In our generation, almost everyone listens to music with electronic devices. In UBC, we can often find some students walk through campus, having dinner at cafeteria, or studying in the library with their headphones. Music seems already become an indispensable part of our life. However, the risk of playing music with high volumes is always overlooked by people. According to Journal of Medical Association, there are 20 percent of teenagers already have hearing loss in varying degrees, which increases 30 percent from 2000. Most of them is noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL).
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How loud is risky?
As we know, many of teenagers and young adults enjoy go to rock concert and sports games which can have the maximum of 150 DB and they seldom realize this hardly damaging the hearing. It’s harmful for our ear to listen music, or expose in a noisy occasions at 85 DB for more than 8 hours. An electronic device can have more than 100 DB as its loudest volume, which is a hundred times more intense than 85 DB and can cause permanent damage to ear after 15 min.
Source: https://i.stack.imgur.com/7KvpH.png
What Should we do as Protection?
The hearing loss or damage is incurable, so it’s vital to protect our hearing. There’s a way to tell whether your music is too loud: you can try talking with your friends, if you can’t hear any voice from your friends’ talk then the music volume should be reduced. To help getting used to a proper volume, every time when you listen to music, slightly decrease the volume on your electronic device. This is good method for to avoid and stop the long term damaging. Or you can make a warning system such as an alarm everyday to remind you put down the volume and reduce the daily time you listen to music using headphones or in noisy surroundings. The most important thing is we must have the awareness of protecting our hearing.
– Tianyi Lian
