Teenagers like us enjoy listening to the music by using iPod, MP3 player, or portable CD player. By those tools, we can listen to our favorite songs loudly without making somebody else feels annoyed. Mostly, we listen to the music when we are not in good mood. We listen to the music because we think that music is the only thing we can escape for a while from our problems. The more we sad or brokenhearted, the louder we set the volume. But, don’t you know that listen to the music loudly through earphone can give fatal effect to our ears?
photo courtesy: weheartit
The safety level’s limit of sound that we are allowed to hear is 85 decibel. With the comparison, our daily conversation and the sound of telephone’s ring is 60 decibel.
Dean Garstecki, an audiologist and lecture in Northwestern University says that earphone which is used very close to our eardrum can make the sound louder until 9 decibel. Can you guess how much decibel that an iPod can produce? It’s about 115 decibel.
Research of American Speech Language Hearing Association in 2006 finds that more than half senior high school students suffer at least one hearing trouble. 40% from 301 students confess they have habit to listen to iPod through earphone in a very high volume.
In our ear, there is Cochlea which is full of hair cell and has function to catch sound’s frequency. This hair cell changes vibrations into electric stimulus in order to be caught by our brain. If this hair cell receives sound’s frequency more than 85 decibel continuously, this hair cell will be tired and finally broken. If this hair cell is broken, nothing we can do to make this hair cell works again. Can you guess what the effect is? Decreasing of hearing function which is only temporary on the beginning will be permanent. It is so scary, isn’t it?
How loud is too loud? How long we should listen to the music through earphone?
The expert says that our ears are in danger if we listen to the sound more than 80 decibel, but how can we measure the decibel? Well, too loud sound is when our ears are buzzing or when we should shout if we talk with the person in distance of 2 meters.
How long we should listen to the music is based on the volume we set. In every 3 decibel increasing, there is sound energy two times more. We should listen to very loud sound or music only two hours per day.
photo courtesy: weheartit
Do you want to know how to keep our hearing?
There are four easy ways to keep it well.
1. Every one hour, give our ears a little break from earphone or headphone
2. Stay away from listening music in maximum volume. If your MP3 player has the scale from 1 to 10, please listen it at 6 only.
3. Don’t set up the volume just to ignore the sound around us. For example the sound of the traffic, or train.
4. If our MP3 player has Smart volume application, use it so we can control the safe volume
The point is, there are two factors that influence the decreasing of hearing system’s function, the first’s volume and the second’s time duration. The louder the volume, the shorter time we listen.
Our hearing system is a gift from God. Use it wisely and keep it for sure. Once you loose it, it won’t be as good as before.
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