“Without music, life would be a mistake,” wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Certainly, but listening to it at too high a volume and for too long is another. This is the finding that recalls the study published this Tuesday in the scientific journal BMJ Global Health. However, it is a risk to which young audiences are too frequently exposed, its editors stress.
dangerous listening practices
The proportion of adolescents or young adults who put their hearing at risk due to the level of sound reflected from their headphones, earphones or concert speakers – and the duration of the noise – is approaching or even exceeding a billion people.
Lauren Dillard, a researcher attached to the South Carolina School of Medicine, an expert from the World Health Organization (WHO) and above all coordinator of the study published by BMJ Global Health, quantified the phenomenon with CNN. “We have estimated that there are between 670 million and 1.35 billion people between the ages of 12 and 34 with unsafe listening practices around the world,” she said.
The researchers used material from a series of articles, published between 2000 and 2021, linked to three separate databases.
A threshold well exceeded
This indicator is the main information of this study whose finding regarding the deleterious effect on ear health of too loud sound for too long is common sense, and whose mechanism is well known by experts.
Excessive sound strains the cells that act as sensors. If the test is prolonged, it can lead to permanent damage, tinnitus or even hearing loss.
Very good, but how do you know if the noise level has exceeded the reasonable limit to become excessive? The team behind this new study relied on the threshold set by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (USCDCP): 85 decibels for 40 hours spread over a week.
The problem is that by listening to 2h30 of music during the day, we already tend to burn up to 92 decibels, says CNN. This overtaking is all the easier since the user of headphones or earphones sometimes raises the sound to 105 decibels. And concert “amps” typically spit out between 104 and 112 decibels.
Common sense close to your ears
The site of the American chain then provides some advice to limit the risks. You can wear a helmet that isolates the noise from the outside as well as possible; adjust the settings of your laptop, computer and other device to monitor the sound level; or even set up alerts warning the listener to calm things down.
If these precautions do not work, or if they have been neglected, one signal undoubtedly makes it possible to ensure that we must absolutely review the volume downwards, Lauren Dillard asks the US media: the ringing in the ears.
Source: BFM TV
