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I’m coming late to this, but back in 2006 a couple of audiologists decided to test a bunch of earbuds and headphones to measure how much hearing damage they cause when playing MP3 tracks at a range of volumes, from whisper-quiet to full-on 100%.
That chart above summarizes the results. It’s slightly alarming to me, because I sometimes listen to my Sansa Fuze player — using earbuds — at 80% or 90% of the volume, in part because when I’m walking around Manhattan, the ambient noise is pretty high, so the music has to cut over that. If hese guys are right, I can listen for no more than 1.5 hours, and possibly as little as 22 minutes, “without greatly increasing their risk of hearing loss”. Mind you, who really knows: As the scientists note in their writeup, people’s auditory physiology varies quite a lot.
But there’s also some more, and newer, nifty research from this team — about the listening habits of young people. One public-health-policy concern these days is that young people are listening to music waaaaaay too loud, and are all gonna be deaf by their mid 40s. To figure out whether this was true, these same scientists studied 30 Denver-Boulder-area teenagers.
It turns out things aren’t so bad. Only a small minority of kids — between 7 and 24 per cent — are listening to their MP3 players at eardrum-shredding levels. “We don’t seem to be at an epidemic level for hearing loss from music players,” Portnuff said. What’s more, boys tend to listen to music louder than girls, teenagers tend to listen at quieter levels as they get older, and some teenagers appear to have trouble judging precisely how loud they’re listening.
But dig this …
The study also showed that teen boys listen louder than teen girls, and teens who express the most concern about the risk for and severity of hearing loss from iPods actually play their music at higher levels than their peers, said CU-Boulder audiologist and doctoral candidate Cory Portnuff, who headed up the study. Such behaviors put teens at an increased risk of music-induced hearing loss, he said. [snip]“We really don’t a have good explanation for why teens concerned about the hearing loss risk actually play their music louder than others,” he said.
Heh. Maybe it’s because they’ve been listening so loud for so long that it’s just begun to unsettle even themselves . Not enough to stop, yet, but enough to start wondering, hmmm, isn’t this gonna make me deaf?
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
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A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
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“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
Hacking the Model T
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
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A long German word for "noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history"
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