Ouch, my ears!

Portable music culture has long been under fire for sociological reasons. Worried essayists, overwrought with concern, pepper the blogs of the world with the charge that our society’s growing fondness for headphones is disconnecting us with the world that we live in, causing us to tune in and tune out.

But a lesser talked about problem regarding iPod culture has a very scary and very tangible consequence: hearing loss. Those little white earbuds are slowly and surely destroying our ears. How remarkable that such little things can be so dangerous.

The danger posed by unsafe headphone use has not been in the public consciousness much, and this is, in part, because the kind of hearing loss that headphones cause can take years to become apparent. And apparent it’s becoming. At last year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Steven Greenberg of Silicon Speech claimed that young people have a rate of hearing loss “two-and-a-half times that of their parents and grandparents,” and estimates 50 million Americans will suffer from some form of impaired hearing by 2050.

In relation, hearing specialists are reporting an increased number of people in their 30s and 40s with more severe forms of tinnitus, according to an AP report. Tinnitus is a chronic ringing or “whooshing” sound in the ears that can result in deafness at certain frequencies. These people were among the first Walkman users (the first model went on the market in 1979), and it’s suspected that hearing loss from headphone use will become an increasingly bigger problem, as headphone usage has increased greatly in the last few decades.

“It may be that we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg now,” Dr. John Oghalai, director of the Hearing Center at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, told the AP. “I would not be surprised if we start to see even more of this.”

Dr. Colin Driscoll, an otologist at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, said in the same report, “The tricky part is that you don’t know early on. It takes multiple exposures and sometimes years to find out.”

Further exacerbating the problem are rechargeable batteries that last longer and cause listeners to prolong noise exposure more than they would before. Not to mention today’s iPod culture, which yields more and more listeners who use headphones on the bus, on the street, or in the crowded cafeteria, can just crank the volume to block out ambient noise. Frequent headphone users are also likely to become decreasingly sensitive to higher sound levels over time, causing even more twists of the volume dial.

Independent testing shows that the maximum volumes of iPods and other MP3 players are around 120 decibels, “about the level of a jet plane taking off,” reported Brian Fligor, an audiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. For a reference point, the American Speech-Language Hearing Association says sounds louder than 80 decibels are “potentially hazardous.” Yikes!

So, um, yeah. A lot of us are slowly going deaf. But most of us are probably not going to put away our headphones tomorrow, so are there ways we can safely continue our headphone use? Definitely.

The UCLA Ergonomics Division tells us that noise-induced hearing loss comes from three things: the loudness of a sound (decibels), the pitch of a sound and the length of exposure. The pitch of a sound usually isn’t as much of an issue compared to how loud you’re listening to your music and for how long.

So what can you do that is OK for your ears? According to the AP report, a study at Boston Children’s Hospital determined that listening to your headphones at 60 percent of the maximum volume for one hour per day is “relatively safe.” If you are unsure whether 60 percent is too little or too much given your particular listening scenario, the folks at UCLA suggest conversational noise as a rule of thumb, i.e. if your music is coming in at the level of a normal conversation, your ears are safe. Any louder and you’re in the zone of potential long-term hearing damage.

Also avoid the temptation to turn up the volume when ambient noise, like city traffic, drowns out the music. Buying a good pair of canalphones is an excellent way to mitigate this, as their snug fit in your ears blocks out the outside sound and allows for a decent hearing level.

Finally, consider not listening to the headphones 24/7. The hand-wringing sociologists have a point: iPod culture can get us so wrapped in our tunes that we don’t touch base with the world around us. It’s truly refreshing to take the earbuds out in places you’d normally have them in, be it on the bus or in line for coffee. In an increasingly isolated country where a quarter of Americans report that they have no close friends they can confide in, it’s worth taking time to reach out and connect with the strangers around us. And it’s usually a lot easier on your ears.