Whether you are a musician, a concert enthusiast, or someone who enjoys listening to music at high volumes, protecting your hearing is crucial. Prolonged exposure to loud sounds can lead to irreversible hearing damage, making it essential to take preventive measures.
Earplugs designed specifically for music lovers offer an effective solution, allowing you to enjoy rich sound quality while protecting your ears. In this guide, we will explore the benefits of using earplugs for music, the different types available, and how to choose the right pair for your needs.
How Earplugs Can Help
Earplugs lower your perception of sounds because they block your ear canal so that not much of the noise can get through to your eardrum. They don't change the noise, but they do block a lot of it from getting to where you notice it.
This is particularly beneficial in loud environments like concerts or music festivals, where prolonged exposure to high decibel levels can cause hearing damage. By wearing earplugs, you can enjoy the music while protecting your hearing, ensuring that the harmful effects of loud sounds are significantly minimized.
Playing in a Band
Many people play in bands in clubs and venues without access to in-ear monitors, making earplugs a great solution for them. Instruments like guitars can produce sound levels of up to 93 dB, while drums can range from 90 to 130 decibels.
Additionally, crowds at concerts often average a volume of 120 dB, which is extremely loud. Exposure to sound levels greater than 100 dB for more than 15-20 minutes can put you at risk of hearing damage. Using earplugs allows musicians to protect their hearing while still enjoying and performing music at high volumes.
Unfortunately, many fellow musicians rationalize this damage by saying things like, "I can’t feel the music with earplugs," or "I don’t like things blocking my ears." These excuses lead them to shorten their careers by allowing themselves to go deaf for no good reason. Earplugs are your best friend in the music business.
Technological advances in hearing protection have made it possible to lower the volume by as much as 20 dB without loss of frequencies, and they are more comfortable, too.
Going to Gigs
As we stated above, crowds at gigs average a volume of 120 dB, and without any protection on your ears, that rate can cause hearing damage if you don't use earplugs. For sounds of 110–120dB, even a very short exposure time can be harmful. What does a guitar, a piano, or even a set of drums sound like in a large room?
That is the highest volume or sound level one should use to replay music, as it recreates the actual event, emotion, and scales the dynamics as the artist intended—accurate and realistic. A good pair of headphones can reproduce that with great accuracy, but even the best headphones cannot provide the physical impact that all sound has on the rest of the body.
As a result, some people keep turning up the volume, expecting to get that physical response. By then, the sound level in the headphones is far above normal, and hearing damage is occurring.
Protect yourself
Listening to music at 120 decibels for even a short duration, such as 10 seconds, can potentially cause permanent hearing damage, especially when using headphones, as the sound is delivered directly into the ear canal.
To protect your hearing, it's crucial to keep the volume at a safe level (80-85db), take breaks from loud sounds, and use noise-cancelling headphones or earplugs in noisy environments. If you experience any symptoms of hearing loss, such as ringing in the ears or muffled hearing, it is advisable to seek medical attention from an audiologist or healthcare provider.
You can see our guide to the best ear plugs Here
