When he had to take his 12-year-old to a concert
by the group Smashing Pumpkins,
Peter Jeffery planned to wait in a "parent's room."
But a warm-up act commandeered the room, so Jeffery, a leading scholar of Gregorian chant,
inserted a pair of earplugs, joined his son in the concert hall, and stayed to the end.

Big mistake!

After the concert,
Jeffery felt dizzy and his left ear ached; both symptoms lasted until morning.
The next day, his left ear rang loudly and incessantly.
The ringing turned out to be tinnitus caused by the decibel overload,
and his doctor said it would never go away.

It hasn't.

Jeffery has sued the concert hall,
Smashing Pumpkins and their warmup acts, promoters, and record labels.

The defendants and the plaintiff would probably disagree
over whether Gregorian chant is better for your soul than, say,
Smashing Pumpkins concerts.
But no one can reasonably disagree about which is better for your ears.
Monks never had to protect their eardrums during vespers.

Early music - from chant through Bach - is safer for the ears not only than rock,
but also than standard orchestral and opera repertory,
which is often loud enough to damage the performer's hearing.
But if early-music performers and listeners have an auditory advantage,
they are still not immune - as Peter Jeffery found out ....

.... to the new epidemic of ear damage!!

Smashing Eardrums!

According to press reports,
the Smashing Pumpkins concert reached loudness levels of 125 decibels,
enough to cause permanent hearing loss in a fairly short time.
On their own, many fans also crank up their Walkmans and car stereos to ear-splitting levels.
With that kind of exposure, plenty of Smashing Pumpkins fans
will need hearing aids by the time they reach Jeffery's age.
Many won't have to wait:
at least 15% of American teenagers have permanently lost some hearing.
That's about the same percentage you would find among people between
45 and 65 years of age.

That cohort, Jeffery's own generation, started the problem:
we don't call them "boomers" for nothing.
This generation made amplifiers as central to adolescence as acne.
One study found that people in their 50s in 1994 had 150% more hearing trouble
than people of that age in 1964.

Amplified music was a large part of the reason.

True, rock music is not the only culprit.
Such stereotypical guy-toys as guns, motorcycles, chainsaws, and snowmobiles
can punish your ears just as badly; so can leaf blowers;
so can some digital movie theater soundtracks.
About 30 million Americans - more than one in ten -
are exposed every day to dangerously loud levels of noise.

And lasting damage can come
even from a single blast of noise if it's intense enough.

Not that hearing loss is the most prevalent syndrome caused by all this noise.
Jeffery is one of 50 million Americans with tinnitus;
12 million of them have ringing in the ears so loud that it's incapacitating.
Despite occasional claims, there's no cure for tinnitus caused by acoustic overload.
Current treatments can help patients cope with the condition,
but can't reverse it.

The ear-damage epidemic is an example of what medical theorists
call "a disease of civilization": a medical problem created by a mismatch
between the world our bodies are designed for and the world we have created.
Modern technology has created a high-decibel soundscape,
but nature designed our ears for detecting predators creeping toward us
and prey creeping away from us.
It didn't equip us to withstand Smashing Pumpkins,
because our ancestors hardly ever encountered anything that loud.

Over the last few centuries, with the rise of the industrial society,
noise levels have increased dramatically.
Music, instead of providing a counterbalance, has for its own reasons
HAS INCREASED AND GOT LOUDER...

... to the point of creating a public health hazard!


SHOULD CONCERTS OF THIS NATURE
POST HEALTH WARNINGS?