

We all know that guy who listened to symphonic metal so loud that everyone on the train could hear it, too. Setting volume is highly variable depending on how soft the music you’re listening to is, its quality, and generally how locked into your own head you want to be. “There is no “safest” volume per se, but when possible, it is recommended that people follow the 60/60 rule: Set your volume at 60 of the maximum level and listen at a maximum of 60 minutes at a time,” he says. But he does have a recommendation that some music diehards may find disappointing. Stoll outlines that there’s no hard and fast rule for safe listening. What volume should you keep your earbuds at? Diabetes, high blood pressure, and a family history of hearing loss all weigh more heavily on this loss. While hearing loss is simply a part of aging, overall health, lifestyle choices, and environmental factors can influence this progression. “Over time, loud noises can damage your sensory hair cells, which is one of the parts of your ear that allows hearing,” Stoll says. However, as we age, gradual hearing loss pervades the inner ear in a process called presbycusis. “As we increase or decrease volume, we experience a change in these vibrations and the stimulation of our hearing nerves traveling up to our brain,” Stoll says. The auditory nerve ferries those electrical signals to the brain, resulting in sweet, sweet music. Those microscopic hairs convert the vibrations-turned-fluid-motion into electrical signals, which zap to the auditory nerve. Fluid in the cochlea sways with the vibrations, stimulating thousands of little hairs. These bones amplify and transmit the vibrations, finally, to the inner ear, where they shimmy to the spiral-shaped cochlea.
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These vibrations travel to three little bones in the middle ear called the ossicles. Sound waves cause the eardrum to vibrate. The tympanic membrane), which is a thin, supple membrane that shields the middle ear from the outer ear. Upon reaching the ear canal, the vibrations continue toward the eardrum (a.k.a. The waves wiggle through the air into our ear canal, which is the passage leading from the outer ear to the middle ear. Music is soundwaves, Stoll wrote in an email to Inverse, which results in vibrations in the air. Clinical audiologist Will Stoll at Hackensack Audiology lays out what happens when we listen to music all day, every day - and available alternatives if we so choose. Here’s what you should know about what listening to 8 hours of Taylor Swift daily is doing to our eardrums (and that’s before blowing out our cochleas at the Eras tour). In fact, the possibility of hearing damage from excessive vibing in your head is so serious that in 2022 the World Health Organization (WHO) released recommendations to limit listening time in order to prevent loss.
#AUDITORY OSSICLES BLUETOOTH#
We may all appear separated by our preferences for AirPods or headphones, Bluetooth or wired, but at the end of the day, we’re all conjuring a private oasis in the most public spaces.īut like any good thing, too much comes with consequences. On any city street, you’re bound to see every type of person, from finance bros to artsy hipsters, making their way downtown from within the protective bubble of their headphones or earbuds.
