Why Should You Bring Ear Plugs to Music Festivals?

Of all the accessories you might think of bringing to a music festival, ear plugs might not be high on your list. Learn why they should be -- and how else you can prevent hearing damage -- in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum and as I record this,
we're in the throes of music festival season. These multi
day concert art debauchery parties can be a blast, but
research shows that they can also be a bummer for
your ears. The sheer length of some music festivals, for example,

(00:21):
each weekend of Coachella runs three days with ten plus
hours of music every day, a plus the widespread use
of alcohol and drugs can inflict serious damage on your hearing,
with potentially permanent consequences. We spoke with Marshall Chasen, an
audiologist from Toronto who specializes in hearing last prevention for musicians.
He says that there's nothing inherently bad about going to
the occasional loud concert or cranking your headphones up to

(00:44):
Mack's volume to listen to your favorite song, as long
as you do it in moderation. That's where three day
music festivals become a problem. There's a point at which
all sounds above eighty five deciples equivalent to the dial
tone on a telephone, can inflict permanent hearing damage. Exposure
to eighty five deciples of noise seems harmless enough, but
if you listened to a dial tone forty hours a
week for a full year, you'd suffer some level of

(01:06):
permanent hearing loss. And if you turn up the volume
to ninety four decibles, which is about halfway to full
volume on an MP three player, all it would take
is five hours a week to damage your hearing. Jason said,
it's the total dose that matters, much like a radiation dose.
A single X ray here and there won't hurt you,
but thirty seven X rays in a short period could
be problematic. Rock music at a live concert can easily

(01:29):
reach a hundred and ten decibls. At that volume, your
ears start to sustain permanent damage after only two minutes
of daily exposure. It's especially important to give your ears
a rest once they've suffered some short term hearing loss
that buzzing, ringing, or numbness in your ears after attending
a loud concert. There's a recovery period of sixteen to
eighteen hours, during which your ears are particularly sensitive to

(01:50):
further loud noises. Jason said, there's nothing wrong with going
to a rock concert on Friday night, just don't mow
the lawn on Saturday morning, and be careful about a
tending yet another rock concert on Saturday. If you don't
let your ears rest, there are several ways they can
suffer lasting damage. The inner ears smaller than the tip
of your pinky finger and contains the cochlea, a fluid filled,

(02:11):
stale shaped chamber lined with thousands of hair cells. Prolonged
exposure to very loud noises can disturb the fluid in
the cochleas so violently that the hair cells bend or break,
never to grow back. Another source of permanent hearing damage,
says Chason, lies deeper in the brain, where nerve cells
carry signals from the ear to neurons the process the sounds. Growing.
Research shows that overloading those neural pathways with loud noises

(02:34):
can disrupt the connection, creating situations where the neurons can't
detect the signals coming from the ear. Luckily, the solutioned
noise induced hearing loss from music festivals is simple. We're
ear plugs. Lots of concert goers avoid wearing earplugs because
they think it will muffle the music and ruin the experience,
but that only applies to the cheap, foamy disposable kind, which,
to be fair, I've had perfectly fine experiences with. However,

(02:57):
there are excellent inobtrusive ear plugs on the mark to
protect the air from dangerous sound levels without distorting the
quality of the music. Professional musicians have been using them
for decades. These are designed to evenly lower noise levels,
some by as much as twenty decibels across the hearing spectrum,
not just the high frequencies. You can find them for
less than twenty dollars and they're reusable forever. Weirdly, drug

(03:19):
and alcohol use at music festivals has also been shown
to increase the risk of hearing loss. A study out
of the Netherlands tracked fifty one participants with the main
age of twenty seven years who attended an outdoor music
festival in half were given ear plugs and half were not.
All were advised to refrain from drugs or alcohol so
that their hearing could be accurately tested after the four
and a half hour show. As to be expected, not

(03:41):
everyone abstained. The resulting data showed the concert goers who
drank beer or used drugs like cannabis or m d
m A experienced worse short term hearing. Loss, and interestingly,
so did male subjects, whether on drugs or not. What's
not clear from the data is whether the increased hearing
loss linked to drugs, alcohol, and being male is biological

(04:01):
or behavioral in origin. Chasen, for one, is convinced that
drugs or male hormones chemically alter the inner ear to
make it more susceptible to damage. Patterns of behavior are
more likely at play, he said, using alcohol or drugs
decreases your ability to self monitor, so you're more likely
to put your head right next to a loud speaker.
Your judgment is off, by the way. As far as

(04:22):
professional musicians go, more than half of all classical musicians
experience hearing loss, compared with only thirty percent of rock musicians.
Jason says it's a dose thing, with classical musicians exposed
more hours of loud ish music over their career than rockers.
Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by

(04:44):
Tyler clayg. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works from Onenness and lots of other
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