Hearing Damage

Our ears are extremely complex, delicate, sophisticated devices. They can and do break. The pain we've mentioned above is nature's way of telling us that we are exposing them to the risk of damage. Such damage results in temporary or permanent deafness or other problems. For musicians, such losses are devastating.

Various Types Of Problems

Temporary Threshold Shift is a protective response of the hearing system to loud sounds. It occurs after exposure to loud sounds, and is a period of partial deafness. The ear mechanism has conditioned itself to the loud environment and the eardrum and middle ear bones are both held over in their "protect-the-inner-ear" state for some hours after the exposure. For me personally, I've noticed that it usually takes a day after I mix a rock concert before my ears are back to normal. Often, some ringing in my ears is audible for a while.

Ringing, static, clicks, tones, etc. that seem to spontaneously appear in your hearing are called tinnitus. They occur as a result of the nerve endings in the inner ear firing spontaneously. Often, we notice tones in our ears when the surrounding environment gets very soft. Tinnitus begins to be a problem when it gets loud, doesn't go away, and begins to modify the sounds we are listening to.

Sometimes, tinnitus happens as a result of prolonged exposure to loud sound. Sometimes it is due to legal drugs, including aspirin and quinine (no kidding, watch out for those gin-and-tonics!). Sometimes, it becomes a permanent condition. As you age, it will become more prevalent (I've got some always with me now that I'm 50, but mostly it does not present a problem for me.).

Deafness is the loss of hearing ability. Total deafness is when you can't hear anything at all. Partial deafness is when sounds seem really soft and indistinct, right up to the threshold of discomfort.

Conductive hearing damage refers to damage to the outer or middle ears that results in sound information not making it to the inner ear. Such damage can sometimes be corrected by surgery. It is the result of physical injury or trauma, but not usually due to loud sounds.

Nervous hearing damage refers to damage to the nerves on the basilar membrane in the inner ear. It is these nerve endings that transmit sound data to the brain. Each ear has about 30,000 of them, but they are not redundant -- each of them represents a different frequency (this is seriously over-simplified), so that as they are damaged, the bad news is that the ability to detect certain frequencies can be partially or totally lost. The even worse news is that the frequency region where they are most sensitive and likely to be damaged is the region where our hearing sensitivity for speech and musical timbre is most critical -- around 4,000 Hertz. As we damage our ears due to loud sounds, we will do so first in the frequency range that is most important for us. The worst news of all is that damaged nerve endings can not be regenerated. Damage 'em and they are gone! Gone, gone, gone forever!!