Recommendation 2

Educational Module for Informing Music Students about Hearing Loss

Goal 2. To promote healthy beliefs about hearing loss and positive attitudes toward hearing loss prevention and risk reduction practices among students, faculty, and staff.

For most students, information about risk to hearing will be new, unusual, and challenging. In order to be effective, students must believe they are at risk and they must believe that the benefits of performing any recommended protective behavior outweigh the costs of risk-taking behavior.

To fulfill this goal, instructing faculty should:

1) Address the importance and sophistication of the sense of hearing for musicians (speech understanding, pitch perception, localization, etc).

" Hearing loss permanently changes a musician’s capacity to hear and can diminish capability to perceive changes in timbre, pitch, dynamics, and localization".

2) Characterize prevalence rates for problems with hearing loss among musicians and assert that the risk occurs across all music genres and is not restricted to particular types of music, instruments, or venues.

" Experts agree that 30 to 50% of musicians have problems with hearing loss. Proportions are related to many factors including the instrument played, the genre of music performed, and the performance venue."

3) Characterize safe sound levels:

" Risk for injury is based on both sound intensity and duration. The exposure limit is 85dBA (TWA) for eight hours in one day. Even brief exposures to extremely loud sounds have the same potential for hearing damage as longer exposures to lower intensity sound sources. For every 3 dB increase in sound level, decrease the time of exposure by half, as shown in the following chart."

TWA Decibel Levels and Maximum Exposure Time

85 dB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 hours
88 dB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 hours
91 dB. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 2 hours
94 dB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 hour
97 dB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 minutes
100 dB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 minutes
103 dB . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 minutes 30 seconds
106 dB . . . . . . . . . . . 3 minutes 45 second
109 dB . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 minute 53 seconds

4) Characterize potential sound levels generated by music ensemble:

" The average sound levels produced within certain music ensembles can be very high and are dependent on many factors including an individual’s location within the ensemble, size and kind of ensemble, the selected literature, choices regarding dynamic levels, the acoustical environment, and individual playing styles."