Olivia talks about the effects of loud noise exposure and the benefits of wearing hearing protection
Do loud sounds damage your hearing?
So, I think hearing is something that people take for granted, a lot of us know that we should be wearing hearing protection when we are being exposed to loud sounds, but we don’t necessarily always do so.
Things like loud music events, when working with noise, like a musician or a DJ, there are all types of things that can cause damage to your hearing and its all kind of proportionate to the level to which you are being exposed to so, if you’re exposed to a very loud sound, then it make take seconds for damage to be caused to your organ of hearing or if its lower but still loud it might take longer, so in that sense its proportionate to the level.
I would say that if you are someone who plays music on a regular basis that’s amplified, if you are someone that works with heavy machinery, definitely DJ’s then you should be thinking about protecting your hearing>
Even if you go to a concert or a festival you should be thinking about your hearing because if you stand next to the speaker for the whole duration of the set then that’s quite a long time really and it doesn’t necessarily show itself straight away so it might be that it shows itself in the future. I see quite a few people who have been DJ’s in the past and their hearing has been fine, so they’ve never done anything about it but then get to the age of say forty and they have moderate hearing loss in the higher pitches and you can definitely tell that it is noise damage because it follows a certain type of pattern on the hearing test results.
So, in terms of protection I would say that you would be wanting custom made earpieces. If you are somebody that has been exposed to loud noise on a regular basis then your best bet is to get something that is custom made to you.
It means that its more comfortable and your more likely to want to wear them. It means that your hearing is better in those environments, where you can get foam ear plugs that are non-custom made or different variations of ear plugs that aren’t specifically made for you, they don’t filter out in the same way that the custom ones do. So the custom ones are designed to filter out sounds that are harmful but still mean that you can have conversations with the person you are speaking to or hear the music in the way that you should do and I think that most people that I see that have those say that they are miles better than the non-custom made ones.
My job as part of that is to take the shape of your ear, which is just basically a mould of your ear and send that off to be made by the manufacturers, or if you have someone specific you want to use, then I am able to give you the impressions that you can send off directly to them.
