The deafening truth about millennial tunes
It’s no wonder millennials are so uninformed. We can’t hear a damn thing.
Doctors warn that the access to loud music through earphones will lead to a generation with hearing loss.
One billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of personal audio devices and damaging levels of sound at entertainment venues like electronic dance music festivals, where noise levels can top 120 decibels for hours, according to the World Health Organization.
One in five teens have some form of hearing loss, which is up by 30 percent since the 90’s, according to the American Osteopathic Associ- ation.
Next to HTML and Chinese, perhaps sign language will be the next most important language to learn.
We should all start listening to more songs like John Cage’s “4’33”. In other words, we should start listening to more silence.
So the question is, how loud is too loud?
The answer is simple. Basically, if you can’t hear noise around you, turn the volume down. You’re jamming too hard. If you are drowning out the sounds around you, that means you are playing your device almost at the same decibel level of an EDM concert (120 decibels). Damage also coincides with duration (duh). The longer the loud, the less you’ll hear.
The worst part is that hearing loss from loud noise is irreversible.
Think of your ear like a tissue box. Every time you take a tissue out of the box, you are one step closer to having an empty box and a dripping nose. To make a long story short, there are hair cells in your inner ear, and attached to these cells are stereocilia, or hairs that stick out.
The bending of these hairs are responsible for triggering the reaction that tells your brain to hear. However, if these hairs are bent too far from loud noises, they die or are permanently damaged, and they can never regenerate.