In the ears
by Bob on March 31. 2008
Our human ears are amazing and yet delicate mechanisms. They keep our balance when upright on our feet and most importantly they allow us to hear and perceive sounds.
Some animals have amazing hearing capability. We as humans have moderate capability comparatively.
Nevertheless, we should watch what we put in our ears. My grandmother used to say for medical advice "never put anything larger than your elbow into your ear" which basically meant leave your ear canal alone and don’t mess with it.
I spent years as a musician in the studio using "cans", namely headphones for recording sessions. I had to do so. There were mixing parts and click tracks for timing that I had to play along with. But especially for long studio recording sessions, I really wasn’t thrilled with having airtight headphones on my ears. A suction could happen and move the eardrum in a bad way. But I was young and didn’t really pay much attention. The show must go on. Live musical performances were fine since we had open air and no headphones on stage.
Of course, open-air headphones, such as Sennheiser, were better for the ears since it wasn’t a near-vacuum. But they weren’t as revealing, as insulating, or as precise as closed headphones were. So we mostly used closed-air headphones in the recording studio. But an unnatural suction was created inside the chamber of the headphone and the ear canal and tympanic membrane of the ear.
Which all brings me to a concern. I see everyone with iPOD "buds" in their ears or headphones of one sort or another.
And what’s worse is that often I can hear the music they are playing which means it’s really to loud for the ear chamber. Besides wax getting moved around in the canal, there is a torturous effect on the eardrum (tympanic membrane) which makes it move quite wildly unless one is playing very quiet classical music.
The old rule in the Walkman era was if you could hear the music out of someone’s headphones, it was too loud for their ears.
This public fixation of closing one’s self off from the world with headphones is a cause for concern, societally and anatomically.
You could hurt your eardrum and also alienate yourself from mankind in the process of isolating and not hearing other people or not want to hear them or just wanting to shut people out of your aural sensory apparatus.
If we re-read Dr. Carl Seashore’s famous work which I studied in university when oddly enough working in an electronic music lab in the early days of synthesisers in the 1960s, entitled "The Psychology of Music", we realise that open-air listening to music is critical for the full sensation of the piece. Waves have to bounce around in the open space for all kinds of pleasant overtones and undertones to take effect. We can easily move into the area of Musical Acoustics and learn more about this.
There are some interesting stories about the way music is perceived. In a modern move, a concert hall designer made a hall which took away all the statues and wooden decorative designs in the old hall and made a "modern" hall without any of these old items. It was designed with mathematical and physical formulae and it looked perfectly brilliant. The trouble was, years later, after the concert hall was built and an orchestra actually played in it, it was horrible. It was flat and cold in timbre. It turns out those centuries old tried-and-true old statues and decorations in the concert hall changed the direction of the musical waves and made the sound warm. So, decades later they had to re-do the concert hall to make it sound warmer.
The ancients had wisdom about these things which are not reflected in formulae in Physics. It’s called the subjective aspect of music, too.
We don’t need headphones really except in a recording studio to hear a previously recorded part we are adding our new music to.
But the wheel of progress has turned and there’s no stopping it.
The trouble is that after I use most headphones for a Walkman, especially listening to rock, my ears feel like when I was in Punk Rock clubs back in the day in NYC and after the performance as a person in the audience, not on stage, I left the club with my ears ringing and not being able to hear well for a day.
I prefer open sounds bouncing off wood and walls.
But I am old school about that. And I am in a very small minority.
Pete Townshend from The Who could tell us all a lot about rock-induced hearing loss.
But that was the price of the 1960s.