1. Few things in life can compare to the excitement of creating your music, loud and proud (yes, there are other things, but you may prefer to choose a different magazine, wrapped in plastic, from the rack above this one). Whether you’ve found that point of endless sustain in your guitar, twenty-five feet from your 100-watt stack, or you’ve felt the visceral crunch of kick and snare through 30-plus thousands of watts of sound system outdoors, or achieved the magic balance of instruments filling all of the available frequencies at 115dB from the main monitors, or felt the earth shake during the cannonade in the 1812 Overture, executed by a naval destroyer close by, then you’ve probably experienced the rush that loud music can give. It’s hard to resist the urge to push that fader up one more notch!

Hopefully, this article will help you resist. The advent of electronic amplification has allowed the musically/technically-inclined to join the ranks of boilermakers, truck drivers, artillery gunners and others whose occupations have rendered them partly or effectively deaf. We’ve done it to ourselves and we’re doing it to our audiences in our ignorance.

The hearing system is divided into two subsystems which respond to the two modes of speech. The low frequency subsystem identifies pitch and the characteristic resonances of the person speaking (vowels, chest and head tones), while the high frequency subsystem identifies stops and starts (consonants, mouth sounds). The brain integrates and interprets both modes to form an image of words.

In the inner ear, the conversion takes place from hydraulic oscillations to nervous system signals. The mechanical structure of the inner ear resembles a snail-shaped tunnel through the bones of the skull, which is called the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with fluids, separated by membranes, which, when energized oscillations at the oval window, generate oscillating motion in the membrane that separates them by virtue of their different fluid densities. The relative motion between the membranes and fluids is detected by the cilia (hair cells) which wave about in the fluid and fire the neurons of the nervous system.

Some topics in this essay:
Hearing Loss, Chain Transducers, LOUD There’s, Losses Air, Speech Hearing, Mechanisms Warning, Hearing System, Damage Leaving, hearing system, nervous system, upper mid, hearing loss, inner ear, oval window, hearing damage, upper mids, loud music, mid frequencies, upper mid frequencies, effects hearing loss, vibrating elastic membrane, rush loud music, frequency subsystem identifies,