Hear The Music

Mead Killion and Andy J. Haapapuro, in the November 2015 issue of Hearing Review have finally put to bed the controversy of whether Musicians’Earplugs have a flat or uniform attenuation. There have been some publications over the past several years that have questioned the flatness of commercially available musicians’ earplugs.  These publications have contained rather significant errors; some of which

From time to time, certain articles come across my desk that make me sit up (typically spilling my coffee in the process) and reread it to make sure that what I thought I was reading, was indeed the case. Well, this happened to me about 15 years ago (and many times since, but I didn’t always spill my coffee). There

In many state or provincial worker’s compensation boards there is a “correction factor” that may be applied to a calculated noise induced hearing loss. In many cases, this is a “presbycusic” correction and may amount to subtracting 0.5 dB off of the calculated average hearing loss for each year over the age of 60. On the surface, this appears to

The “shape” or configuration of the sensori-neural hearing loss, at least in worker’s compensation board claims for noise exposure, is one of the base elements for deciding whether a hearing loss is indeed a noise induced hearing loss.  Yet, not all audiograms of workers exposed to high levels of noise (or music) have a “notched” audiogram with the greatest hearing

From time to time, I am asked either by a referring physician, a union, or a local Workers Compensation Board (sometimes referred to as the Worker’s Safety and Insurance Board) whether a particular worker has a hearing loss that could have been caused by his or her occupational noise (or music) exposure. As a field of hearing health care professionals,

This is a continuation of something that is possibly similar to the phenomenon mentioned in part 1 of this blog  but I am not sure. In part 1 of this blog series it was shown that hearing loss over time was asymptotic, meaning that over the years, even though hearing loss continued to increase, the increase was less and less.

At the last National Hearing Conservation Association (NHCA) meeting in New Orleans I had the opportunity to run in to Ulf Rosenhall in the elevator. Having never met him, I recognized him by his name tag, and immediately started to tell him about his excellent 1990 study, in perhaps more detail than I should have. Unfortunately for Dr. Rosenhall, his

I had a case last week where a violinist came in complaining about years of violin exposure, and oh yeah, as an afterthought, there is an evil piccolo player to my left. (Actually the piccolo player is very nice, but his instrument is “acoustically evil”.) After taking a case history to ensure that there are no other noise or music

Once upon a time, when he was only 16 years old, Mick Jagger bit off the top of his tongue. There seem to be some confusion whether it was during a basketball game, a soccer game, or during a gymnastics event, but regardless, when he was 16 he bit off the tip of his tongue, or so his publicists say.

To complete this three part blog series on the Didgeridoo, we need to look at the effect of curves in the tube. Actually we don’t need to look into that… but we will see why shortly. Didgeridoos, because they come from everyday branches or hollowed out trunks of small trees, are not always straight.   The same can be said for