The bands played on ... and slowly I went deaf
Years of playing and listening to loud music left Denis Campbell in need of a hearing aid. Now, the sports reporter and former rock star says his generation must face up to the damage caused by noise.
The audiologist didn't mince her words. 'You've got the hearing of someone 30 years older than you.' The results on the audiogram showed that I have 'severe' hearing loss with high-frequency sounds, she said. It's not what a 44-year-old expects or wants to hear.
It wasn't a surprise, though. I've struggled for many years to hear clearly in almost every situation: at work, in bars or restaurants, at parties, in front of the TV, at the cinema, or on the mobile. Partial deafness is very frustrating. It's also usually irreversible. Unlike most parts of the body, damaged inner ear hair cells don't regenerate.
I've lost count of the number of times I've missed out on hearing a joke, gossip or discussion of a film. But for many years a reluctance to wear NHS-issue hearing aids meant I did nothing.
The likeliest reason I'm a bit deaf is the first love of my life: music. Between 1979 and 1985 I drummed in bands, and regularly went to gigs and clubs until the early Nineties. The three audiologists I have seen all described how they are now seeing DJs, musicians, factory workers, road diggers, and people who shoot - and now have hearing loss well before their time. Now that people spend more time in louder bars, at all-night clubbing, with MP3 players or at music festivals, more of them are hearing more loud music more often and for longer than ever before.
Noise-related hearing damage is not new, but the Sixties brought the creation of deliberately loud music as entertainment. From the Who to Deep Purple, through to Motörhead and more recent bands such as My Bloody Valentine and Mogwai, to many who play and appreciate music, loud is good and louder is better still.
Our inner ear hair cells pick up the mechanical energy of sound, convert it into electrical signals and transmit it to the brain. When we're born, each of us has about 30,000 such cells, and this number decreases slowly after the age of 25. But prolonged exposure to noise makes cells less sensitive. And once they're gone, they don't come back.
A survey in 2006 by Deafness Research UK and Specsavers concluded that 'today's youth are at risk of going deaf up to 30 years earlier than their parents because they are listening to MP3 players too loudly and too often'. They blamed the fact that 'more than 75 per cent of people own a personal music player and sophisticated sound systems in their car and homes, which allow them to blast out music day and night. We also spend more time in clubs where the noise is so loud we can barely hear the person opposite and few people, particularly in the 16- to 34-year-old age group, are aware of the damaging effect all this can have on their hearing.'
Source: The Observer
