SnowGhost Music

In the not too distant future, be prepared for the unveiling of the iAid. It will be available in at least 3 standard Mac colors, they will come in sleek and simply designed pairs, and they will be infinitely more comfortable than your earbuds. They will be popular with all ages, but especially with the thirty-somethings who spent a decade or more with their earbuds engaged at all times and are sure to be experiencing difficulty hearing any sounds other than the same midrange tones they’ve been torturing their eardrums with over the course of their young adult lives. You’ll probably be able to use them with iPhone version 34.8, which will be the first cell phone to be officially brain cancer-proof, though that’s a whole other story.

What we’re concerned with now is the average American and their hearing. Perhaps you’ve sat on a plane or a bus or a train next to someone listening to their MP3 player and noticed that, despite the tiny size of the little white things hidden inside their ears, you can hear what they are listening too. Maybe you’ve even tried to tell them something about how that noise might be irritating, or at least that it might not be a good idea for them to be subjecting their delicate ears to such volumes. But they wouldn’t be able to hear you, of course, because you would have to be talking louder than the music, and that’s not so easy these days.

Now before I sound too high and mighty, or even worse, like a scared old man, I should say that I love to listen to music at volumes that some would consider a bit loud. Certain songs and bands just sound better loud. It’s cool to actually feel the music sometimes, to have your hair moved just ever so slightly by the thump and whoosh of a subwoofer. But I also know that it’s a good idea to wear earplugs at concerts and band rehearsals because I’ve experienced first hand the effects of ear damage. The fact that I had multiple operations in my youth to drain fluid from my eardrums had a lot more to do with genetics than cranking up the Muppet Movie soundtrack on dad’s turntable, but it still left me with a sense of how precious our hearing is, not to mention how delicate.

Think of how strange food tastes when you have a cold and can’t smell. Or maybe you’ve spent a day in the water and your ears are a bit clogged, and you have to keep turning the TV up. Eardrums are not like drum heads. If you’ve ever fired a gun, stood near a plane, or got stuck in front a wall of sound at a concert, you’ve experienced a temporary loss of hearing, as well as a nice hollow ring that takes a while to go away. Imagine if that was permanent. You’d probably get pretty tired of having to ask people to repeat themselves.

I understand that we all slowly lose our hearing as we age anyway, and that our ears and noses (and back hair) are the only parts of our bodies that just keep growing, but why expedite the process? Music produced with the intention of being played on MP3s is compressed and crunched so that the loudness is constant. It’s a function of competition, and people more or less demand it because they want their ballads to be just as loud as their riff rock. [See this Rolling Stone article for more about this sad state of affairs. -Ed.] Dynamics be damned, people don’t want to have to keep adjusting the volume knob. So what we’re left with is ultra-compressed mid-ranged music that we crank up in our cars and earphones until we drown everything else out. Very few people have listening rooms (or dynamic headphones) where they can relax and simply listen to music the way it was meant to be heard. Despite the fact that we have the technology to make recordings sound as realistic as possible, music is actually sounding worse than it did 15 years ago. And we’re listening to it a lot louder.

So think about that the next time you download an MP3 instead of buying a CD, or the next time you pop in your earbuds instead of plugging in your old stereo. Try turning everything down, including the distractions around you. Just close your eyes and really listen. You’ll probably appreciate the nuances you’ll find at lower volumes, but even if you don’t, you can bet that your eardrums will. And maybe you can avoid ever having to wear the iAid.