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Loud Music from Night Clubs and Hearing Damage Essay

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Amplified music from night clubs can lead to hearing damage
Shifts in hearing thresholds can result in excessive exposure to any kind of sound. It not matters whether the sound is pleasant or not nor the music genre, the degree of noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) depends on the intensity and frequency characteristics of the noise, along with its duration and the intermittency of the exposure. Individual genetic and environmental factors also play important part(Bovo, Ciorba, & Martini, 2007).
Hetu and Fortin (1995) studied the characteristics of highly amplified music in discotheques from psychoacoustic and phenomenological points of view. They found that the amplified music is characterized by strong pulsations (≈ 2 Hz), a narrow dynamic …show more content…

“Recreational” noise exposure (nightclubs and music players) is unlikely to cause the above direct damage. Rather than direct mechanical injury, the process is a combination of metabolic and mechanical changes. The music is more damaging when it is impulsive (energy is highly concentrated in the time domain) and contains spectral energy peaks (over-stimulation of local specific frequency region of the cochlea), the stereocilla of the hair cells are the most vulnerable organ(Dobrucki et al., 2013).
Several mechanisms have been proposed for TTS. This includes increased shearing force of the hair cells, synaptic fatigue, metabolic exhaustion of the outer hair cells (OHCs) and inner hair cells (IHCs) due to overload, and changes in blood supply to the cochlea(Yamasoba, Pourbakht, Sakamoto, & Suzuki, 2005). The internal amplification system of the cochlea is thus impaired as shown in LePage and Murray (1997)’s research by studying otoacoustic emissions. Yamasoba et al. (2005) suggested that constant overstimulation of the metabolic process could result in production of by-products like reactive oxygen species and free-oxygen radicals, which triggers cell necrosis or apoptosis. They also found pathological changes of the hair cells along with TTS, such as hair cells disorganisation and fusion, floppy stereocilia, collapsing of the pillar bodies and swelling of the afferent nerve endings. For IHCs, in addition to

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