Amusing ourselves to deaf
Brad Thompson, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 9/1/2006
A new phrase recently entered our collective vocabulary: ear spray. That’s the audio leakage that you hear when standing next to an MP3 user who has the volume setting cranked to the max. Audio leakage from the perpetrator’s earphones (or possibly sinus cavities) gets into your ears, too. You experience tinny, scratchy highs and dull thumps that might have once been music, while the earphone wearer experiences another step toward permanent hearing loss.
Other sources of entertainment-related acoustic punishment include rock concerts, motion-picture theaters, and The Land of Honk, Buzz, and Boom (reached by visiting the electronics department of any “big-box” retailer). Unlike drive-by or walk-past audio assaults, attendance at these events is voluntary.
And yet, one listener’s buzz and boom can impress another listener as crystal-clear highs and awesome bass. You can buy hardware for recording and reproducing sound at your neighborhood drug store, and even a personal computer’s sound card and spectrum-analysis software can ferret out a signal’s harmonics. But as Martin Rowe reported in his “Tech Trends” column in Test & Measurement World’s July 2006 issue, audio instrumentation manufacturers note that a sound card’s performance as an instrument often falls short in several important aspects (see box, below).
If we can’t agree on objective or subjective measurements of music quality, surely a simple loudness measurement could be within our reach. I envision a cell phone of the future that will measure sound-pressure levels, dial into a central database to ascertain the average level for the immediate surroundings, locate and photograph the offending noise source, and shoot the whole works to the local noise-abatement board.
I want one.
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