Electronic Hearing Protection for Musicians

Many people are exposed to large sound pressure levels ei- ther occasionally or regularly, and thus need to protect their hearing in order to prevent hearing loss and other hearing disorders. Earplugs are effective at attenuating sound from the environment, but they do not attenuate bone-conducted sound, but instead amplify it at low frequencies due to the occlusion effect. This is a problem, e.g., for many mu- sicians and especially wind instrument players, since this low-frequency amplification greatly affects the sound of their own instruments. This makes it difficult for the musi- cians to play while using hearing protectors, and therefore many musicians choose not to use hearing protectors at all. In this paper, we propose electronic hearing protectors that mitigate the problems associated with musicians’ hearing protection through several different approaches: reduction of the occlusion effect, adjustable attenuation with natural timbre, and monitoring of the musician’s own instrument. We present the design of prototype electronic hearing pro- tectors and the evaluation of these by professional musi- cians, where they were shown to alleviate the problems as- sociated with conventional hearing protectors.