The Beck Approach: A Musician's Guide to Hearing Conservation

Unlock the fascinating intersection of music and hearing protection with our special guest, Dr. Douglas Beck, a distinguished audiologist and musician. Let Dr. Beck guide you through his extraordinary musical journey - from nearly becoming Ringo in the original Beatlemania production, to performing original Americana music with the Jeff Keith band. 

As you tune into our conversation, you'll discover invaluable advice from Dr. Beck on how to safeguard your hearing without compromising your love for playing or enjoying music. You'll gain insights into misconceptions about sound exposure and potential risks leading to hearing loss. Learn about the marvel of musician's earplugs - a modest investment that could potentially preserve your hearing for the long run. If you're a musician, a music lover, or anyone who values their ability to enjoy the sounds they love, this episode is a must-listen!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

You're tuned in to the Hearing Matters podcast, the show that discusses hearing technology, best practices and a growing national epidemic hearing loss. Before we kick this episode off, a special thank you to our partners. We've the all-in-one patient communication and engagement platform cycle built for the entire hearing care practice. Redux faster, drier, smarter, verified auto set, the modern ear cleaning device. Welcome back to another episode of the Hearing Matters podcast. On this episode, we are going to be discussing musicians and hearing protection with Dr Douglas Beck. Doug, before we dive in, you are a musician and you have released countless records. Share with us your music background.

Speaker 2: 1:00

Oh, my music background is like a lot of people who are listening to this. I play lots of different instruments and I've played a lot of them professionally and I can't read a note. It's Dr Nina Krause at Northwestern University. She and I were doing an expert form recently and we were talking about playing by ear and she corrected that and she said you know, really should be learning by listening. So I like that a lot and I think I like that yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:21

And so I use that a lot. So I learned by listening. Early in my career, back in the 70s, one of the most important musical developments was when Beatlemania first was aired as a show, as a musical. It was at the Winter Garden Theater in 1978, just off Broadway, and I was one of the runner-ups for that show. So that was a ton of fun to work with those guys and to get to play with that band quite a few times. And then careers happened and I became an audiologist and lots of studying and lots of work there. But I've always maintained my interest in music.

Speaker 2: 1:52

The Jeff Keith band if you look that up online you can still buy any of our three albums and we played all over Southern Texas for oh, it must have been 2010 to 2013. And we had a great run. We actually played for the Susan G Coman Walk for the Cure. I think we had 30,000 people there, wow. And you know the funny thing was they hired us because we were doing all original Americana music. We had a nice fan base and everything was cool. But when we started playing Twist and Shout by the Beatles, you know, 30,000 people started dancing. So that was kind of cool.

Speaker 1: 2:22

You had some really incredible audition years ago. Can you share with us what that audition was?

Speaker 2: 2:28

That was actually the Beatlemania audition. I was first runner-up for the position of Ringo Holy smokes. Yeah Well, drums was my first instrument. I played that. Probably in elementary school I started, but then I realized that the cool thing about guitar is you can strap one on your back and go across the world with it, right, and you can't do that with your drums. So you know, I mean, I still play drums. I have a drum set at home, but it's considerably less portable. So I started getting involved with guitar. So now I've been playing drums for about 54 years and I've been playing guitar for about 50 years.

Speaker 1: 2:58

Wow, Dr Beck. Nowadays there seems to be an increased awareness amongst the musical community regarding the importance of hearing protection. What do you think sparked this awareness?

Speaker 2: 3:09

This is a huge issue, blaze, and I'm so glad that you're bringing this up in this podcast, because lots of musicians just get this wrong. You know, musicians know a lot about music. They know a little bit about sound. Oftentimes, recording engineers have no knowledge as to how a human ear works, and it's not a cut on them. It's not their area of expertise anymore than my area of expertise as being a recording engineer. But what happens is it's very easy when you're in a rock band or you're using in-ear monitors and you're just going about your day and minding your own business, you're causing hearing loss.

Speaker 2: 3:36

There are known guidelines for this. For instance, osha, which is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, says 90 decibels of sound over eight hours will cause hearing loss. Now, that's a general rule and here's how it works. So it's 90 dB after eight hours, 95 dB four hours 100 dB two hours 105 dB one hour 110 dB. 30 minutes, 115 dB about 15 minutes. So when you go to a concert, even if you came to the Jeff Keith band, you were listening to about 130, 140 dB for two hours. So that's why people leave those concerts and their ears are ringing and their ears feel full. You've definitely caused a temporary threshold shift. Now, sometimes what happens is a temporary threshold shift can become a permanent threshold shift, and there's no way of knowing ahead of time. So instead of going through all of that, potentially causing damage that's going to impact your hearing as well as your listening, as well as your brain, it would be smarter to avoid loud sounds.

Speaker 2: 4:35

Now, I'm a Texan and I was in the Air Force and I'm a musician. Thank you for your service, you're welcome and you know I have no hearing loss. Now, I do need a better signal to noise ratio than most people in order to make sense out of sound, but my thresholds are all within the normal range, despite 40 or 50 years of performing on stage. And so this is what I encourage audiologists to talk to their patients about, who are musicians that if I just sit here and strum a D28, it's going to be about 90 decibels. So that's an acoustic guitar. For people who aren't familiar, and they come from Nazareth, pennsylvania, right where we're sitting right now, from the Martin factory, these are among the world's best guitars. The Martins are just extraordinary, and when you just play one and you play an open G chord and you're just strumming it, your ears listening to 85 or 90 dB and then you start singing and now it's louder, and then you have two or three people playing bass or drums or another guitar or keyboards and you amplify all of that. Well, you're very quickly in the danger zone.

Speaker 2: 5:25

What I recommend is that performing and practicing musicians should always wear musicians' earplugs. Now, this irritates some people because they're expensive, but you know what, when you're using a custom made hearing protection, what it does is it enables you to converse, because it only takes out the highest highs and the lowest lows, so it reduces them substantially. We can reduce those by more than 15 or 20 dB. When we do that, we allow you to have more sound exposure without causing damage, and you can still converse to your colleagues and peers on stage while you're playing. If you don't do that, you're risking damaging your ears, damaging your hearing, damaging your brain, and once that starts, it's really hard to get a grip on it and to reverse it. So I think that the easiest thing you can do as a musician is invest a couple of hundred bucks, get a set of musician's earplugs.

Speaker 2: 6:14

There's a few different people who make them. I know that your office handles that sort of thing and you know these can easily run two or three hundred dollars. But the thing is they are custom made. We take a cast of your ear. We look at your hearing loss first or we do a complete hearing assessment first to make sure everything's okay, and then we take a custom impression of your ear. We send that to the factory. They custom fit filters into there so that they can do the job. If you don't have that and you go into a concert tonight, you can go to one of the pharmacies around town by those squishy little yellow earplugs. Stick them in your ears. Better than nothing.

Speaker 2: 6:47

But not very good, because most people don't use them properly. To really use them properly, you actually need somebody to show you, because you have to roll it in your fingers and you have to insert it deep into your ear without damaging your ear canal, and it's not fun or pleasant to install these things correctly. So I'd recommend buy a set for 99 cents or two bucks, whatever it is, and then make an appointment, see Dr Dolphinos, see Blaze, learn how to install these correctly in your ears, because the vast majority of people that I see using them including the guys out on the tarmac at every airport in America they're not using them properly. They're doing almost nothing for them, and this is a big deal, because if you use these 99 cent plugs properly, at least you're getting some protection, but it's rare to see somebody insert them correctly.

Speaker 1: 7:29

Let's take a quick break. Running a private practice is challenging, and it's especially difficult if you're using a management software system that's out of date or doesn't really fit your needs. As a former private practice owner, I personally found Cycle to be such an incredible tool that is easy to use and is really in the best interest of my patients. Cycle provides you with industry specific workflows and features for a smooth running front office, and if you've been listening to the Hearing Matters podcast, you will know that I believe that the front office staff is really the most important position in a hearing care clinic. Learn more at Cyclecom. That's S-Y-C-L-Ecom. Enjoy the rest of the episode.

Speaker 1: 8:19

Dr Beck, oftentimes when you go to a concert and really back in the day you saw a lot of the wedge monitors In-ear monitors weren't such a big thing. They were expensive and they still are expensive. They're expensive systems, but we always say that the cost of untreated hearing loss is greater than the price of the in-ear monitors. And sounds cliche, but it's true. Why should musicians invest in in-ear monitors and should they wear them during rehearsal? Should they wear earplugs? Why are in-ear monitors so important?

Speaker 2: 8:52

So this is a huge question. People who aren't familiar? In-ear monitors are those custom-made earpieces that you'll see somebody like Mick Jagger have in his ear while he's singing. So we have a colleague in common, michael Santucci, who's an audiologist up in Chicago, and Michael kind of was the lead guy in inventing Sensophonics, which are probably the premier in-ear monitors that are available commercially, and they're not cheap. And they shouldn't be cheap because Michael insists at least last time I spoke to him that you can have a complete audiometric evaluation.

Speaker 2: 9:20

That's step one. We need to know what's our starting point. Number two he's going to take a custom impression, much like we would for musicians earplugs or for custom-made hearing aids. Number three he's going to measure the sound that your ears are perceiving while using an in-ear monitor, to make sure it doesn't get too loud. And this is the thing that garage bands get wrong. All across the country. They'll buy in-ear monitors over the counter and they'll buy the less expensive ones, which we all understand. But the problem is that if you're the vocalist, you're going to set that in-ear monitor to where you can hear yourself singing really, really louder than the rest of the band, because you want to make sure you're hitting the notes and when I sing back up or lead vocal, I really need to hear myself really, really loud in order to sing well, and so that's what they're doing. But they have no idea what the SPL or the sound pressure level is, and quite often and this is a warning that Michael Santucci and I wrote up years ago people will be listening to sound at 130, 135 dB, and if you go back to that scale OSHA says 90 dB for eight hours will cause hearing loss. We start talking about 115, 120, 125. That's causing hearing loss in a matter of minutes or seconds. And so in-ear monitors, if they're fit professionally, much like a hearing aid, if we're measuring the sound pressure getting to the eardrum, then they can be very useful and safe.

Speaker 2: 10:35

My fear is that the vast majority of people using in-ear monitors are listening way too loud to their instrument, and you know, generally I'll play either rhythm guitar or lead guitar. I'll play piano in most bands, and so what I would do as a musician on stage is I would have the sound engineer crank it up so I can hear what I'm doing. But if you were to measure that sound, it could easily be very dangerous and the musician has no way of knowing. You can't say oh yeah, that's about 125 dB, yeah, that's. There's no reference. You can't do that. You absolutely cannot do that, and so it's got to be measured. So I'm good within in-ear monitors, if they're professionally dispensed Again, for the folks in the audience, we can measure exactly how much sound is at the eardrum.

Speaker 2: 11:13

It's called a real-ear measure and there's all sorts of ways of doing that within in-ear monitors to make sure musicians are using it safely, because if they're not using it safely they're causing hearing loss and that's going to cause a much, much greater problem later. So in-ear monitors, hearing protection devices, hearing aids this is the beautiful thing about having trained, licensed professionals involved is they're assuring your safety because they know what they're talking about. They're not just going to set it willy-nilly to where it sounds pretty good, and I've seen this a million times. I mean, I am still a musician. I go to a lot of concerts and I see guys on stage within-ear monitors and you know darn well, and most of them are just cranking it up to where it sounds good and that's cool, because I'm an audiologist and we call that job security.

Speaker 1: 11:52

You're tuned in to the Hearing Matters podcast, the show that discusses hearing technology best practices and a growing national epidemic Hearing loss. I'm Blazdel Fino, your host, and until next time, hear life story.