Sounds you can’t hear can still hurt your ears

One of the most amazing things about being a mammal is our sensitive hearing. Where does it come from? — These three little bones in our middle ear.

But what about sound waves that are well below the frequencies humans can hear?
A wind turbine, a roaring crowd at a football game, a jet engine running full throttle: Each of these things produces sound waves that are well below the frequencies humans can hear. But just because you can’t hear the low-frequency components of these sounds doesn’t mean they have no effect on your ears. Listening to just 90 seconds of low-frequency sound can change the way your inner ear works for minutes after the noise ends, a study shows.

The functioning of the inner ear is at least temporarily altered by exposure to low-frequency sounds

For the study, neurobiologist Markus Drexl and colleagues at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, asked 21 volunteers with normal hearing to sit inside soundproof booths and then played a 30-Hz sound for 90 seconds. The deep, vibrating noise, Drexl says, is about what you might hear “if you open your car windows while you’re driving fast down a highway.” Then, they used probes to record the natural activity of the ear after the noise ended, taking advantage of a phenomenon dubbed spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAEs) in which the healthy human ear itself emits faint whistling sounds. “Usually they’re too faint to be heard, but with a microphone that’s more sensitive than the human ear, we can detect them,” Drexl says. Researchers know that SOAEs change when a person’s hearing changes and disappear in conjunction with hearing loss.

People’s SOAEs are normally stable over short time periods. But in the study, after 90 seconds of the low-frequency sound, participants’ SOAEs started oscillating, becoming alternately stronger and weaker. The fluctuations lasted about 3 minutes, the team reports in Royal Society Open Science. The changes aren’t directly indicative of hearing loss, but they do mean that the ear may be temporarily more prone to damage after being exposed to low-frequency sounds, Drexl explains. “Even though we haven’t shown it yet, there’s a definite possibility that if you’re exposed to low-frequency sounds for a longer time, it might have a permanent effect,” Drexl adds.  

Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/sounds-you-cant-hear-can-still-hurt-your-ears?rss=1

Source: https://myfusimotors.com/2019/09/06/sounds-you-cant-hear-can-still-hurt-your-ears/