Wow, this gives me hope. I'm 22 and in the past two years I've gone to ~100 rock concerts, seeing a total of 270 sets. For the first 23 concerts I didn't wear any hearing protection, until I had a scary event with my hearing at a Neon Trees concert that left my hearing very distorted for three days. Then for the next 80 or so concert's I'd wear my hearing protection most–but not all–of the time.

In the past year I've had worsening tinnitus. Although now (and for the last ~30 concerts) I've worn ear plugs most of the time (and recently bought molded ear plugs), the tinnitus still gives me great anxiety when I hear it in quiet places like my bedroom at night. The permanency of it is what freaks me out the most. But your comment gives me hope that I'll one day be able to enjoy silence again.

I fully urge anyone who goes to rock and similar concerts with any frequency at all to wear hearing protection. I'm a fan of Earasers and custom-molded musicians ear plugs. Even if you don't care about your hearing now, once you do care, it'll often be too late.

I've had pretty bad tinnitus my whole life. In a perfectly quiet room it sounds deafeningly loud. I use a pink noise app in bed at night, but otherwise it doesn't really bother me. Point is, don't worry about it, your brain can adjust to anything and you'll be fine. As I understand it, tinnitus is only half physical damage anyway. The other half is neural. In my case I believe it's all neural.

At one point it got way worse for about a month, likely caused by stress. Freaked me out to the point of briefly having suicidal thoughts. Then I got used to it again.

TLDR try not to be anxious about it. Good luck :)

In my experience blood pressure and sinus inflammation (the symptoms of which can be pretty subtle) can both jack up chronic tinnitus.

Wow, are you in the business or just a huge fan?

That’s not too difficult if the area you live/work in has a good scene for your favourite genres of music. The music I listen to tends to be pretty DIY (very small gigs in front of 20-50 people), and more weeks than not I find myself at at least one concert.

I commute via plane for work so it gives me something to do that’s not sitting in the hotel watching TV or drinking too much alcohol.

I recommend an app called Songkick if you want to find local gigs you might be interested in, it scans your Spotify/last.fm and notifies you when artists you’ve listened to are playing nearby.

Off-Topic.

Could you elaborate on commuting by plane? Do you go to work every day? How long does it take? Why did you decide to work that way?

I live in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK but not on the island of Great Britain. The company I work for is based in Belfast (capital of NI), and we bid for government contracts. For example, the government client that I'm currently working with is the DVSA (responsible for driving tests and roadworthiness tests), and the DVSA office I'm working out of is in Nottingham, which is a city on Great Britain, meaning I have the Irish Sea between me and the office I work in.

I fly out from Belfast to Nottingham at around 07:00 on Tuesday morning, and I fly home to Belfast around 20:00 on Thursday evening. Tuesday and Wednesday nights are spent in hotels in Nottingham.

From locking my front door behind me in Belfast to sitting down at my desk in Nottingham it takes around 3h30m. Thursdays are killers though, I don't get in my front door until at least 21:30. So depending on meetings, on Thursdays I frequently end up being on the go from 08:00 to 21:30, which isn't too much fun.

I ended up working this way basically because the company I work for bids for almost exclusively central government projects, and I can't think of any central government agencies that aren't based in England and therefore a flight away.

I first started doing this when I was at university and doing a year-long placement, at the same company I'm currently full-time for.

I was asked if I fancied flying back and forth, and as a 20-year-old, the prospect of getting flown around; staying in nice hotels; getting £5/£10/£30 for breakfast/lunch/dinner every day; and extra pay due to having to fly every week was quite attractive.

Currently 22-years-old and the constant flying got old pretty quickly, but I like where work and I like working on government projects that affect millions of UK citizens' lives.

Just a fan. I did several co-ops at west coast tech companies (San Francisco and Seattle) that gave me ample opportunities to see my favorite bands touring. I kept track of my concerts with a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XIwkqPQmxT6jZE5UMjxU...

I'm 43 years old, and in my 20s I went to a few loud rock shows. I had the same experience as you for days afterwards, but at the last one I attended without hearing protection, something funny happened in my right ear. It was like someone turned the tone control right down, and loud noises would distort so badly I couldn't make anything out.

A while later, I was watching a Scrubs episode where one of the characters ruptured an ear drum. That sound closely matched what I remembered hearing, so I've worn hearing protection to every concert since. Even had people make fun of me for it, but as soon as I say "probably ruptured an eardrum at a concert," they stop laughing.

I have tinnitus from a different cause, though. When I was very small, 5 or 6 years old, one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears. I remember that my ear started ringing one day, and it never stopped.

I have two tones in one ear, and I think three in the other. 37 years later and it's as bad as it ever was, sadly. I have learned to just tune it out, but I can still hear it if I choose to - annoyingly, when I choose to hear it, I have to wait until I forget about it.

edit: Forgot to note, the ringing is very, very high pitched. Remember what CRT televisions would sound like when you turned them on? Higher pitched than that.

I literally cannot understand the mentality of people who'd make fun of you for wearing hearing protection at gigs. I go to a lot of gigs (like multiple times a week) and "simply trusting" that the sound engineer won't push the volume up into hearing damage territory is... naive at best.

Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.

It seems to be in the same bucket as people not wearing seat belts and making fun of you if you ask them to wear one in a car with you.

If it's not something everyone does, and if you mention you do it for safety, the reaction is often rather negative. I think people don't like the idea that they might have been doing something very unsafe this whole time.

Well if I'm passenger in a car with someone who won't wear seatbelts then my reaction will become rather negative until they put the damn things on. If we got in a car accident, I may be secure with belts, but I don't want their body parts flopping in my face either.

> Even had people make fun of me for it

What? Who does that? Whenever I see someone wear earplugs I think "good for them" (and occasionally "shit I forgot to bring mine").

I saw loads of people wear them at the psy festival I was last summer (and wore them myself, too). And the music wasn't even that loud.

While I can hear the music just fine, it does, however, reduce that feeling of "sound presence" during a live show or set. The space feels "emptier" too, like, a huge crowd of people jumping to sonic vibrations (even stronger if it's in a darkened club with just a few bright white lights and smoke), it's pretty weird behaviour if you consider it. But the sound sort of blankets and normalizes this, at least, that's my feeling when that veil falls away when I put in the plugs.

I kind of wonder about the custom-mold plugs. I don't use the cheap yellow foam ones, but reusable ones about €20 I got at a hearing-aid store (asked for ones suitable for concerts/festivals), which I'm fairly pleased with.

Does the "presence" effect get better with the custom-molded ones? Because afaik they're about €300 or so. If they don't restore that "presence" compared to the €20 earplugs, but just some better quality (which is nice, but is it 300 euros nice?) I'm not sure if it's worth it. But if they do and they are also much more comfortable, it might be a nice present for myself :)

What brand are they? I wear Etymotic ER20XS earplugs (also cheap, about $20) now and don't notice any lack of "sound presence". I completely forget I'm wearing them after 20 minutes or so.

> one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears.

what in the f*?

Yeah, he was an abusive piece of crap, and we were the children of another man. Think that pretty much covers it there.

the abuse rate of stepchildren is something like an order of magnitude higher than of biological children, for whatever reason (correction: at least TWO orders of magnitude!)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/2009...

"The Cinderella effect is well substantiated in crime data. Children growing up in step families are about 40 times as likely to be abused and 140 times as likely to be murdered as children growing up with both natural parents (murder still being a low probability)."

I'm really sorry you had to go through that. I was also physically abused by my bio mom up till about 9-10 years old (but she in turn was abused until she was 18, so she arguably reduced the snowball effect). All we can do is try to not repeat the same mistakes for our next generations. The problem is, I have temper issues to this day...

FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz (noise notch). You generally lose the really high frequencies (20 KHz on down) due to presbycusis, hearing loss due to aging. Even if you can still hear the really high frequencies, you could still have a noise notch around 4 KHz.

If you haven't already, go get an an audiogram. It's cheap (<$100) and will give you a baseline on how your hearing is.

> FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz

I used http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ to quickly profile my hearing and found significant loss around 4.0kHz. I have ridden a motorcycle most of my life and it is much worse in the ear that is on the same side as the exhaust.

I am not sure what a spectrogram looks like for a motorcycle but I would have assumed that most of the energy is in the lower end of the spectrum, given the steady cruising RPS is around 40Hz-70Hz. But, your comment seems to suggest that there is not a direct correlation between the frequency of the noise exposure and the hearing loss frequencies.

Wind noise is at least as loud as engine noise at least at highway speeds.

While I can clearly hear my (loud piped) Ducati at 120kmh (~70mph) - on my Honda VFR800 with stock piped the engine noise is completely overshadowed by wind noise.

As a hint about how loud that wind noise gets, up around 130-140kmh, if I've got my noise cancelling earbuds in, they start clipping. I've heard them do that a handful of times in non motorcycle riding instances, always in reaction to sounds loud enough that people around look around and cover their ears.

(These days I _always_ ride with earplugs or noise cancelling earbuds in. Even on my "quiet" bikes. Gotta save that hearing damage up for loud concerts... )

Do you feel "less connected" to the world when you are riding with earplugs in? Does it make it feel more dangerous you might be less aware? It makes sense to wear the plugs, but I've never heard of a street rider doing it.

Definitely does not feel less safe. Plugs don't "disconnect" you, they just take all the sound down a few notches. The exhaust noise, wind noise, and other traffic noises are all still there, just not so loud and insistent.

I'm completely convinced that they make me safer on long rides, because you arrive significantly less tired - works great on planes too, I won't fly without earplugs any more.

While trying this tone generator out, I thought I had a ridiculous notch in my hearing at 532Hz, because the perceived volume dropped to about 10-20% of the neighbouring frequencies. But then I moved my head slightly to the side, and the normal volume was restored!

Turns out that I had inadvertently replicated a classic high-school "constructive/destructive interference" demonstration. Driving the pair of speakers on my desk at that frequency put the position of my head in one of the destructive-interference "nulls" where the effective volume approaches zero.

So if anyone else is playing around with it, be sure to use headphones instead of stereo speakers!

That's correct. Even in a factory environment, where most of the noise is in the lower frequencies, you'll still end up with a noise notch at 4 KHz. It has to do with the anatomy of the ear.

I'm mid 20s and my hearing is pretty much perfectly cut off at 11 khz but is fine below. I've had tinnitus since youth and have had lots of exposure to loud music but it hasn't gotten tremendously worse overtime and doctors either wave it away or say it's from noise induced hearing loss, which seems at odds with the 4 khz thing I've heard from you and others.

Any perspective on what the deal with that would be? I haven't ever used an ototoxic medicine or anything

Interestingly, when I was about 16 I was at a friend's gig in a pub. I hadn't gone to many before and haven't been to many since, but on this particular occasion I was stood talking with friends near the stage with my left ear directly next to the speaker cabs. I wasn't aware of the activity behind me, but the opening band had come on to do a sound check, and being heavy metal, it was basically just a mechanical, metallic sound, 30 cm away from my ears at max volume.

Here is what is funny though, the wavelength at which my hearing "kazoos" is the wavelength at which my young son cries. So while he was a baby, and even sometimes now as a toddler, if he's upset and I'm holding him, it's gotta be my right shoulder, otherwise my left ear bugs. It's a strange feeling too, a mixture of pain and grinding and broken audio that really sets me on edge.

Peculiar.

Is there a way to test your own hearing online, I wonder? with headphones?

How are you using an SPL meter to measure headphone audio? I've always been kinda worried about hearing damage.