With specially designed earplugs like Loop Experience, you don’t need to miss out on any of the fun of festivals, concerts and other events where you might encounter loud noises, like firework displays. The best way to protect yourself is to use earplugs. It’s recommended that you use hearing protection whenever you’re exposed to sounds over 80 db on the decibels scale, no matter how long you’re in close proximity to the sound. This type of hearing loss is particularly common as we get older.Īs we’ve seen above, any sound over 80 decibels can cause hearing loss – and hearing damage can happen based on the intensity of the sound, as well as the length of time someone’s exposed to a sound for. High-frequency hearing loss means that people have difficulty hearing high pitched sounds. What are some examples where the decibel scale is used Decibel is used to quantify the intensity of sound. For example, the 5 of the bottom scale corresponds to the 15 of the top scale, meaning that 3×515. 20 dB (A) × 10 The dB (A) value for a ratio of 1:3 is 10 dB (A) therefore a sounder rated at 90 dB (A) at 1 m is the same as one rated 80 dB (A) at 3 m. Some pitches are easier for us to hear than others. In this illustration, two log scales are aligned to multiply by 3.

Low frequency or low pitch sounds include dogs barking and thunder, while high frequency sounds include bird song, children crying or squealing, and women’s voices. A higher frequency of vibrations is a high pitched sound, and will have a higher number of hertz, while a lower pitched sound has a lower frequency, and is measured as a lower hertz. It’s the number of vibrations of sound waves in a second, which – in simple terms – describes how low or high pitched a sound is. Sound frequency, on the other hand, is measured in hertz. This is measured in decibels, and charted on the decibel scale, as we’ve already looked at. The more amplitude a sound has, the louder it is. Sound can be measured in two different ways: frequency and amplitude.

Just to confuse things even further, let’s introduce hertz.

Inventor of decibel scale