The RNID runs a campaign for raising awareness of hearing damage among young people. This campaign is called Don't Lose the Music and offers advise on protecting your hearing.

Ever thought about your hearing?

Something we all take for granted day to day.

How many of us walk past workmen using a pneumatic drill and cover our ears?

That's because it hurts our ears and our natural instinct is to prevent our bodies from feeling pain.

So a pneumatic drill is around 110 dB and we are agreed that causes a degree of pain, where do you go at the weekend?

How loud  do you think it can get in your favourite club?

The RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People) has found that noise levels in nightclubs range from 90 to 109 dB.

How long do you stay in your favourite club? 4 hours approx?

Let's see how that affects your ears, as you can see even at 91dB the safe listening time is 2 hours. So 2 hours at 91dB is the equivalent of 8 hours at 85dB.

85dB is a threshold set by The Health and Safety Executive but these regulations only apply to work situations, not your social life. So it is up to us to safeguard ourselves.

Sound pressure is based on a logarithmic scale and expressed in Decibels (dB). Each time the decibel level is raised by 3(dB), the intensity of that sound is doubled, in other words it is twice as loud. When the intensity is doubled, the safe listening time is halved. The table below shows how quickly safe listening times are reduced as the sound level increases.

What damage is being done?

Many of us suffer short-term hearing problems after being exposed to loud noise over the course of an night out. This is often dullness in the hearing or ringing / buzzing in our ears. This is a warning that we have exposed our ears to too much noise and gradually improves within a day or two. If after 48 hours your normal hearing hasn't recovered, then you should visit your GP.

What can we do?

Part of the problem is that if you are in a club or listening to your headphones after about an hour your ears get used to the level, so you turn your headphones up or move closer to the speakers. This is where the damage starts to happen. If you were to turn your headphones off for 5 - 10 minutes or move to a quieter room in the club you would be giving your ears a rest and the level would not need to be increased on your return.

The same applies to front of house engineers, after around an hour the engineers ears get used to the level and starts pushing the system because he feels that the volume has dropped. That's why intervals are useful, not just for refilling your glasses but to give everyone's ears a rest. Next time your at a gig after the interval watch the engineer will he reach for the master faders? will he look around thinking someone has turned his master faders up while he was in the loo?

One of the best ways to prevent damage is to wear ear plugs.

I know, you think that ear plugs would defeat the object of hearing the music in fact this is not the case. The RNID recommend spending up to £14 for a pair of re-useable plugs. They 'closely replicate the ear's natural frequency response' which in plain English means it sounds as if the volume has been reduced. Some people have told them they actually make gigs sound better because they filter out the distortion - and you can even hear the vocals over the guitars.

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But you think it would be uncool to wear ear plugs at a club or gig. What's uncool about protecting your hearing? When the sun comes out we protect our skin and our eyes, when we ride our bikes we are sensible enough to wear helmets. So why are we not doing the same for our ears?

We need to forget about the image or coolness of ear plugs and start protecting ourselves. No one else is going to do it for us, music venues and clubs may start to do all they can to reduce the risks but it is still our responsibility.

At the end of the day we all need to think whether we want to be able to enjoy listening to music into our later years, or listen to the ringing in our ears or even worse not being able to listen at all.

Click here for our range of ear plugs.

For more information:

• RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People)

• Don't Lose the Music

• HSE (Health & Safety Executive)