A day in the noisy life of a student musician

Abstract

In conservatories and universities across the world, students prepare to be the next generation of performing professionals to entertain and enliven worldwide audiences. They pack numerous musical activities into each school day, from countless hours of personal practice to regular ensemble rehearsals to lessons and performances and other personal activities. Many of these activities expose the musicians to significantly high sound levels and potential threats to long-term hearing health. In order to understand the daily student musician noise experience, music majors at Brigham Young University were selected from various instrument categories to wear a Larson Davis noise dosimeter and their noise levels were recorded for two days. Each musician wrote a log of the times different activities took place as well as the location in which they were performed. Overall daily noise dosages and contributions to the noise dosage from each separate activity were calculated. Doses for each instrument type as well as each activity type were compared to identify which instruments and activities contribute most to noise overexposure.