Music is a huge element of everyday life and it has been for nearly as long as Human beings have now been on this planet. I often point to the discovery of the 40,000-year-old flute dating back to that ice age as evidence for this, but truthfully, all the facts you may need is all around you, each day. We bear in mind ballads and songs long after the people who initially composed them have died and rotted away (a plan which I find curiously comforting) plus the music industry, love it or hate it, is definitely a big business.
On the other hand, whilst the ice age musicians probably survived during a world of stark cruelty, frozen, unimaginative wastelands and tough, ‘kill or be killed’ inter-cave politics, they never had to contend with road works, transport lorries, screaming children or drunken crowd-rousers on their way to a stag night. Fortunate buggers.
Today’s listener has to accommodate all that and much more, that may make listening to the music not only difficult, but also dangerous.
Now, however, current science has stumbled over a way in which you can still listen to your favourite songs, even if you’re wearing earplugs (no, I have not been sniffing discarded paint cans yet again). It is called skeleton conduction tech and no, despite the slightly odd name, it in truth doesn’t hurt…
Based on recent fields of study, exposure to any sound over 100 Dbm wears away a membrane known as a myelin sheath and leaves your middle ear liable to problems like tinnitus and temporary deafness, which can be the beginning of even more significant problems. Bone conduction technology is made to bypass various sensitive portions of the ear and reduce the risk of inner-ear damage.
How? Well, so as to understand that, we have to first understand how our ears essentially work. (HERE COMES THE SCIENCE-Y BIT) Basically, noise travels though the space, these sound waves are intercepted by quite a few structures within the ear and are finally translated and transmitted into our brains (if it helps, visualize it much like the encoding/decoding of digital information, such as that which guides the movements of the wireless mouse).
The sound waves first meet a bit of cartilage (yes, identical stuff a shark’s skeleton is formed of), which helps to focus the sound, this is named a pinna (but you can call it your outer ear without looking too stupid).
Subsequently, the sound waves pass into your middle ear, it is filled up with air and also contains both your acoustic canal and your eardrum (my little brother burst his when he was little and almost burst mine crying about it). The eardrum vibrates, passing the sound through to the ossicles, that are three small bones (that are actually pretty essential to your sense of steadiness, I’m told). These tiny bones transmit the sound to the cochlea, that’s a fluid-filled structure that ‘encodes’ the signals for our brain to ‘decode’.
Bone conduction tech vibrates the bones of your skull, distributing the sound directly to the cochlea and bypassing the remainder of the ear totally. The nerve impulses transmitted to the brain are precisely the same, but the sensitive mechanism of our ear does not need to deal with the hassle of, to cite Anchorman’s Brick Tamland “LOUD NOISES!”
This process appears to be totally safe; actually, the famously deaf composer Beethoven employed a rudimentary version of this method to be able to compose his most renowned works. He attached a rod between his piano and his head and, as such, was able to listen to the song he was playing.
So here you go, instead of exposing your delicate ears to louder and louder volumes, to drown out the environment noise, you can instead stick your earpugs in and play your music at the appropriate volume. Make no bones about it (groan!)
for more information on the full range of bone conductor earpieces visit
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