If you suffer from tinnitus, it’s important to be aware that avoiding exposure to loud noise can prevent further deterioration of your hearing. However, it’s not easy to determine just which sounds are dangerously loud and which are not. The following list should help with this.
- 10 decibels – normal breathing, leaves rustling in a gentle breeze;
- 20 decibels – a very soft whisper, the ticking of a watch;
- 30 decibels – quiet conversation;
- 45 decibels – ordinary conversational speech, many computer hard-drives;
- 50 decibels – quiet radio, light traffic from a distance of 30.5 meters, ordinary conversation;
- 60 decibels – a sewing machine, average street traffic;
- 70 decibels – an electric typewriter, average factory noise, noisy restaurant, TV at normal volume;
- 80 decibels – heavy city traffic, a tube station, a heavy truck passing by;
- 80-85 decibels – the tinnitus and hearing loss safety level – a vacuum cleaner;
- 90 decibels – a lawnmower, police whistle, some motorcycles at 7.5 meters, the average volume of a personal music player through earphones;
- 100 decibels – a chainsaw, pneumatic drill, jackhammer, speeding express train, farm tractor, some car horns;
- 110 decibels – a loud music concert, thunder crack, motorcycle or a personal music player headset at full volume;
- 120 decibels – a loud amplified rock band in front of speakers, sandblasting;
- 130 decibels – a four-engine jet at 30 meters;
- 140 decibels – a gunshot, jet-plane taking off at close range – the decibel level at which pain is felt;
- 155 decibels – the loudest fireworks, at a range of 3 meters;
- 180 decibels – a rocket launching pad.
Sound is always measured in decibels – a unit used to calculate the intensity of a sound or electronic signal. The decibel system was developed by engineers at the Bell Telephone laboratory to express the gain or loss in telephone transmissions. The word decibel comes from the Latin for ‘ten’, plus ‘bel’, from the name Bell. The ‘bel’ alone was too large a unit for everyday use, so the decibel (dB) – equal to 0.1 bel (B) – became more commonly used.
The decibel takes into account the sensitivity of human ears to different pitches of sound. Its logarithmic principle means that an increase or decrease of three decibels reflects a doubling or halving of loudness. This means that 57 decibels is half as loud as 60 decibels, whereas 63 decibels is twice as loud as 60 decibels. Strangely, though, a person with normal hearing perceives a sound as doubling only when it is ten times louder. For instance, our ears tell us that 70 decibels is twice as loud as 60 decibels when, actually, it is 10 times louder. To the human ear, 1 decibel is usually the smallest detectable change in volume level.
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