I'm curious (you already know that).

Sorry this post is a little bit technical but could result in a good explanation of why the piccolo can be dangerous to the human ear. You can skip it completely if you wish or jump to the conclusions at the bottom of this post, that I hope are clear enough even if you are not much technically minded.

In quantum physics there is a formula that directly relates the energy of the photon to its frequency, through the Planck constant (in quantum mechanics the photons can behave either as electromagnetic radiation with a certain frequency as well as massless particles).

But there are no sound photons, as sound is only transmitted in matter (no sound in vacuum, we all know). So I wondered if there is a relationship between the sound frequency (the pitch) and the energy of the soundwave. This is important because it could explain why a high enough pitched soundwave (or note) could make more harm to the ear than a lower note with the same intensity.

I checked wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure)
and it looks that the sound pressure of a soundwave is also proportional to the frequency of the sound, according to this formula:

p (acoustic pressure) = 2 x PI x frequency x Z (acoustic impedance of the medium) x Epsilon (displacement of the air molecules)

As the displacement of the air molecules produced by the sound is proportional to the amplitude of the transmitted wave and the acoustic impedance is a fixed parameter of the transmitting medium (except for extremely loud sounds over 194 dB in air), it follows that acoustic pressure is proportional to the frequency (pitch) of the sound wave.

Please note that acoustic pressures 120 dB over the reference pressure of 20 micropascals (or 20 Pascals) in air can produce damage to the ear including short terms exposures. Hearing damage due to long term exposures occurs at a considerably lower level of 85 db.(or 0.6 Pascals)

Conclusions:

- for equal amplitude sound waves, the higher the frequency, the higher is the sound pressure and so is the potential harm it can produce.

- the piccolo produces the highest frequencies of all wind instruments and at quite high amplitude levels, so its reputation of being able to damage the human ear is justified.

- Working in an orchestra for expended periods can potentially
damage the ear, as the threshold of 85 dB most probably is much exceeded in forte/tutti passages, particularly in locations near the brass instruments and in the direction of their apertures (don't want to explicitly mention the trumpets, but...)

I appreciate your great patience to reach this point...
Hope this can be useful.

Dear JoseLuis,
I believe that a scientific study would most likely back up your conclusions. I have heard that a common ailement of orchestral musicians is hearing damage. This is partly due to long term isues but also short term ones such as tutti accented attacks, persussion and such.

My point is that our human hearing is geared for communication with others or for defensive alerts. The range of frequency is weighted around those specific freq. of the sounds that we use to communicate and the sounds that dangerous beasts or even objects generally make when we are in imminent danger. This may include a snapping twing on the forest floor or the sond of an avalanche.
The Piccolo is on the high end of our communication sounds and may be a bit above the top in that respect so our sensitivity begins to drop off up there and if it is actually louder on a high note (As recorded on a Db meter and not as perceived) then we may not take action to protect our ears -not realizing the damage.

You are totally right.

I did not want to complicate this already complex subject, but it is true that our ear is completely non linear (only way to accommodate the amazing range of amplitudes it can deal with) but also is very far from having a flat spectral response.

As you say, it could well be a result of evolution and the need to survive in a hostile environment. (I have read that some orchestras could also be considered a hostile environment but for other reasons)

Due to this feature, we do perceive the relative amplitudes of sounds at different frequency ranges quite differently from reality.

The hearing frequency range is normally 20 to some 20,000 Hz for a young healthy person. Even if not degraded by exposure to excessive sound levels, we all lose range at higher frequencies, and about 40 years it is very difficult to be able to hear frequencies over some 13,000 Hz, though this varies a lot among people.

Many people and not only orchestra musicians have hearing loss and it is very probable it will become a worldwide epidemics because our youth is subjected to the high levels of Ipods, as was before with discmans and before-before with walkmans.

And there is also the exposure at work, that often is not perceived but damages the same. I suffer and increasing hearing loss and it has been attributed to "acoustic trauma", a general concept that only serves to tell the patient that your doctor has no idea of what happened.

My loss comes very probably from the time (in my early thirties) when I worked in a big transmitting site, with some 150 cooling fans that generated a lot of noise, basically in the very high range of the hearing range and beyond (supersonic range).

When I noticed I had this problem, I began to wear aviation type protectors (I was working at an airport and these were readily available), but it was too late.

Age has of course aggravated the problem and there is nothing to be done, except learning and playing my flute and singing the most as I can and as long as I can hear it.

I do not want to be catastrophic, but this is a general problem and our forum friends here should be aware that there are important risks and that they should be managed before the hearing loss becomes irreversible (which means pretty quickly, unfortunately).

It would be interesting to have more data concerning effective sound pressures for different notes/winds. I could not find any.

Considering that the sensitivity of our ears is reduced at higher frequencies and that we perceive the piccolo as such a loud instrument, it could well be that its wave amplitude is higher than expected.

The effect of very low frequencies on a speaker cone makes it act as a kind of piston, with the cone moving as a whole. This is very noticeable as the mechanical displacement is big.

At higher frequencies the cone vibrates in higher modes and it is not visible to the naked eye.

It is an interesting subject, I just wish we had more specific information about winds and their measured sound pressures.

With those pressures, we could go to the tables showing the risks thresholds and make our own conclusions. I will try to do some more searching on the web and see if I can find something.

"The effect of very low frequencies on a speaker cone makes it act as a kind of piston, with the cone moving as a whole. This is very noticeable as the mechanical displacement is big.

At higher frequencies the cone vibrates in higher modes and it is not visible to the naked eye."

THis is true.
With certain devices such as the earlier synthesizers, you could produce a wide range of oscillations. Even down to about 0hz. At very low oscillations rates and high amplitude where the cone is moving slowly, you can see it going back and forth. I would asssume that as other vibrating objects, (including our flute air columns) The oscillations may not necessarily be the whole object moving in unison but will form nodes. This is how you can get harmonics and such on instruments, Say a guitar, if you have the whole string vibrating and you touch the halfway point lightly for an instant, you will cause the string to form two vibrating sections of equal lengths. result would be an octave but the amplitude is less for each half length.

This may be a cause for the higher volume...On the piccolo, the wave forms are more fundimental with easily greater amplitude in a range where our ears are less sensitive to the volume.

As a temporary fix, earplugs (particularly in the right ear. As a permanent fix, learn that the high notes don't need more air, they need a smaller opening in the lips and a bit faster air. -but important smaller column of air from the lips. Think -the diameter of a thread. The difficulty is that as the opening in the lips and the airstream get smaller, it becomes more difficult to hit the opposite edge. One has to be careful with the length of the air reed and not only the diameter of course.

I agree. Low frequencies are difficult to couple with the surrounding media (air) when produced by a vibrating or moving membrane as in the loudspeaker (the window or aperture of the system). One has to increase the window area to be able to couple enough energy when the sound wavelenght increases (that is, the frequency lowers). It means that at frequencies close to what we are able to hear at the low end, the loudspeaker should be impractically big.

One trick is to use both sides of the cone to project the sound in the front direction, delaying the rear wave a half wavelenght (by forcing it trough a longer path), so that it is emitted in phase with the front wave (the basis of the reflex boxes).

But I think that the process is much more efficient when the air vibrations are produced directly by an air column, as is the case of winds instruments with edges (such as the piccolo and at the other extreme, the organ pipes). We are normally impressed by the very high sound level a good air organ can produce, even at the lowest notes -and could it be, being deafened by the piccolo-

I wish good luck to your nephew. There have been several attempts to replace the cone with different membranes, to achieve a physically and acoustically flat loudspeaker. My opinion is that all have not succeeded in taking their due place in the market. But I could be wrong or not well informed.

Other more innovative systems could have a better outcome.

I believe that the potential damage to our ears is essentially related to the sound pressure (the differential sound pressure, actually) that they are subjected to.

But it could be that some parts of the middle or the inner year could be more fragile to certain frequency ranges, such as the piccolo's.

There could be mechanical resonance effects, for example, that could damage some of the three transmitting "small bones" in the middle year (sorry I do not known their names in English). I know personally a great oboist who had to leave his so far very successful career because he got almost 100% deaf. The damage was in his middle ears and it was (probably) aggravated by incorrect and repeated surgery.

This is something that deserves very serious investigation and of course we are not at the scientific level necessary (not me, at least) to discuss it more deeply. There are probably many papers about this issue, only that we, normal "public", usually do not have access to them.

As Scotch says, one needs university affiliation to have access to the most serious information.

And even so, this is not granted. I have been subscriber to "Science" for a few years (together with "Nature", it is considered a very important media for peer-reviewed scientific articles). But I was overwhelmed and flooded by the information received and felt much frustrated because the issues accumulated and I was unable to read everything I was interested in.
Finally I cancelled the subscription. And live a little happier since then...

of course there are two types of sounds that can effect hearing damage but basically they aren't all that different as far as I'm concerned. one would be that instantaneous loud report such as that of a gunshot and the other would be a constant level of intensity such as Jose Luis' work related comments. jose Luis' may not be exceeding any threshold of pain but it would probably be constantly at a level where it is not safe. The other loud noise may be at a level where you actually want to try to cover your ears after the fact. Either way, i'ts not good (From my totally unscientific comments)
I could give other anecdotes such a the time I videotaped a C-5A taking off at the local airport. I was about 1/2 mile away from this airctaft and I hd to cover my ears. A student's father who used to work on these aircraft in the military actually is fairly deaf from the job.

As far as clean vs. dirty noise? I can say that it's still the wave amplitude that is the concern. If the sounds from an amplified musical group is cluttered with extraneous pink or white noise then this is adding to the overall amplitude of the sound. This is triggereing far more of the cilia receptors in the ear and can be more noticeale that cleaner sound that is effecting more specific frequencies.
As an example, I find that my computer is disturbing my ears because it is causing a ringing. I think that it's either a FM effect from the HDD or fans but could be from other causes. Either way, if I spend a lot of time near it' my ears ring afterwards at a specific frequency.

DISCLAIMER:
This particular informal forum discussion as far as I've seen is totally unsubstantiated in regards to scientific evidence in every post but then again, you get what you pay for on the internet. It's an interesting resource of fact and fiction. One could consider it the ultimate reality show. So sorting it all out is entirely left up to the cringing readers.

~bilbo
N.E. Ohio

LOL! "The ultimate reality show"

YES! still more considering the drama we had in the last weeks...

Jose Luis,
Drama?
What Drama?

The invasion of the body snatchers trollers