Musicians' ability to judge the risk of acquiring noise induced hearing loss.

The objective of this research was to study musicians' abilities to estimate the risk to obtain a hearing loss. Twenty-two professional musicians mainly playing classical music wore dosimeters during 2 working weeks. They also wrote a diary describing all their musical activities and tried to judge the percentage of time that every activity was harmful to their hearing. Half of the musicians seemed to be capable to reasonably judge the harmfulness of the music that they were exposed to. They started to judge the levels to be risky at 80 dB(A) and regarded themselves as slightly more susceptible to noise induced hearing loss than normal.