Dangerous Decibels

Today, Room 41 went to the Whare Kai to attend a session called "Dangerous Decibels". Dangerous Decibel's is a programme where we were taught about the dangers of hearing loss. 

Our teacher, Toni, took the session. 

Toni spoke about 'decibels'.

Decibels are a way of measuring sound.  

First Toni explained to us how we were able to hear sounds and what parts where included in this process. 

We were told that 85dB was the highest it can go without becoming dangerous.

Toni showed us a chart. This chart had three separate colours. On top of these colours were labels. 

Green represented activities that wouldn't harm our hearing, orange represented things that have a time limit, and red was instantaneous hearing damage.  

She asked us to put our fingers in our ears and attempt to have a normal conversation with the person beside us. She said that is what is was like to have severe hearing loss. 

One of the exercises we had to do including a tuning fork and a ping-pong ball attached to a thread. 

She asked us to hit the fork on the floor, then put it beside our ear to hear a ringing noise.

She then asked us to hit the for on the ground, and place the tip of the fork against the ping-pong ball causing it to bounce back and forth off of the fork. 

Toni then went onto show us the small hairs inside of our hears and the damage that can done to them by using pipe cleaners as an example. Vibrations pass through the hairs, allowing there to be sound.

Another exercise was where Toni asked for three volunteers. Each volunteer was giving a device that recorded the amount of decibels something was creating. Toni explained how once those hairs were damaged, they could never be repaired nor could they regrow. 

After that, we had a conversation on ways to protect our hearing and a conversation on how you can tell if your in risk of having hearing damage.

One thing I learnt was how to actually measure sound, as I never knew.