Dude wat.

Hearing damage can be really painfull, please.

It's not a superpower when it hurts.

harmonic content is physically equivalent to any other kind of sound, just at a lower spl than its fundamental. from what i understand, higher frequency sounds are known to be more damaging to hearing (why violin players typically experience hearing loss is their left ears), so a sound pallet that has particularly emphasized high harmonics does seem like it could be more damaging.

I never wear ear plugs and I've spent a decent amount of time at / performing at incredibly loud shows.

Loaded up a 16khz test tone, and hope I never have to listen to anything at 16khz again.

@Feryl: I usually keep my android's volume down below 40% during casual listening (unless I'm in a loud car or something). usually 3-5 clicks up from "muted". I'm pretty careful with what I subject my ears to for the most part. It's a bit hard for me to keep track of the volume level of my computer because the knob is missing the dot that shows how high I've turned it up. Anyway, since I had the problem I've taken more precautions so it hasn't turned up again since last year when I first got into the lsdj stuffs.

@Jefftheworld: It's not my noise channel only music. The two tracks were made by two other people. There's a thread about it somewhere. I think it was "how does the noise channel work" or something.

@chunter: Your hypersensitivity after that concert sounds a lot like what happened with me. Thank you for sharing.

And thanks everyone for your responses they have been most helpful. I feel like I may have made this thread before...

Regarding earplugs, exactly. I never travel without them.

I have dulled hearing in the ranges where guitar amps feed back and where cymbals crash from being near both too much. There's nothing wrong with asking a doctor for help too.

Also a 'true' squarewave is impossible. There's always going to be some sort of delay in the rise and fall.

I'm pretty sure this going back to the whole loudness war question. Over-compressed distorted music can cause ear fatigue if turned up too loud, while dynamic music can invite you turn the music up louder without causing the same effects. A lot of gameboy music doesn't have a lot of dynamics, probably becuase a lot is made by beginners and it can be hard to squeeze them out of that thing with only 15(?) volume levels. The noise channel is harsh and distorted which can probably to fatigue if it is too loud in the mix. Tl;dr: Put dynamics and a proper mix in your gameboy songs, esp. with the noise channel.

(Of course, I probably missed the mark by a mile, but maybe something to keep in mind?)

the main thing is that i just don't get how a difference harmonic content can equates to a difference in ear damage, unless you relate it back to the fletcher & munson curves.

re: square wave harmonics, this video is pretty good! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC36AqL5mw8

Sorry that was misleading of me. I didn't mean harmonic content in a hand-wavy artsy way. I meant the fundamental + harmonics. In any case this has got my physics brain re-activated now. I'm pretty confident an orchestra would have a truckload more harmonics than an LSDJ track, but a square wave's harmonics is a good point. It might be misleading because the majority of its infinite harmonics are outside our audible range. And the ones within our audible range don't come close to outnumbering the harmonics from the insane waveforms of just a few violins never mind a full orchestra. Either that or the amplitude of those harmonics drop off like a sack of sh... sugar.

BUT you may well be correct. I'm gonna go and geek out on this a bit. If I figure it out before I get bored, I'll let you know.

oh, well in terms of musical "harmonic content" no. but in any case, adding more harmonics doesn't necessarily change the amplitude of a waveform anyway.

in terms of actual harmonics (all sounds are made of a fundamental frequency + a bunch of "harmonic" frequencies which are multiples of the fundamental frequency), i think the LSDJ track would have more harmonic content than an orchestra... iirc a perfect square wave has infinite odd-order harmonics

also this:

(but you should probably avoid levels of >110dB with anything)

(unless you're at BRKFEST)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … on_ELC.svg

I used to believe that pure square waves were bad for speakers (and possibly bad for ears since they work on similar physical principles) because the membrane is forced to attempt to follow the wave pattern - i.e. instantly extruded, instantly retracted, repeat repeat repeat. I'm not sure who told me that, but it's pretty thoroughly proven wrong. Both membranes are made for the job.

Sure, but presumably an LSDJ track doesn't normally consist exclusively of pulsewaves. Even if it did, that's only, what, 4 tracks of pulsewaves ? (Can you tell I don't use LSDJ?) That's not exactly the harmonic content of a full orchestra.

actually a pulse wave has lots and lots of harmonics (although a 50% duty cycle won't consist of any even-order harmonics)

I'm not an expert on ears or sound, but something that comes to mind is that the simple waveforms you get from a game boy chip probably consist of much fewer harmonics than more complicated waveforms. That might be wrong right off the bat, but if it isn't, that means a song using a game boy chip playing at 120dB will have much fewer harmonics contributing to that volume compared with, I don't know let's go crazy, some Bach concerto, with complex harmonics all over the place. I would assume then, that each of the relatively few harmonics (specific frequencies) in the LSDJ track must be louder to achieve an overall equal volume to the concerto. Seems possible to me that the bits of your ear responsible for responding to those frequencies might take a nastier hit than any of them would while listening to the Bach song.

So in a nutshell, it seems very possible to me that loud game boy music could potentially be more harmful to your ears.