Hearing Health Summer 2015 Issue Summer 2015 | Page 18

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hearing health

How I Learned to Love My Ears
I

got my start in the music industry in the early
’70s as a partner and house engineer, with classmates
from Northwestern University, for the Chicago-area
music venue, Amazingrace. For six years, I was one of
two house sound engineers for folk and jazz acts ranging
from Steve Goodman and Odetta, to Pat Metheny and
Charles Mingus.
Aside from developing audio “chops” that would prove
useful for years to come, my partners and I became very
used to the moderately loud levels these genres of music
generated. In fact, there were some acts we never invited
back because they were too loud.
Following the closing of Amazingrace in 1978, I spent
six months on the road as Pat Metheny’s first front-ofhouse engineer. This was a rude introduction to how the
rest of the world experienced music: through bad sound
systems provided by proprietors who were often more
18 | hearing health | a publication of hearing health foundation

interested in the bar profits than in the music, let alone
the sound quality.
Through the ’80s, I worked at Studiomedia, a recording
studio in Evanston, Illinois, which I eventually came to
own. I continued and built new connections with the
local and national folk and jazz communities. At some
point, early on, we realized that after a few hours of
recording or mixing, we needed a break to rest our ears.
Hello, TTS! (Temporary threshold shift is the term for
short-term hearing loss, resulting in a muffling of sounds
that can last a day or two.)
We kept an SPL (sound pressure level) meter in the
control room, knowing that when levels crept up to 95 to
98 dBA, it was time for that break (dBA, or A-weighted
decibels, are a measurement of how the human ear
perceives volume). It was during this period that I
became an adjunct professor at Northwestern University,

PHOTO CREDIT: CHARLES SETON

A former self-described “studio rat” details the transition from owning a music
venue to hosting hearing physiology and conservation workshops. By Benj Kanters