A bone conducting earpiece, what makes it special to other types

Music is a large part of everyday life also it has been for nearly as long as People have been on this earth. I often point to the finding of a 40,000-year-old flute dating back to that ice age as evidence for this, but truthfully, the facts you need is all around you, every day. We recall ballads and music long after the folks who first composed them have died and rotted away (a plan which I find curiously soothing) and also the music industry, love it or hate it, is actually a large business.

 

On the other hand, whilst the ice age musicians probably lived in a world of stark violence, frozen, featureless wastelands and harsh, ‘kill or be killed’ inter-cave politics, they by no means required to contend with road works, transport lorries, screaming infants or drunken crowd-rousers on their way to the stag night. Fortunate buggers.

 

Today’s listener has to accommodate all that and more, that may make listening to your music not only difficult, but also dangerous.

 

Now, though, modern science has stumbled across a means in which you can still listen to the favorite songs, even when you’re wearing earplugs (no, I’ve not been sniffing discarded paint cans once more). It’s called bone conduction technology and no, despite the marginally strange name, it in truth does not harm…

 

Based on recent research, exposure to any sound over 100 Dbm wears away a film known as a myelin sheath and leaves your internal ear susceptible to problems like tinnitus and temporary deafness, that may be the start of even more significant problems. Bone conduction technology is made to bypass the most sensitive portions of the ear and reduce the danger of inner-ear damage.

 

How? Well, in order to know that, we need to first identify with how our ears essentially work. (HERE COMES THE SCIENCE-Y BIT) Basically, sound travels though the air, these sound waves are intercepted by quite a few structures within the ear and are ultimately translated and transmitted into our brains (if it helps, imagine it like the encoding/decoding of digital information, like that which leads the actions of the wireless mouse).

 

The sound waves first meet a bit of cartilage (yes, similar stuff a shark’s skeleton is made of), which allows to concentrate the sound, this is called a pinna (but you may call it your outer ear without looking too ridiculous). 

 

Then, the sound waves pass into your central ear, that is filled up with air and also includes both your acoustic canal plus your eardrum (my little brother burst his when he was little and almost burst mine crying about it). The eardrum vibrates, passing the sound through to the ossicles, that are three small bones (that are actually pretty vital to the sense of balance, I am told). These tiny bones transmit the signal to the cochlea, that’s a fluid-filled infrastructure that ‘encodes’ the signals for our brain to ‘decode’.

 

Bone conduction tech vibrates the bones of your skull, distributing the sound directly to the cochlea and bypassing the rest of the ear completely. The nerve impulses transmitted to your brain are precisely the same, but the sensitive instrument of our ear does not need to deal with the trouble of, to quote Anchorman’s Brick Tamland “LOUD NOISES!”

 

This process seems to be completely safe; in fact, the legendary deaf composer Beethoven employed a elementary version of this process in order to compose his most famous works. He attached a rod linking his piano and his head and, as such, was able to listen to the song he was playing.

 

So here you go, rather than exposing your delicate ears to louder and louder volumes, just to drown out the environment noise, it is possible to alternativily stick your earpugs in and play your music at the proper volume. Make no bones about it (groan!)

 

for more information on the full range of bone conductor earpieces visit www.earpieceonline.co.uk

A bone conducting earpiece, what makes it special to other types