Does music hurt your ears?

A few weeks ago I posted an entry on the topic of music, and whether or not listening to music helps you to study. This morning I read a story in the New York Times about the effect that today's music technology is having on our hearing. In Room For Debate: Why Teenagers Can't Hear You the effect of high rates of use of portable music devices on hearing is discussed.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week found that one in five American teenagers now has some hearing loss. This is a 30 percent increase from just 15 years ago.

If you are playing your iPod loudly enough that I can hear it as I walk through the stacks.... you should probably turn the volume down.

Does Listening to Music Help You Study?

Working at the Law Library, I meet a lot of students who spend time in the library, wearing their earbuds. I don't know what they are listening to, nor do I ask. But sometimes, I hear music in the stacks. A few stray notes will escape the earbuds and drift down the quite aisles of books.... Have you ever wondered whether listening to music while studying really helps people to learn? A recent study reported in the Daily Mail indicates that listening to music does not enhance a student's ability to concentrate.

Background music - a staple of students cramming for exams the world over - interferes with concentration, research shows.
Students who listened to their tunes while trying to memorise a list of letters fared worse than those who worked in silence, the British study found.
Even songs from their favourite bands proved more of a hindrance than a help.
Researchers from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, tasked 25 students with memorising lists of consonants.
Some were shown the letters while sitting in silence, others while listening to music by their favourite bands or by groups they had a strong aversion to.
Listening to music - including tunes that they liked - hampered their recall, the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology reports.
This shows that listening to music, regardless of one's opinion to it, impairs the ability to memorise information in a set order, said researcher Dr Nick Perham.
The students were also tested while listening to a voice simply repeating the number three over and over again and while listening to a voice saying random numbers - something known as a changing-state sound.
Although the random numbers proved a distraction, the repetition of the number three didn't.
This suggests that it is not peace and quiet that is important when studying - but lack of change in any background noise.

What do you think? Does listening to music help you study? Does the information in this article give you any insights into music and other noises, and the impacts they can have on your ability to concentrate?

How and Where Are You Getting Your Songs?

Via Legal Blog Watch, U.S. sides with RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in filesharing case. Read the entire post here.

Purchase a song online and it will cost you, at most, 99 cents. Download the song via filesharing and it can cost you anywhere from $750 to $30,000. That is the range of statutory damages allowed under federal law for copyright infringement. Can so disproportionate a penalty be constitutional? In a brief filed yesterday in a filesharing case pending in U.S. District Court in Boston, the U.S. Justice Department says yes.