GridGirl

Not enough. Above a certain noise level hearing protection is mandatory so 'strongly recommending' doesn't cut it. One of the news stories claimed that the peak level in front of the brass was 130dB (with no weighting etc. given) Most disposable earplugs are going to attenuate by 20dB or thereabouts, so you will still have a problem. That’s peak level though - here in Australia the max allowable peak is 140dbC so it’s still under that. We occasionally see peaks that high (although from percussion not brass) and it’s still perfectly legal.

Thanks for this - very interesting reading and in all honesty it makes me feel an awful lot better about what we’re doing to protect our players’ hearing. Sending it on to my boss because he’s going to be very interested in it.

If you read the whole thread then it shows that it shouldn't be any trouble if you do things correctly. We still don't know what the outcome will be and he may just be given representative damages of a nominal amount because of his own contributory actions. Not just sitting right in front of a Wagnerian brass section but possible cumulative damage from over-rehearsing his own instrument for years and playing in heavily amplified, large scale events. "Do things correctly" is not always easy, or even possible sometimes. We have what used to be a full-scale disaster of an orchestra pit, as I've said before, and even now after a big refurbishment it's still massively problematic, due to the fact that no-one wanted to give us a billion dollars to completely rebuild the theatre so that the whole pit is out the front of the stage, instead of having 2/3 of it under the stage as we do. As I have posted earlier in this thread, we are doing everything we can, but we can't eliminate the problem. But I absolutely think that what Kerry says about the cumulative damage should be taken into account - he's played on stage with Kylie Minogue and that won't have been quiet. In all honesty I'm baffled as to how they seem to have been able to pin it to one specific event and I think if the ROH appeal, as I suspect they will, that that line may very well be taken. Suffice to say we're concerned about the ruling and discussing with a lot of people today. Someone has to sit in front of the brass! And orchestras tend to sit in one formation for many artistic reasons, so yeah, he would not have anywhere else to go and sit. If he'd come to me, I would have shuffled things around to gain him as much space as possible and move him as far forward as I could, away from the brass, but in a crowded pit (and with Wagner it will have been chockablock) there's not many options usually.

I think it's one of those things where if you bleed to death, it's not going to matter that you're not burned. Much like the situation my husband and I found ourselves in a couple of years ago where we witnessed a motorbike vs car accident and it was a choice of not take the helmet off the motorcyclist because it might be holding his brain in, or take it off to get him breathing again (I did post about it on here). Not breathing trumped possible skull injury so the helmet came off. Even with a regular tourniquet, surely losing a limb because someone stopped you bleeding out with a tourniquet is better than bleeding out.

Actually yes, we do have more than one pair of earmuffs which appear from time to time! The other thing which I should reinforce is that for us, earplugs are an absolute last resort. We noise monitor everything, and players all have individual noise graphs produced so I can accurately estimate their noise exposure over any given period of time. Should it be too high, they'll be replaced for as many shows as need be to keep their exposure at an appropriate level. Respite is the best thing we can give them, so we do. And if someone comes to me and says they're struggling with noise, I don't care whether their exposure is under the 85dBA level or not - if they need a night off, they get one.

Way back in the dim distant past, I remember sitting in a lecture that quoted case law that employers responsibility is not just supplying PPE but ensuring workers used them. This includes monitoring that PPE is used and disciplining employees who do not comply with the PPE requirements. e.g. hard hats worn when they should be eye protection etc. In an industrial situation I can absolutely agree with this. However in the orchestra pit it is not quite that simple. For instance, one of our brass players has major issues when it comes to playing with earplugs in; due to some factor that we can't quite work out (possibly some major dental work done in the past, we think), the plugs cause his skull bones to vibrate oddly when he plays (pressure of mouthpiece on jaw), this causes his eyeballs to vibrate and therefore he can't read the music properly. Therefore, earplugs make it impossible for him to do his job properly. I don't think I'll ever see the day that we fire someone for not wearing their earplugs. Having said that, should a player sue the company for hearing loss, the question "were you supplied with appropriate PPE, and did you use it correctly?" will undoubtedly be asked, and if the answer is no, then it's on them and not the company.

I wonder how this case is progressing. It was brought back to mind because my colleagues and I had a long chat with the audiologist who does all our hearing tests and fitted earplugs this week - we've been sending people to him for ages but had never actually met the guy. Turns out he's a death metal drummer when he's not being an audiologist! Anyway, we discussed this claim and he reckons that without a baseline hearing test from when the player started at the ROH, it would be very unlikely that the damage can be pinned on them. And even then, if the workplace had issued him with earplugs and a directive to use them, they have done all they can. I'm sitting in the orchestra "pit" currently (we're actually out of the pit and in a studio - singers are on the front steps of the building!) and noticed one player has tissue paper wadded up in his ears. I KNOW he has proper fitted earplugs because I sent him the referral to get them, but I can't force him to wear them. And wadded up tissue paper isn't going to do a damn thing for his hearing.

The more I think about this, the more I think the player isn't that likely to be successful in his case. Everyone in the orchestral/opera world knows that Wagner is loud. When you have seventeen brass players, there's really no other way that it can be. For something of that magnitude, orchestral management will have had every possible method of PPE on standby ready to go; the original article says that he was not given proper training on how to use his 28dB earplugs. Unless they're those squishy foam ones, which do need to be rolled up tightly before putting them in your ears and you can insert them in a way that is less effective, it's not hard - stick them in until you feel them seal. I use the "Christmas tree" plugs (Etymotic ER20) when I'm playing in our orchestra big band; they're one step down from a fitted moulded plug but still pretty good, and it's really not rocket science to put them in. It's tricky without knowing the full circumstances of the case, but it seems to me that a) he should have asked for more info if he didn't know and b) really a lot of the blame can be laid at his feet. I have 70+ musicians to worry about; I can't worry about every single thing for everyone, and rely on players to come and see me if they have an issue. If I don't know they have an issue, I can't solve it. This GIF really sums up my feelings on the matter: http://I.imgur.com/bZcRPFL.gif (Clearly it's a performance, so not the first time this has happened - and if you saw a percussionist behind you with a giant hammer, wouldn't you try to find out when he was using it so you could write STICK FINGERS IN EARS at the appropriate moment in your part?!)

So I've had a bit of a dig around in my Noise folder at work, and found a couple of documents; one is from the BBC and was written in 1998 but is still relevant, if brief. The second one is a lot more in-depth, and more recent. Both are interesting reading and I would think that the ROH orchestra is part of the ABO, as one of the authors was the Orchestra Director there for six years.BBC Noise Awareness leaflet.pdf British ABO_A_Sound_Ear_II.pdf

Some sort of shielding between percussion and woodwind. Be that individual head shields (I highly recommend the GoodEar shield - and Kolberg Percussion make something very similar) or a wall up to 1200mm high, anything will help. We're using a wall in front of percussion and behind woodwind for Opera on Sydney Harbour and it's effective enough that even for Turandot, when the 5 percussionists (plus timpani) are all making a hell of a noise almost continually, the wind players are comfortable without headshields. Here's a photo, before we bumped the pit in; we ended up taking out two of the five perspex pieces because they were so effective the conductor and the percussionists couldn't hear each other talking, and the percussionists couldn't hear any of the rest of the orchestra. The pit has about 50% of its wall surfaces covered with the acoustic blanketing - we start there and add or subtract as necessary. http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e26/kiwitechgirl/9E9C18B0-6C4C-469B-AECE-56AF7EBFD30A_zpsyudk1lqv.jpg

This is very, very interesting. I think the news report is perhaps a little misleading in its report of the "peak" level - the only thing that I have seen at that level was an onstage whip crack in a ballet production of Don Quixote - and they altered the whip to quieten it after that reading came in. Even a cymbal crash or big snare hit doesn't get close to that. It's also interesting that he's pinning it to one specific event because in my experience, while that may tip you over the edge, it's unlikely to be the sole cause and I would think he'd suffered damage over the years leading up to the event. We work very, very hard to protect our players' hearing. We have an absolute disaster of an orchestra pit in the Opera House, plus the complications of the harbour stage as someone alluded to earlier. We have a multi-page hearing conservation policy, which is a part of our union agreement; every production is monitored for noise and I feed the results into a big complicated spreadsheet which then gives me a graph of each player's noise exposure, based on their roster for the season. If their weekly average tips over 85dB, we take steps (re-rostering, ensuring they wear earplugs - most of our players have moulded plugs which we pay for, or put in a head shield) to reduce their exposure. The harbour stage pit, oddly enough, causes us fewer problems because we pack it with acoustic blanketing and because players are mic'ed, they can often play more quietly as they're not having to balance themselves against the rest of the orchestra (we have a fantastic sound engineer to do that!). This year's harbour production is Turandot, which is one of the loudest operas in the repertoire, and thanks to being able to customise the pit (half height walls in front of brass and percussion) it's quieter than it is in our regular pit. Ordinarily our brass section sits behind a wall; where we can, we leave space between percussion and the back of the orchestra (usually strings in our weird setups) but we can't always do that. The only time we take the wall away from the brass is in Mozart operas where they don't play loud stuff. We still have to use head shields in front of the percussionists; they're never the Perspex ones, as that causes mutiny from those behind them (they do as much damage as they do good by slapping the sound back at the players behind them) but soft covered ones called the GoodEar - they're made by an Australian company. I do have somewhere at work a few documents about noise and hearing conservation from British companies - I'll dig them up and see if there's anything from the ROH. I would be very surprised if they didn't have a comprehensive policy though; I do know they noise monitor as I was corresponding with my opposite number there about a ballet which was brought in from there (and had some very complex percussion requirements!) and he sent me their noise readings for that ballet. Certainly we do have one of the most comprehensive noise policies of any Australian orchestra - there's one orchestra who has an audiologist as a horn player and theirs is up there with ours, plus he comes to speak to us regularly, and it's paying off. One of our brass players had a hearing test reasonably recently and his results were almost identical to his results from when he first joined the orchestra nearly ten years ago. This could be viewed either way - we do not have enough accurate information. 137dBCpeak is the upper action level in CONAWR 2005 but it's not clear if it really means 'peak' as we understand it. What's needed is a noise exposure profile - preferably the one the employer should have taken when carrying out the initial risk assessment ;-) There should also be a baseline audiogram taken when the musician was hired...together with subsequent health surveillance. Without this information it would be hard to determine whether the issue of NIHL and Recruitment was due solely to exposure in this job, or if he already had hearing damage. The issue of lack of information and training may be a valid one, but we don't know what the employer actually provided. Although such claims are commonplace in industry, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.... I should also add that we require new players to get a hearing test when they commence working with us, and we encourage (and pay for) annual hearing tests. Over the past twenty five years of noise monitoring we have built up a pretty comprehensive database of noise profiles for all of the common operas and a lot of the uncommon ones so we have a head start on working out noise exposure. Occasionally I do come up against an opera I have no readings for, but the music staff and library can usually recommend something similar I can use as a reference until we get the noise readings in. I also think this paragraph in the Guardian report is very telling: Long-term hearing damage is very often caused by your own instrument - our horn playing audiologist was very clear on that. It's particularly the case where you have a physical connection between your head and the instrument (so not a cello or double bass) suspect if they get in any audiologists with musical knowledge as expert witnesses, this will come up. As I said, Valkyrie might have tipped him over the edge but he'd been bashing his own ears up since the age of ten. Most of my guys wear earplugs when they practise these days.

Seven years, almost to the day!! Think that probably is close to a BR record. Interesting information though!