[Stk] Does very low/high frequency damage your ear?

[Craig Sapp]

Hi Spencer,

Basically no: if you cannot hear it, then it cannot damage your (inner)
ear—as long as the sound is less that about 120 dB_spl.   Extremely loud
sounds can still damage whether you can hear them or not, such as burst
your ear drum, and if the sound is intense enough in the low frequencies it
could probably turn you into mush.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Human_reactions
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound#Safety

2,000,000 GHz is pretty high—most audio speakers will only go up to 20,000
Hz (20 kHz).  If you try to produce 2,000,000 GHz or similar with STK you
will be wrapping around the Nyquist frequency (22 kHz maximum for CD
sampling rate) in any case.

140-150 dB ultrasonics were in the news recently:
    http://www.livescience.com/52598-sonic-tractor-beam-moves-objects.html


-=+Craig



On 30 October 2015 at 18:01, Propular Vid <spencerkim1214 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello All!
>
>
> I was just kind of wondering if frequencies that human cannot hear damages
> your ear.
>
> It is known that loud sounds can damage your ear, but will it damage your
> ear even if the sound is unhearable?
>
> Let's say that there is a speaker which produces 2,000,000 GHz frequencies
> which human cannot hear and its amplitude is very high. If someone is
> standing there, will it damage his/her ear?
>
>
> Or does it only work if the sound is in human frequency range?
>
>
> Regards,
> Spencer.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Stk mailing list
> Stk at ccrma.stanford.edu
> https://cm-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/stk
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://cm-mail.stanford.edu/pipermail/stk/attachments/20151030/529f7507/attachment.html>