The history of hearing protection for musicians (part 1 of 3): the international pioneers

Hearing protection for musicians did not happen by chance. It was built by a small number of people who, often after damaging their own hearing, decided to do something about it. In this series of three blogs we take you past the most important names and places in that history, from the early pioneers in England and America, through the university roots in the Netherlands, to where Earproof stands today.

One of the most important names in this story is Andy Shiach. He damaged his own hearing in the seventies, in a studio, and it brought his music career to an abrupt end. Rather than accept that, he retrained as an audiologist and founded Advanced Communication Solutions (ACS) in England, with one goal: to spare other musicians what had happened to him. Together with his colleague Robert Beiny, he was one of only two British audiologists in the nineties who focused specifically on in-ear monitoring, and their early work in development and awareness helped lay the foundation for how musicians perform on stage today.

In that same period, in April 1995, Beiny and Andy met the American audiologist Michael Santucci, founder of Sensaphonics, in Dallas. From Chicago, Santucci built one of the leading companies in hearing protection and in-ear monitoring for musicians, and spent decades working with artists and sound engineers to protect their hearing without giving up sound quality. Lisa Tannenbaum, owner of Musician’s Hearing Services in Chicago and California, was also at that meeting in Dallas. It marked the point where a small, worldwide network of audiologists found each other in the same mission: making musicians aware of the risks, and giving them protection that does not get in the way of the music.

Two other names belong to this story. Mead Killion and his company Etymotic Research brought the ER15 musicians earplugs to market, based on a design by his mentor, engineer Elmer Carlson. Killion turned the common assumption of the time, that more attenuation is always better, on its head, and introduced moderate attenuation that keeps the sound quality intact. That approach became the basis for the custom musicians earplugs that have protected hundreds of thousands of musicians since their introduction in 1988. Marshall Chasin, of the Musicians’ Clinics of Canada, was also part of this small, worldwide network.

A similar movement grew on the European mainland. In Germany, Eckhard Beste was the driving force. As managing director of Hearsafe, he focused specifically on professional hearing protection and in-ear applications for people in the music world, from musicians and music teachers to festivalgoers at events like Wacken. Like his colleagues in England and the United States, he worked on awareness and prevention, at a time when homemade, unprofessional hearing protection was the rule rather than the exception.

So in the nineties, spread across England, the United States, Canada and Germany, a small but international network of audiologists and specialists grew up, every one of whom understood that hearing cannot be replaced. In the next part of this series we take you to the Netherlands, where the same mission took its own, university-based form.

Peter