The history of hearing protection for musicians (part 3 of 3): TU Delft, Loop, and where aarproof.comes from

In the first two parts of this series we saw how hearing protection for musicians grew out of a combination of personal missions, from Andy Shiach to Eckhard Beste, and technical university work, with TU Delft and Tympanitec/Tympro as early Dutch examples. In this last part we bring that line up to the present, all the way to Earproof itself.

Dig into the more recent history of hearing protection for music and you end up at TU Delft again. Not as one central institute with an ongoing hearing protection programme, but as the technical partner that several brands turned to for developing and testing their acoustic filters. A well-known example is Loop. The Belgian brand, founded by Maarten Bodewes and Dimitri O, worked with TU Delft for two years to design and test some forty prototypes. That collaboration led to their recognisable 3D-printed earplug with a hollow acoustic channel, a production method that only 3D printing made possible.

What few people know is that the connection between Loop and TU Delft did not come about by itself. I made that introduction myself at the time, and so brought Loop into the university that our own filter technology also builds on.

Because that same university line runs through Earproof as well. Our PRO filters, with the double mesh membrane that gives flat attenuation across the whole frequency spectrum, were also developed together with TU Delft. The same goes for the acoustic filters built into our custom-made earplugs. So Loop and Earproof, however different the brands are otherwise, stand on the same technical foundation: developed independently of each other, but rooted in the same technical and scientific thinking, with a line that runs through me back to the same university where Tympanitec started in the eighties.

It fits the wider pattern of this whole series. Again and again it was people with a personal connection to music, often with hearing damage of their own or years of hands-on experience, who connected science and practice: from Andy Shiach and Michael Santucci, who combined audiology with in-ear monitoring for musicians, through Eckhard Beste in Germany, to the collaborations of brands like Loop and Earproof with technical universities like TU Delft. Each time it comes down to the same core: making scientific knowledge accessible to people who live with music, so that protection and sound quality do not have to be at odds.

That is also the thread running through our own philosophy at Earproof: ears are vulnerable, and once damaged, the damage is permanent. Building on the work of all these pioneers, from Shiach and Santucci to Beste and the researchers at TU Delft, we will keep working so that musicians and concertgoers can go on enjoying music without sacrificing their hearing for it.

Peter