Occlusion Effect Dangerous?

[Imshael]

Hi everyone!

I'm having a flight (not a long one, only one hour) in a couple of weeks, to go home over Easter. I've bought a pair of Peltor X4A, but I'm a bit worried because of the occlusion effect. I'm thinking that since I experience it from my own steps, it's probably worse on a plane.

So, how bad is the occlusion effect? Can it make my tinnitus worse?

 

[Samir]

Not sure if I follow... it's normal to experience occlusion effect if you have ear muffs over your ears. You conduct sound more through the bone than through the ear canal.

The occlusion effect occurs when an object fills the outer portion of a person's ear canal, and that person perceives "hollow" or "booming" echo-like sounds of their own voice. It is caused by bone-conducted sound vibrations reverberating off the object filling the ear canal.

Wikipedia definition...

I don't think any such temporary occlusion will worsen your hearing or your tinnitus.

 

[Bill Bauer]

how bad is the occlusion effect? Can it make my tinnitus worse?

The sound when I wore my muffs (so the sound included the occlusion effect) on a plane was clearly a lot less loud than when I briefly took them off.

 

[Imshael]

Oh, so it's only the voice, @Samir ? I might have misunderstood it then, because I thought that the loud sound of my own steps that I hear while wearing the earmuffs fell under this category as well? This is why I asked, because I figured that if I hear this really loud "bom" sound with every step, it would happen because of the vibrations of the plane as well. Thank you fow your answer!

Thank you, @Bill Bauer . Guess that I'm a bit paranoid at the moment, and even though I figured that the sound without them would be worse...well, at the moment I just worry about most things, I suppose.

 

[Samir]

No, it's not limited to only your voice. It's that everything you hear sounds hollow and booming, including your own voice.

Normally, when you speak, some of the sound travels from your voice box to the cochlea directly through soft tissue and bone, but the majority of it are air waves that travel from your mouth and bounce off of different external objects and enter your ear canal and propagate down to the eardrum, which in turn moves the middle ear bones, which in turn sets the inner ear fluids in motion, which in turn causes the hair cells to move and release chemicals that create action potentials which essentially creates electrical signals that travel from the ear to the brain and you recognize this as your own voice.

How your own voice sounds to you depends on this balance between air conduction and bone conduction. When you have ear muffs on, you are blocking external sound vibrations which is the whole purpose of ear muffs, but this also includes your own voice. Such that more of the sound is conducted through the bone vibrations. This is why we often sound funny when we listen to our own voice recording, as if it's not our own voice.

But this does not only relate to our own voice, occlusion effect is evident for other sounds as well. Another person speaking to you while you have your ear muffs on will sound different than when you have the ear muffs off. Same goes for other sounds, like the sound of a bird singing. Basically all the sounds that have some high pitches will sound more "booming" when you have ear muffs on.