Musician spreads lesson of safe listening to children

The award-winning musician had some important advice for his audience.

"First, don't stick your head in a tuba," said Oran Etkin. "Second, if you have earbuds, that's kind of like sticking your head in a tuba. So you should turn the volume waaaaay down."

The 400 children sitting on the cafeteria floor at John Hancock Demonstration School in Northeast Philadelphia hung on his words, as if the wiry, bushy-haired clarinetist were a sage. And in a way he was.

Etkin had brought his jazz combo - tuba, drums, and piano - to help fight the epidemic of youthful hearing loss that experts link to the explosion of personal listening devices such as iPods.

The concert, with Etkin's kid-centric versions of Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington hits, was part of the Listen to Your Buds campaign, a national effort by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association to teach preteens how to protect their hearing while using audio devices.

"We made a conscious decision to focus on the very young," said the association's spokesman, Joe Cerquone, explaining why elementary schools are the target. "Better to start them off on the right foot than try to break bad habits."

Over just the last five years, ownership of iPods, smart phones, and other audio devices has soared from 39 percent to 66 percent among 8- to 18-year-olds, according to Kaiser Family Foundation surveys.

On average, Kaiser found, they spend almost eight hours a day using entertainment media, with TV, audio devices, and computers leading the list. (Only the last-place medium - print - has been steadily falling since 1999.)

"Kids are not allowed to wear earbuds in school," said William Griffin, the city school's principal. "But in the neighborhood, on the playground, on the bus, you're going to see them wearing some kind of listening device."

Indeed, when Griffin asked how many youngsters had an iPod or its ilk, almost every hand went up. (This may have reflected peer pressure; some kindergartners interviewed later claimed iPods are the size of toaster ovens.)

The problem, experts say, is that kids play these devices too loud, despite volume-limiting features and manufacturers' generic warnings about safe listening levels. And because of earphones, parents today are less likely to scream "Turn that thing down!" than in the days of transistor radios and record players.