Unbalanced sound hurts my ears...

October 10, 2006 12:54 AM

If I'm listening to music predominantly through one ear I get a really intense pain in the opposite ear after about thirty seconds. What's happening?

(by 'through one ear' I'm talking about one headphone from a pair, standing side on to a soundstage or sat in a car with really badly set up stereo)

The pain is similar to the feeling of a moderate to bad ear infection. In the past I've had gromets fitted to drain my inner ear and my outer ear tends to produce large amounts of thick brown wax that fills the canal.

posted by twine42 to health & fitness (3 comments total)

Let me offer a wild guess based on an experience.

A girlfriend and I went to a stony Pacific Norhtwest beach (near La Push, Wa.) during a big storm to look at the surf. It was absolutely overpowering, and there happened to be a huge, uprooted Douglas Fir with a root-disk at least 20 ft. across thrust up onto the beach crown first, perpendicular to the surf line with its base 30 ft. out into the waves. We climbed out along the trunk and wound ourselves into the roots as wave after immense wave slammed into the tree, sending sheets of water >20 ft. over our heads and making the entire tree vibrate like a gigantic organ pipe.

About an hour into the drive home, she started to go deaf, and by the time we arrived she could not understand speech at normal volume. The culprit turned out to be big plugs of wax in both ears. The next day a milder version of the same thing happened to me.

So one function of earwax seems to be protecting the eardrum from some sounds, I'm guessing subsonics especially, since those would tend to produce big excursions, kind of like what you can see on your speaker-cones with heavy bass.

In your case, I think your ear hurts because the earwax produced in response to sound has no place to to go because of the stiff and heavy character of the wax already there, so it presses into your tissues and causes pain.

But why doesn't this happen when you listen to music with both ears (assuming I'm reading your question right)? Possibly vibrations from music in the ear that hurts loosen things up enough so the wax does have somewhere to go, or, I guess more likely, the grommets you had in that ear have left your eustachian tube on that side so wide open that sound and pressure waves can travel up it from its other end in your throat and cause your ear give a confusing signal that your brain interprets as a danger to your eardrum that requires more wax.
posted by jamjam at 11:47 AM on October 10, 2006 [1 favorite]

There are muscles in the middle ear (tensor tympani, tensor stapedius) that contract in the presence of loud sounds. They do this reflexively by stretching the eardrum, thereby preventing it from damaging the ligaments that hold the three tiny middle ear bones (ossicles) together.

Since you stated that this occurs while listening to music in one ear, and the pain occurs in the opposite ear, it might be that the continuous tension in those muscles stretches those ligaments somewhat, like trying to hold a yoga posture for an extended time. The result is a pain in the stretched ligament. The ear receiving the loud sound would be constantly flexed by the sound waves, so that those joints would not remain stretched and become painful.
posted by RMALCOLM at 12:17 PM on October 10, 2006

Crossfeeding can help if you are listening to music. There are plugins for a lot of mp3 programs out there.
posted by robofunk at 4:28 PM on October 10, 2006