EMM 342: NOISE AND VIBRATION BY: KHOO ZHENG YANG (108145)

LEE KITT LEONG (108148)

1) Find causes of human hearing loss and briefly explain them. There are many hearing loss causes and they can be of many different reasons. Hearing loss might be due to age, noise, illness, chemicals and physical trauma. The severity of hearing loss can be determined by measuring decibels. They can be classified based on its severity as mild, moderate, moderately severe or profound. One of the most common factors that we should discuss will be hearing loss due to prolong exposed to high noise level. For instance, people living near freeway or airports exposed to noise level of around 65 to 75dB and this exposure overtime might cause hearing impairment. However this is a long term effect towards hearing loss. One time exposure to an intense impulse of sound might also cause hearing loss such as noise generated in a woodworking shop or exposure to loud sound such as explosion. Besides that, sounds emitted from a range of 120 to 150 decibels from motorcycles, firecrackers and small fire arms will cause noise induced hearing loss. Next, exposure to loud music during musical concert is another reason as you will be exposed to loud sound for the whole concert. All these exposure to noise will damage the hair cells located in the inner ear and also damage the auditory or hearing nerve. Besides noise hearing loss might also be due to other factors as mentioned. Illnesses such as measles, meningitis, autoimmune disease, mumps and many other diseases cause hearing loss. This is due to the damage of the auditory nerve or even the cochlea. In conclusion, hearing loss can be classified into 2 basic types namely conductive and sensorineural where conductive causes are results from physical problems with the movement of sound wave through the ear. Sesonrineural causes are damage to the hair cells or nerves that sense sound waves. 2) Briefly explain how the hearing aid works. Hearing aids are small and light devices that are used by people who have hearing impairment so that they enhance their hearing. Generally, it consists of four basic parts: a microphone, an amplifier, a speaker and a battery. The battery is the power source of the hearing aid and required to be replaced from time to time in order for the device to work continuously. Basically, the mechanism of the hearing aid started from the microphone. It collects the sound from the surrounding and converts it into electrical impulses. The electrical impulses converted are sent to the amplifier. The amplifier will modulate and amplify the electrical impulses. Finally, the speaker, also known as the receiver, will convert the amplified electrical impulses into sound and feed them into the ear. Then those impulses are sent to brain.