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Are Super Bowl cheers bad for your ears?
The Super Bowl is America’s most-watched broadcast and also a very loud event that means the cheers, jeers, parties, bars and big screens may be as rough on the eardrums as a defensive end is on a quarterback.
Researchers from the Apple Hearing Study, a collaboration with the University of Michigan and Apple, tackled the topic of Super Bowl noise by analyzing data from the Noise app on Apple Watch devices of more than 115,000 participants in the Apple Hearing Study.
By their analysis, it appears that noise levels on Super Bowl Sundays are twice as loud as noise levels recorded on Sundays following the Super Bowl and loudest in states whose teams played in or hosted the Super Bowl compared to all other states.
In the study summary, researchers “encourage people to monitor their noise exposure (using the Noise app on Apple Watch or iPhone app, for instance) and to protect their hearing (by wearing earplugs, for instance) when they attend or watch noisy events to ensure that they can have fun safely.”
The ongoing hearing study is believed to be the first to capture an increase in sound from a brief event being simultaneously experienced by people across the United States.
“The Apple Hearing Study shows the tremendous power of crowdsourced data collection across the entire United States and lets us conduct analyses that were simply impossible before the advent of wearable technologies and smart devices,” said noise exposure scientist Richard Neitzel, professor of environmental health sciences and global public health at U-M’s School of Public Health, which leads the research into risks, causes and prevention of increasingly common hearing loss.
To get a grasp on the sounds generated by the Super Bowl, researchers compared data from Super Bowl Sundays in the years 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 to noise levels, measured in decibels, on Sundays following those Super Bowls.
They found that sound levels increased by as much as 3 decibels to 68-70 decibels, overall, on days of the big game.
For reference, 65 decibels is about as loud as a normal conversation, and 70 decibels is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner. An increase of 3 decibels represents a doubling of sound energy and an increase of 10 decibels represents a tenfold increase in sound energy—neither being a goal if preventing hearing loss is the game plan.
“Small changes in decibel levels represent a big change in how much noise our ears are exposed to, and those small changes are barely noticeable to us,” Neitzel said. “It’s important to remember that even small changes in decibel levels that are hardly noticeable can have a big effect on hearing.”
The Super Bowl analysis is the most recent update from the Apple Hearing Study, which was started in 2019 to advance the understanding of how hearing related behaviors and sound exposure can contribute to hearing health and aspects of health related to hearing.
