Scientists just made guinea pigs listen to Adele for seven days… and the results are both surprising and worrying

If you’re a music maker then you can’t fail to have grasped the concept of compression and, more than likely, thanked your lucky stars that it was there to help.

Whether it's evening out your iffy performance or making bad drums and thin bass sound insanely great, compression is a simple but magic trick of the volume level that can put any music in your face and number one in your affections.

If it’s too quiet a compressor makes it louder. Now everything is at the same level. But, just like amping up food with artificial flavourings or taking political opinion to extremes, it’s possible to have too much of a ‘good’ thing.

While the arguments both for and against compression are well known (remember the ‘loudness war’ that saw remastered classic albums coming back ‘brickwalled’ with all of their subtle dynamics disappeared?) it’s now been medically proven that compression equals bad…

While ‘playing music loud is going to damage your ears’ is common sense, surely the amount of compression employed on a track doesn’t make a difference?

Not so.

Now, new research with guinea pigs has shown that compression may not be your best friend after all and that compressed music damages ears in ways that uncompressed, more dynamic music does not.

The experiment’s findings suggest that having silence between sounds – giving the brain a chance to process ‘what just happened’ and appreciate the surprising peaks to come – gives the listener’s brain sufficient headroom to recover from their last surprise allowing them to listen and understand and enjoy music for longer.

It’s a known fact that listening for too long (and perhaps at two high a level) produces a fatigue that is the scourge of musicians and studio staff worldwide. In short, compressed audio is more tiring to listen to and – thanks to some new research – may just be officially bad for you too.

And the guinea pigs in this new experiment?…

Were actual guinea pigs…

And what unpleasantries were they subjected to in the pursuit of science?

Adele’s 2015 single I Miss You. Obviously

Not just addled… But Adeled…

The guinea pigs were split into two groups. One group listened to the Adele favourite in unmolested form while the others were endlessly fed a compressed version, with both groups listening to the track at the same perceived volume level of 102 decibels.

And it that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. It’s actually just below Britain’s Health and Safety Executive’s recommended maximum average for live music.

Needless to say, tests of the various guinea pig’s cochlea’s post Adele trauma revealed damage to their inner ear, leading to mild temporary impairment which would, in time, produce permanent damage. No surprises thus far.

However the group listening to the compressed version had endured more lasting damage to the middle ear’s stapedius muscle. This component of every ear (humans too) protects the inner ear from loud noises and, at just 1mm long, is actually the smallest skeletal muscle in the body.

This, despite the music – uncompressed and a compressed version – being played at the exact same volume.

In the tests, the hearing of those animals who had listened to the uncompressed Adele made a full recovery within a day, with their hearing and performance of the stapedius muscle returning to normal. The test was repeated for seven days with no discernible lasting effects.

However, those who had encountered the compressed Adele did not get off so lightly, with their stapedius reflexes never fully recovering and exhibiting half of their strength at the end of the experiment a week later.

I don't need this compression on

Thus Paul Avan, an audiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who wrote up his results in the journal Hearing Research, has concluded that the constant stimulus of compressed music overwhelms the nerve cells in auditory processing, affecting their ability to bounce back and recover.

While there’s still much to unpack – how much compression is ‘bad’, can a full recovery be made through an extended rest period, and so on – the results are nonetheless conclusive and surprising, suggesting that not only volume level but the relentless dynamics of what we’re actually listening may have serious later repercussions on our hearing.

You heard it here first.