Audiometric database of academic musicians in Uruguay

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary study at the Universidad de la República (Uruguay), in which hearing loss is assessed in a group of academic musicians, including lyric singers, choristers, and orchestral musicians. Methods: Audiometric records from 137 academic musicians were analyzed. The Average Hearing Loss (PAM) methodology, based on Lafon and Duclos combined with the ISO 1999:2013 Standard, was used to convert all the registers to the hearing loss at the age of 35, which were then organized into a permanence curve and compared with reference curves from the ISO 1999:2013 Standard. Results and Conclusion: The results presented here are estimated to represent more than 27 % of the total population of adult academic musicians nationwide. The findings suggest that academic musicians in Uruguay are at a higher risk of noise-induced hearing loss than the general population in the ISO 1999:2013 Standard.