Print PDF
Favorite
Email
I love music and have always found it to be helpful in my work environment. It helps set my mood, engages my creativity, and often works as a metronome of sorts setting a pace to work at.
More often than not, I work in a very loud environment and need to blast the music just to be heard over the atmospheric noise produced by grinding, hammering, sawing, or whatever other kind of racket I might be immersed in.
As a maker, you may have faced this same issue. So what do we do?
Blasting stereos is not a great solution because they can overwhelm a space and become distracting. This is also a poor strategy if you have neighbors.
Headphones help to hear the music more clearly but offer no protection against the potential harmful sounds in the space. Of course, the headphones themselves can cause significant damage to your hearing if they are too aggressive, which they often need to be to be heard in a loud space.
Another complication is hearing protection. We stuff plugs into our ears and cover them with thick muffs to decrease the damaging, high frequencies which leave us with muffled low tones that get mixed up in the droning of the machines.
This ebb and flow of sound blurs the boundaries between the music, the noise and the rest of the atmosphere. Sometimes the sound in the space can be so convoluted, that it starts to produce a psychedelic effect. Under different circumstances, this might be cool, but in this scenario, its just dangerous.
I made these “Safetyphones” as an experiment and potential solution to this problem. They are a pair of safety earmuffs with headphones embedded in them. They offer me the protection from damaging, outside noise while allowing me to listen to music inside the protective area at a reasonable level.
More often than not, I work in a very loud environment and need to blast the music just to be heard over the atmospheric noise produced by grinding, hammering, sawing, or whatever other kind of racket I might be immersed in.
As a maker, you may have faced this same issue. So what do we do?
Blasting stereos is not a great solution because they can overwhelm a space and become distracting. This is also a poor strategy if you have neighbors.
Headphones help to hear the music more clearly but offer no protection against the potential harmful sounds in the space. Of course, the headphones themselves can cause significant damage to your hearing if they are too aggressive, which they often need to be to be heard in a loud space.
Another complication is hearing protection. We stuff plugs into our ears and cover them with thick muffs to decrease the damaging, high frequencies which leave us with muffled low tones that get mixed up in the droning of the machines.
This ebb and flow of sound blurs the boundaries between the music, the noise and the rest of the atmosphere. Sometimes the sound in the space can be so convoluted, that it starts to produce a psychedelic effect. Under different circumstances, this might be cool, but in this scenario, its just dangerous.
I made these “Safetyphones” as an experiment and potential solution to this problem. They are a pair of safety earmuffs with headphones embedded in them. They offer me the protection from damaging, outside noise while allowing me to listen to music inside the protective area at a reasonable level.
Remove these ads by
Signing UpStep 1Safetyphones
I started with an old pair of earmuffs.
| « Previous Step | Download PDFView All Steps | Next Step » |
This was my first instructable and I am looking forward to making more.