Hello Rachel,
It was lovely meeting you on Friday.
I promised you contacts and suggestions for your project work. I've
attached a couple of notes that I hope will be useful. The report of the
trial of earplugs in nightclubs by the Tees Valley local authorities was
led by Jonathon Dicken and Andrew McKenna and I wrote the report.
Unfortunately the report was not released to the general public. Andrew
McKenna is the man who can let you have a copy.
The list of contacts is attached. And I have added some notes on who they
are and how they might help.
I've also done a note of thoughts on your soundtrip.
Keep having fun.
Liz Brueck
Noise and Vibration Section
Health and Safety Laboratory
Harpur Hill
Buxton
Derbyshire SK17 9JN
Tel 01298 218387
Fax 01298 218395
(See attached file: Rachel Dunscombe - contact details of other people.doc)
(See attached file: Rachel Dunscombe advice.doc)
CONTACT OF OTHER PEOPLE
Nick Mayne
Commercial Health
Canterbury City Council
Military Road
Canterbury, CT1 1YW
Nick.Mayne@canterbury.gov.uk
01227 862221
Nick is a star and has led a Kent wide initiative to control occupational exposure in music and entertainment venues. As well as that his initial project in Canterbury researched the attitude of people regularly attending loud venues and he contacted local hospitals and medical professionals concerned with hearing to ask whether they were seeing people with hearing problems linked to exposure to music. His methods have been taken up by a lot of other local authorities.
Andrew McKenna
Principal Environmental Health Officer
Redcar and Cleveland Council
01287 612414
andrew_mckenna@redcar-cleveland.gov.uk
Jonathon Dicken
Environmental Health Unit
Stockton Borough Council
16 Church Road
Stockton on Tees TS18 1XD
Jonathon.Dicken@stockton.gov.uk
Jonathon and Andrew led a project across the Tees Valley local authorities to raise awareness of the risks to hearing in music and entertainment venues. They also tackled the problem of getting workers at risk to use hearing protection. They did a trial of 5 different types of earplug in venues with help from HSL. HSL produced the report for them. Andrew is the person who has the authority to release this report outside central or local government. If you can’t get hold of that they also produced some leaflets and information for venues following the work. This has a lot of useful information in it and has been distributed freely by them.
Mr Leigh Chant | Senior Environmental Health Officer| Breckland Council
Elizabeth House, Walpole Loke, Dereham, Norfolk, NR19 1EE
Office: 01362 656870 | Direct Dial: 01362 656814 | Fax: 01362 656835
leigh.chant@breckland.gov.uk
Sue Thomas
Public Protection (Health and Safety)
Norwich City Council
St Peters Street
Norwich
NR2 1NH
t: 01603 212294 f: 01603 213000 m: 07818038243
SueThomas@norwich.gov.uk
Leigh led a campaign to raise awareness of the risks to workers in venues across Norfolk. He and Sue Thomas (Norwich City Council) have done a lot of work with venues and are both very keen.. Sue is keeping on with a real up hill struggle getting either hearing protection or noise controls into venues. She could give you some wonderful tales of what its like working with venues.
Gillian Clarke
Environmental Health
Milton Keynes Council
Civic offices
1 Saxon Gate East
Central Milton-Keynes
MK9 3HH
Gillian has often been monitoring noise exposure at the Bowl at Milton Keynes. I’ve included her because she is perhaps not so far from you. She too has often visited us here. If you wanted access to some venues not so far from home then she might be able to help.
Alan Bradshaw
Senior Practitioner (Noise)
Westminster City Council
Env. Sciences.
Environmental Health Consultation Team
4th Floor (West)
City Hall
64 Victoria Street
London SW1E 6QP
Tel: 020 7641 3119
Fax:020 7641 3436
E.mail: abradshaw@westminster.gov.uk
Alan Bradshaw is both an Environmental Health Officer and a lecturer in acoustics. He does a lot of speaking and lecturing on the issue of noise in music and entertainment for EHOs and is really up on what is happening. Plus he is a real gem of a person.
David Horrocks
Chartered Environmental Health Consultant
17 Starlight Way
St Albans
Herts AL4 0JH
David Horrocks is a commercial consultant. I’ve delivered CIEH training courses with him. He provides advice on noise control to music and entertainment premises and has done lots of work with holiday camps (Butlins, Pontins etc). He really is up on what sort of sound system gadgets are being produced and used in venues.
David A. Leonard
Global Hearing Sales / Marketing Consultant
Sperian Hearing Protection, Now Part of HONEYWELL,
Mobile 0044 (0) 7785 228487
E-Mail dleonard@sperian.com
David Leonard is based in Macclesfield, and works for Sperian Hearing Protection. He is a wonderful bouncy grandfather with far too much energy for his age. Sperian own the Howard Leight, and Bilsom hearing protector brands. They are also into producing gadgets linked to hearing protection. Examples are Quiet dose (a device to measure noise exposure behind hearing protection, VeriPro (a device to measure hearing protector attenuation on an individual). They produce some unobtrusive probed earplugs for use with their Quiet Dose that would take a small earphone input – so are a source should you want to use your device with a wider range of probed earplugs. They also have a commercial eye for good ideas. Its best contacting him by e-mail as he travels around the world. He usually responds very quickly.
Mohammed Saleem | Advanced European Technical Specialist
3M Occupational Health & Environmental Safety Group
3M Centre, Cain Road, Bracknell Berkshire, | United Kingdom
Office: 01344 857755 | Mobile: 07768 560506 | Fax: 01344 858422 | Triminet: 8 230 3755
msaleem1@mmm.com | www.3M.com
Mohammed is an international hearing protection expert working for 3M who own the EAR and Peltor brands. Like Sperian, 3M are into gadgets to do with hearing protection. Mohammed is a very intelligent, gentle, and genuine person. He might be able to take on your idea as a commercial project.
ADVICE FROM LIZ
Thoughts on Rachel Dunscombe’s Soundtrip – Liz Brueck Health and Safety Laboratory
Hearing protection usually provides higher attenuation at high frequencies than at low frequencies. If you want to supplement the sound attenuated by your earplug with your soundtrip effects you are best producing these effects at the higher frequencies. Low frequencies may be hardly attenuated at all by low attenuation earplugs. So if you put effects in at these low frequencies you could end up increasing rather than decreasing noise exposures. Again if you want to enhance speech reproducing the high frequencies will take off the muffling that removes the consonants from speech.
CE marking of the hearing protection
If you want to provide your device as hearing protection for people at work it will need to be CE marked. This is a requirement of the Control of Noise at Work Regulations. There are two relevant standards that you would need to comply with to obtain the CE mark, and you would need the product to be tested to confirm conformity. The standards are BS EN 352-2:2002 (containing the general requirements for earplugs) and BS EN 352-7:2002 (containing the requirements for sound restoration characteristics). This last standard would cover the speech enhancement but you may not be able to keep the trippy effects in something used for work. Salford University and Southampton University have facilities for the testing of hearing protection. This is an expensive process. You would need advice on the development of your soundtrip in order to ensure compliance.
One way of perhaps avoiding the need for CE mark testing is to make your app compatible with an earpiece that is already CE marked, and has built in limiting of the electrical signal providing the earpiece sound.
CE marking, as above, is not required if the soundtrip is to be used solely to enhance the sound experience of the general public. However, I don’t know if other CE mark requirements outside of my field may apply.
Sources of probed earplugs
3M produce a range of probed earplugs. I gave you some examples. These are produced for use with their E-A-Rfit system that uses microphones to measure the sound level inside and outside the ear when earplugs are worn. These may be useful for trialling bits and pieces, but the earplugs (except for the Christmas tree shaped one) are single use only and would not stand up to a lot of refitting. Sperian have some more rugged and less obtrusive ones that they make for use with their Quiet Dose.
There are also in-ear monitors used on stage, or you could try people like www.sensorcom.com who do earphones with passive attenuation as well. Other companies producing communication earpieces will have ones that provide attenuation of the background sound too. This is where you might find some with CE marking already.
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