If they're yours, you don't notice it. He claims that even wearing earplugs at the event, he got a sharp pain in his skull behind his left ear. Jeffery says the internal noise hasn't stopped since. Meanwhile, the sounds outside his head, like conversations and music, are muffled. There's silence where there ought to be sound, and sound where there ought to be silence.
Toxic noise can deal a blow to the snail-shaped inner ear called the cochlea in two ways.
Acoustic trauma can result from a single strike typical of a firecracker exploding at close range or the high-powered discharge of a rifle, stretching the tissue until it splits. Far more common is noise-induced hearing loss, a cumulative process that occurs as excessive sound blasts away the ears' 20,000 to 30,000 sensory receptors known as hair cells. The way hearing works is that tufts of microscopic cilia on the hair cells' surface pick up mechanical vibrations relayed by the bones in the middle ear, instantaneously converting them to electrical signals for delivery by the nerve fibers to the brain. Over time, however, hair cells lose their resilience, and the damage can become permanent. Walking back and forth will flatten the fibers, but they will stand up again after being vacuumed.