Listening to Mozart or Metallica cranked full-blast may be an addiction, a group of American researchers concludes. People dependent on a high-decibel "fix" may experience the same symptoms and side effects as alcohol, tobacco and drug addicts, says a study published last week in Ear and Hearing by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston. The group adapted a 32-question survey used to diagnose alcoholism and recruited 90 self-professed loud-music lovers, eight of whom showed signs of addiction. The addicts displayed symptoms such as craving, loss of control over their music-listening habits, detrimental side effects like hearing loss, an infringement on other activities and symptoms of withdrawal like mood swings, lethargy and depression. Mary Florentine, a professor of audiology research and one of the study's authors, says people with noise-induced hearing loss who insisted they couldn't stop cranking their stereos planted the seeds for the project. She adds that the subjects themselves suspected their music-listening habits might be out of control. "This doesn't apply to the normal condition of teenage music listening, where teenagers will listen to music for long periods of time. The problem is when it's too loud for too long and it's taking over their lives." The range of loud-music addicts crosses lines of gender, age and musical taste, and takes in people ages 15 to 58 who listened to music ranging from heavy metal to classical. "We had a 56-year-old man who listened to classical music and would blast classical music and his normally hearing daughter would tell him 'dad, turn it down'," Prof. Florentine says. "So it doesn't appear to make any difference what type of music, it's just that the person likes that type of music." This voracity for volume is surfacing as one of a number of new addictions linked to technological change, like addiction to gambling at video-lottery terminals and obsession with the Internet. Soren Buus, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who did the number-crunching, says despite the 10 per cent addiction rate in the study, loud-music addiction would be rare in society at large. "A good part of the population we recruited in a CD store, so I don't think we should expect to find anywhere near 10 per cent of the population as a whole would have this problem," he says. "But one or two per cent, maybe." The study says music can be loud without being annoying and the more a person enjoys a song, the louder they tend to play it -- to the point that well-liked music may be perceived as less loud than unliked music even when played at the same intensity. The researchers say this, coupled with the popularity of equipment like walkmans, is what prompts people to pump the volume in the first place. Music "has the capacity to induce rapid potent changes in mood and level of arousal, the ability to reduce negative states and the tendency to elicit the experience of craving," the study says. "These three elements seem to be present in all addictive substances around which patterns of addictive behaviour tends to develop." The study, which has been in the works for three years, will next have loud-music addicts clinically diagnosed by a psychologist. Will Hunter, is director of substance-abuse at Mayo Regional Hospital in Maine, and one of the researchers. He says he was surprised by the results because his background in addiction research made him a natural skeptic. "My criteria for looking at the results was very stringent," says Mr. Hunter. "I was especially careful to avoid a false positive above all else." But Mr. Hunter says while high-decibel dependence is possible, family members shouldn't jump to the conclusion that their loved one who loves music is an addict. "There really is no need to be worried," he says. "It needs to be clinically significant distress or impairment -- which means pretty serious." |