The history of hearing protection for musicians (part 2 of 3): the Dutch and university roots

The first part of this series was about the international pioneers: Andy Shiach, Robert Beiny, Michael Santucci, Lisa Tannenbaum, Mead Killion and Marshall Chasin in England, America and Canada, and Eckhard Beste in Germany. But a lot happened in the Netherlands too, and that history does not start at a festival site. It starts at TU Delft, where work on custom-made hearing protection was already under way in the eighties. That research also gave rise to other Dutch custom earpiece companies at the time, including Tympanitec, which after a bankruptcy in 2003 continued as Tympro. Early proof that science and hearing protection found each other quickly in the Netherlands.

That same year, 2003, was also when I took my own first steps in this world. I was working at Ampco Flashlight at the time. That year the European member states, with Dutch minister De Geus and his European colleagues, decided that the entertainment industry also had to meet occupational health and safety rules, and hearing was part of that. It prompted me to create the Earproof brand as a vehicle for communicating as a brand, with the aim of building awareness from the bottom up among an independent, headstrong group like musicians and technicians. Those early days, when so much was still largely unknown territory, are the foundation of where Earproof stands today.

So there is a line running from the international pioneers in part one, through the early Dutch custom earpiece development around TU Delft, to my own start with Earproof in 2003. Two worlds, audiology practice in England and America and the technical and scientific work in Delft, that in the end served the same goal: protecting musicians and music lovers without making them give up the music itself. In the last part of this series we show how that university line continues to this day, including at Earproof itself.

Peter