enlarge Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photogarpher

USM professor Doug Owens explains the importance of the acoustics of a music room for protecting the hearing of the conductor as well as the musicians.

enlarge Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photogarpher

Doug Owens, a USM music education professor and trumpet player, performs with his active ear-protective device in place. In 1999, he learned he has noise-related hearing loss in both ears.

GORHAM — It was a harrowing moment for a man who picked up his first trumpet in fifth grade and spent 14 years directing high school bands.

Ten years ago, Doug Owens was standing before a 50-piece concert band in Glendale, Wis., conducting a typical midmorning rehearsal, when the hearing in his left ear went out.

"I thought it was odd," said Owens, 47, who is a music education professor at the University of Southern Maine. "It felt like something that might happen if I had a cold, but I wasn't sick, and it took two weeks for my hearing to return in that ear."

Owens was scared. Music was his passion and his livelihood. A physician confirmed that he had noise-induced hearing loss in both ears, brought on by years of playing in bands and conducting student music groups several hours each day in confined, sometimes poorly designed practice spaces. The doctor advised him to quit.

Instead, Owens set out to study his condition and share his knowledge with the next generation of school band directors and other musicians, hoping to spare them a similar fate. He writes and speaks regularly on the subject, urging teachers, students and others to protect a gift that many take for granted until it's damaged or lost altogether.

His research gained national attention in recent weeks, in noise-related articles in The Sacramento Bee and the Chicago Sun-Times that show a growing interest in preventing performing arts-related injuries. This fall, Owens and two other USM professors will start offering a course in the subject, joining a handful of other colleges in the country.

Owens' journey started soon after he learned that the ringing and hissing in his ears, also known as tinnitus, were signs of hearing loss. He went back to school in 2001 and earned a doctorate in music education and jazz at the University of Northern Colorado. For his dissertation, Owens asked 10 high school band directors to wear noise monitors throughout two days on the job.

Owens found they were exposed to mean average noise levels of 85 to 93 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner or a leaf blower. Noise exposures peaked at 101 to 115 decibels, similar to a jackhammer or a crowd at a basketball game.

Comparing eight-hour exposure rates, Owen found noise levels for all of the band directors were more than three times higher than recommended by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

Owens suggested that band directors take a variety of steps to limit their noise exposure by wearing noise-filtering earplugs, improving sound-absorbing acoustics in performance spaces and controlling how loudly student music groups play throughout the day.

"It doesn't have to be full blast all the time," said Owens, who plays lead trumpet in the Portland Jazz Orchestra.

His dissertation won the 2004 Alice G. Brandfonbrener Young Investigator Award from the Performing Arts Medicine Association. His work has been published in several professional journals, most recently in Medical Problems of Performing Artists in December 2008.

Owens, who came to USM in 2003, encourages young musicians and others – especially people who listen to loud music on ear buds – to view their hearing as a precious resource.

He describes the process of hearing loss as it was explained to him. Tiny hairs inside the ear get trampled by loud noise, much like grass when a person walks across a lawn. If it happens once in a while, the grass springs back. If it happens often, especially over a long period of time, the hair cells die, like grass on a well-worn path.

Owens acknowledges that using earplugs takes some getting used to, and worrying about hearing loss can make being a musician seem more like a job than a creative calling. He remembers fluffing off a doctor's advice to wear earplugs when he was in his 20s.

"Musicians don't always want to admit that hearing loss is a potential...