Meyer Sound champions hearing health on World Hearing Day

On World Hearing Day today, Meyer Sound highlighted its role in global initiatives aimed at improving hearing health, promoting education and encouraging safer listening in live sound environments.

Hearing health has been a longstanding concern in the live sound world, touching everyone from engineers and performers to venue staff and audiences. Traditionally, much of the responsibility rested on individuals, but the focus is shifting toward shared standards and system-level accountability.

A key element in this shift is the World Health Organization’s Make Listening Safe initiative, which examines live venues and events. The framework looks at everything from sound systems design and venue acoustics to monitoring practices and professional education, aiming to take a more holistic approach to managing listening exposure.

For Meyer Sound president and CEO John Meyer, there’s a direct link between hearing health and sound quality. “Sound is only successful if people can listen to it comfortably and clearly over time,” he said. “Hearing health is a responsibility that should be built into how sound is designed and experienced.”

Meyer Sound senior acoustic engineer Jessica Borowski is involved in the WHO Make Listening Safe initiative, contributing practitioner insight as framework for live venues and events is refined. For Borowski, the standard marks a shift from isolated personal choices to shared responsibility. “For many years, hearing health in live sound relied almost entirely on individual behaviour, while the WHO framework acknowledges that safe listening is influenced by the entire environment – how systems are designed, how sound is distributed in a space and how informed the people working in those environments are,” she explained.

Education is becoming a key bridge between standards and practical action. The Healthy Ears, Limited Annoyance (HELA) certification and training programme at the University of Derby translates research into guidance for engineers and venue operators. Meyer Sound helped found HELA and has certified staff in both the US and Europe. The company also continues its support of the Center for Early Intervention on Deafness (CEID) in Berkeley, California.

“Once these conversations start happening across different forums – standards bodies, training programmes, industry events – hearing health stops feeling like an exception,” Borowski concluded. “That normalisation is what makes real change possible.”