The Super Bowl is America's most-watched broadcast and also, it seems, the nation's loudest single event-a distinction that means the cheers, jeers, parties, bars and big screens may be as rough on the eardrums as a defensive end is on a quarterback.
Researchers at the University of Michigan and Apple Inc. tackled the topic of Super Bowl noise by analyzing data from the Noise app on Apple Watches of more than 115,000 participants in the Apple Hearing Study. They found that on Super Bowl Sundays vs. the quieter, regular Sundays following the Super Bowls, noise exposure doubled.
In the study summary, researchers "encourage people to monitor their noise exposure (using the Noise app on Apple Watch or iPhone app, for instance) and to protect their hearing (by wearing earplugs, for instance) when they attend or watch noisy events to ensure that they can have fun safely."
The ongoing hearing study is believed to be the first to capture an increase in sound from a brief event being simultaneously experienced by people across the U.S.
"The Apple Hearing Study shows the tremendous power of crowdsourced data collection across the entire United States and lets us conduct analyses that were simply impossible before the advent of wearable technologies and smart devices," said noise exposure scientist Richard Neitzel, professor of environmental health sciences and global public health at U-M's School of Public Health, which leads the research into risks, causes and prevention of increasingly common hearing loss.
To get a grasp on the sounds generated by the Super Bowl, researchers compared data from Super Bowl Sundays in the years 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 to noise levels, measured in decibels, on Sundays following those Super Bowls.
They found that sound levels increased by as much as 3 decibels to 68-70 decibels, overall, on days of the big game.
For reference, 65 decibels is about as loud as a normal conversation, and 70 decibels is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner. An increase of 3 decibels represents a doubling of sound energy and an increase of 10 decibels represents a tenfold increase in sound energy-neither being a goal if preventing hearing loss is the game plan.
"Small changes in decibel levels represent a big change in how much noise our ears are exposed to, and those small changes are barely noticeable to us," Neitzel said. "It's important to remember that even small changes in decibel levels that are hardly noticeable can have a big effect on hearing."
When length of exposure time to that noise increases and is sustained, it can be more damaging. On Super Bowl days that was the case, the data showed: Exposure began three hours before the game and lasted until three hours after.
The Super Bowl is the latest focus of the Apple Hearing Study, a data-driven effort started in 2019 to understand how noise affects hearing and overall health and to recommend ways to prevent the health consequences of hearing loss.
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