Hearing- damaging sound varies air pressure by only 0.001 percent

Evidence

The energy needed to make audible sound is very small. You can shout for a year, and the energy produced that winds up as sound would not be enough to boil a cup of water. A full orchestra playing loudly produces only about enough sound energy to power a weak lightbulb. An orchestral crescendo might bathe a listener in sound pressure fluctuations of about 1 pascal (1 Pa). Sea-level air pressure is 100,000 Pa, so the crescendo loud enough to damage your hearing, if it lingered too long, is varying the pressure by just 0.001%. Clearly, a very delicate detection system is at work. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 54

Categorization

• CANDY: A year of shouting won’t boil a cup of water, yet that same mechanism can damage hearing - striking contrast.
• DEEPTHINKING: The total energy of sound is trivially small, yet it can both delight us orchestrally and physically damage our ears - a compression of huge dynamic range into a thousandth of a percent of pressure variation.