Psychoacoustic experiments on listeners require controlled sound levels to prevent hearing damage.

Evidence

In any such work that involves human subjects as listeners, an experimenter has a duty of care to ensure their health and safety. In particular, the overall sound level needs to be controlled and assured to avoid any risk of noise-induced hearing loss (see Section 2.5), especially when there are aspects of the sound being controlled by a potentially unknown data source in terms of what its range of variation might be for a given experiment. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2698

Categorization

• QUESTION: How do ethics boards and lab standards actually specify safe exposure limits for listening experiments, and do those limits track contemporary noise-dose science?