White text Make listening safe on black background with WHF and WHO logos.
WHO
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Co-chairs: Lidia Best, Katya Freire

 

Goal

To realize the world where people of all ages can enjoy recreational music without risk to their hearing.

Objectives

1. To increase awareness on the importance of safe listening and change.

2. To promote adoption and implementation of the WHO/ITU global standard for safe listening devices.

3. To promote the importance of implementing safe listening regulations with governments and policy-makers.

4. To inform sound engineers, event organizers, musicians, music industry, recording companies and others about the about the WHO/ITU global standards and guidelines for safe listening.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) for 2024–2025

  1. Headphone manufacturers to adopt safe listening standard – at least 2 manufacturers to adopt the standard.
  2. Policy-makers to add make listening safe – at least 1 country adopting recommendations.
  3. Make Listening Safe to be part of educational curriculum. At least 1 school or country to implement it.
  4. Create the website for Make Listening Safe.
  5. Create 4 educational  videos in English by Andreas Thulin – 1 video by December 2024, 2 videos in June 2025 and 1 video by October 2025.
  6. Increase the social media numbers in 50%.
  7. Creation of a youth group to create videos for TikTok and X accounts.
  8. Increase in 30% the number of MLS members – by December 2025 = 180 members.
  9. Creation of a newsletter: 2 by 2024 and 4 by end of 2025.

Achievements

1. Numbers:

(a) Social media: the Safe Listening LinkedIn group has a membership of 2000 people; created Make Listening Safe.br.pt for Portuguese speakers – so far 734 followers; created Make Listening Safe.whf fro English speakers – so far 166 followers; Wikipedia – Safe Listening page has created 40 932 views so far in many languages (English 23 119; Russian 5958, Arabic 3395, Chinese 2685, Spanish 2225, Italian 1421; Portuguese 931; French 909; Swedish 150; Catalan 136; Dutch 3).

(b) Members of MLS – 139 (108 WHF members).

2. Apple, Huawei, Sony and Google implemented the WHO/ITU #safelistening standards and there is potential interest from multiple headphone manufacturers.

3. Safe listening workshops and sessions organized at: all major audiology and ENT conferences; conferences for sound engineers.