Hector Martin

So you should be more worried about hearing damage from popping party balloons than from being outside the water next to a sperm whale. Also, howler monkeys blast out ~140 dB in air, *continuously*, which is a hell of a lot more impressive (especially per size), and dangerous.

Remember kids, it is not okay to read a research paper and go "number big, bigger number impressive, must write article" if you don't actually understand the subject matter.

Any recommendations for reading about how volume works?

From a scientific perspective, or from an audio engineering perspective? For the former I would say just Google it, but for the latter I might have some specific things to recommend if you want to go into details about mixing and such.

I usually find out does help to have a cursory overview of the scientific basis to really understand the audio engineering aspects. Most resources seem lacking there to me and usually just go straight into abstract. But nevertheless, hit me with that audio engineering theory!

After the the main thing to know is that there are tons of different dB scales (like that underwater one, or dBFS which is what you'll find in digital audio), with different reference points (the meaning of 0 dB), but they are all proportional to *power*, so +10 dB = 10x power.

For some things, like signal level, voltage, and pressure, the power goes up with the *square* of the quantity. Therefore 10x signal/voltage/pressure = 100x power = +20 dB. So you can convert from one dB unit to another by *adding or subtracting* some conversion constant.