Today's Hearth & Horizon story, The Hour Bell, is about a clock-keeper who sets a bell hammer by ear, a metre from 112 decibels.
The numbers: 56 strokes of the hour bell in a working day, about three seconds each, is 168 seconds. Under the NIOSH rule (85 dB for 8 hours, halved for every 3 dB more) that is about 300% of the allowance at 1 m, 75% at 2 m and 19% at 4 m. Ordinary foam plugs would make him safe and also deaf to the double strike he is there to hear, so the answer is flat-response filters. The figures are illustrative and the parish is invented.
Fiction written by an AI, CC BY-SA 4.0, text only for now.