How to give your smallest muscle a workout.

Can you name the smallest muscle in your body?  It's the stapedius, and it's actually in your head.  Thus you can go around knowing you are a musclehead, regardless of your level of fitness.  You are also a fathead and a bonehead at the same time, but those are different stories.  The stapedius works together with the tensor tympani muscle to dampen sudden loud noises, dropping the intensity by 20Db! This protective mechanism is called the acoustic reflex.

On Thursday night, we gave those muscles a mighty workout by going to a concert at The Zoo (Fortitude Valley) with Mutemath.  The band is a new favourite of ours, and when they came to town, we saw them live in their first Australian concert of their Odd Soul tour.  They put on a fantastic show, and despite being severely jetlagged were enthusiastically thrashing and jumping all over the place.  The drummer actually taped his earphones to his head as he was so exuberant!
Rob had an app that measured sound amplitude on his phone, so we checked- the average was around 82Db. That is actually enough to cause gradual hearing loss after prolonged exposure- which probably explained why all the staff there were wearing earplugs!

We enjoyed the concert immensely.  My current favourite is "Blood Pressure" (yah, I know- no surprise there.)  It is a brilliant video:



And one of the more interesting videos around:


This segment makes the drums and bass players some of my musical heros: