Do you think you talk loud? Well, let’s see.
Average human speech sits at 60 decibels, but this is easily beaten by my blender at 85 decibels. However, my blender is easily outdone by a loud city street reaching up to 90 decibels.

Boring Math Stuff: For reference, decibels’ volumes aren’t scalar: they’re logarithmic. Thus, 60 decibels would be 10 times as intense as 50 decibels, and 70 decibels would be 10 times as intense as 60 decibels, and so on. However there is a difference between sound intensity and sound volume: Sound intensity is the energy required to produce a sound, and sound volume is what we perceive it as. We typically perceive a 10 dB increase in intensity as about twice the volume.

So, what’s twice as loud as the 90 dB city street? Why, Airpods of course! At max volume, they reach volumes of 100 dB. Do you know what else reaches 100 dB? The surface of the sun. This is why many people, including me, highly recommend you do not listen to air pods or headphones at maximum volume. Prolonged exposure to sounds above just 70 decibels can damage your hearing permanently.

Anyways music keeps on damaging hearing with a Purple Sound concert reaching 117 decibels. But what beats Purple Sound? Sound from something purple, AKA a vuvuzela – the most annoying “instrument”. A vuvuzela right in your ear would be about 120 db, enough to immediately cause pain and injury to one’s ears. However, a wise man once said, “Everything must go to space,” and so does this article with a jet take-off reaching 130 db. Nah, forget space, let’s just try the sky with fireworks at close range reaching 140 db.

You know what beats explosives: animals. The greater bulldog bat can easily beat 140 dB with their echolocation screeches, hanging around 150 dB. However, they are so high-pitched that humans are unable to hear them. But you know what beats animals? Guns. The American Speech Language Hearing Association in its article for Recreational Firearm Noise Exposure says that “Firearms are loud.” Pistols produce a sound of around 175 dB: if the bullet doesn’t kill you, the volume sure will. But this raises the question America has been trying to answer for years: what beats guns? Well, to enter this realm of volume, you have to realize that volume above 194 dB creates shock waves, where rather than the sound moving through the air, it pushes the air creating moving walls of air. These air columns move beyond the realm of just hearing the sound in your ears and instead feeling it physically. One animal uses this extreme sound intensity to its advantage: the Tiger Pistol Shrimp reaches insane levels of 200 dB with its unique ability to shoot jets of water with its claws, creating imploding air bubbles that kill other sea creatures instantly. Unsurprisingly, a nuclear blast recorded 250 feet away reached 210 dB, enough to kill a person. But in the end, mother nature always wins. The loudest replicable sound is the Sperm Whale’s click, clocking in at 230 dB. However, this is usually not dangerous because, just like the bat, it’s out of the frequency range of human hearing.

So we’re done, right? The Sperm Whale wins, right? No. The loudest sound ever recorded is the eruption of Mount Krakatoa in the Indonesian province of Lampung. This volcano’s eruption reached 310 decibels. That’s 250 decibels louder than average human speech. That is 33,554,432 times louder than average human speech and required 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1024) times as much energy to produce compared to human speech. The sound of the eruption circled the earth four times.

So no, you don’t talk loud – Krakatoa has you beat.