The volume of notes turns up in response to those whose forte--rock or Bach--is loud music

This will not be the last word in the controversy over loud music, but I hope it will give a final balance to my inquiry into that phenomenon.

Many readers have complained that the young people whose letters I recently quoted seemed to care only about their own gratification, with no consideration for others.

(I said I didn’t care about the loudness of rock as long as I didn’t have to hear it; but I did care about the overamplification of other music.)

“The essence of the matter,” writes William F. Miller of Newport Beach, “is not simply the desire of the rock freaks to benumb themselves. If it were, they would merely use headphones. What they want is to disturb other people, a point none of them mentioned in the responses you cited.”

“Your teen-age detractors seem to have missed the point,” writes Frank LaRoche of El Segundo. “No one would deny them the right to destroy their hearing by listening to mindless pap at painful decibel levels. The issue is simply one of respect; decent human beings don’t subject others to unwanted noise.”

“The only real point at issue,” writes Norman Hudis of Woodland Hills, “has been studiously missed in the correspondence. It is consideration for others. The type of music doesn’t matter.”

“I was struck by the fact,” writes John Degatina of Studio City, “that the people who wrote you of their preference for loud music seem to be totally indifferent to whether or not their loud music disturbs others by infringing unfairly on their sound space. I can enjoy Mahler and Weill without bothering neighbors. I don’t see why they can’t have their music without bothering me. To each his own. . . .”

Nancy Kiang of Irvine observes, on the contrary, that classical music does not consist entirely of “Corelli concerti, Mozart trios and Debussy reveries.”

She points out that Beethoven and Bruckner symphonies and Wagner operas “quite frankly outdo rock music in volume. . . . If one lives in a dormitory where one is exposed in a compact space to a variety of musical tastes, then one realizes that classical noise can be just as offensive as rock ‘n’ roll.”

She argues that classical music is more distracting because of its changes in mood and loudness, while rock music “is much easier to ignore as a general background din.”

She may have a point. Classical music in concert is never as loud as rock in concert; but classical music played on a stereo can be amplified as high as rock.

I’m afraid I was guilty, when young, of inflicting my taste for loud classical music on my neighbor. In Honolulu we lived in a small house half a block from Gray’s beach, near the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Because of the bland climate, our house had screens without windows. In the daytime I played classical records on our Magnavox. I had a taste for the robust music of Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov and the like, and I liked to play it loud, much to the distress of an elderly woman who lived next door. I thought that classical music in the daytime wouldn’t hurt anybody. It was the arrogance of youth.

Ms. Kiang makes a curious complaint against classical music lovers. She observes that when she picks up a few measures of rock ‘n’ roll from someone else’s car radio at a stop light, she can enjoy it.

“But it’s quite rude for a driver to blare a few classical notes to other people in the street and then drive off without letting that phrase resolve, since a classical piece is so well-knit and dependent on the whole for proper balance, it is quite annoying and leaves one hanging.”

Take that, you classical music lovers.

A point that goes beyond courtesy is the very real possibility that amplification can damage hearing. This is not a mere bugaboo.

Beverly Biber of the Hear Center in Pasadena concedes that “every individual has the right to listen to what he desires at the level of loudness he desires.”

She warns, however, that those who wrote me in defense of loudness should know that, according to a recent study by the Deafness Research Council in New York, “the number of hearing-impaired Americans has increased by a staggering 90% in a 12-year period.”

She explains that “increasing numbers of young people experience hearing difficulties due to exposure to loud, amplified sound.”

She adds: “Noise-induced hearing loss may be gradual or sudden, depending on exposure to a complex combination of frequency (tone), intensity (decibels), and/or duration of the noise. Varying degrees of loss may be permanent and irreparable.”

Henry Kehler of Long Beach, a schoolteacher, offers dramatic proof of this hearing loss. Though his hearing is only average, he says, he often astounds his students by repeating dialogues he has overheard between two or more of them at the rear of the room, when they think they are speaking softly.

“This has come up so very often that I am sure that loud rock through powerful speakers or earphones (sic) has damaged the hearing of the present younger generation. Now my hearing is far better than any of my students. This has been true for about the last eight years. . . .”

You may have noticed a story in the paper the other day about a lawsuit filed against rock star David Lee Roth and the Forum, the plaintiff being a young woman who alleges that she suffered ear damage at a Roth concert in the Inglewood arena.

It was inevitable.