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Try finding silence in this age of iPods, Digital Surround Sound, satellite car radios, cell phones, pagers, home theaters and minivans that come equipped with DVD players.

Noise pollution joins with air, water and light pollution assaulting modern life.

And there’s no remote control you can use to mute the cacophony.

The Who frontman Pete Townshend worries about this onslaught. He’s concerned about our hearing, specifically that iPod users may someday end up like him, hearing impaired, ears ringing.

The guitarist who fled his raucous life as a rock star for the “quieter world of book publishing” wants us to turn down the volume.

On his Web site last month, Townshend wrote that years of using studio headphones damaged his hearing. He now must take 36-hour breaks between recording sessions.

“Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired. If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you MAY be OK,” he wrote. “But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead.”

Experts say he could be right. The new warnings about iPods are similar to those issued in the 1980s for previous incarnations of personal, portable stereo systems, CD players and Walkmans, which used traditional ear-muff-style headphones.

Northwestern University audiologist Dean Garstecki says MP3 players such as iPods might put their listeners at risk for hearing damage, which is related to volume as well as duration of exposure. Many of the new devices use small “earbuds” that are placed directly into the ear to boost the volume.

People are also listening longer to the latest gadgets, according to Robert Novak, director of clinical education in audiology at Purdue University.

“People, especially young adults on a college campus, have something in their ears almost all the time,” Novak said. “Their ears have very little quiet time to recover from noise exposure.” This results in people with “older ears on younger bodies.”

Novak has documented among students a growing incidence of noise-induced hearing loss, the inability to hear higher frequencies. People with this hearing loss may have mild ear-ringing or have trouble following conversations in noisy situations.

VCU psychology student Joanna Wolfe keeps the volume on her iPod set at the halfway or three-quarter mark as she plays it most of the day. The earbuds are in her ears a couple of hours a day as she studies or walks around campus, she estimates.

“I have a hookup in my car and at work,” which is in VCU’s mechanical engineering department, she said.

Wolfe said earphones have been used for decades. She doesn’t worry about the warnings about earbuds and iPods.

“I heard that, but I heard that when CDs got popular. [Hearing experts] always seem to say stuff like that. I figure as long as I’m responsible and don’t try to blare every single song so that people 5 feet away can hear it, I think it will be fine.”

Noise puts you on edge, makes you nervous. It’s difficult to work or concentrate on reading or learning in a noisy environment. Other nonauditory effects include elevated blood pressure, sleep loss, increased heart rate, cardiovascular constriction, labored breathing and changes in brain chemistry, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The World Health Organization says noise can lead to increased absenteeism, drug use and accidents. Environmental noise can also accelerate and intensify the development of mental disorders.

About 10 million of the 28 million people with hearing loss in the United States can at least partially attribute it to damage from exposure to loud sounds, according to the National Institutes of Health. Four million people in the United States use hearing aids.

Dr. Aristides Sismanis, chief of Virginia Commonwealth University’s otolaryngology department, is discomfited by the growing din of beeping, buzzing, talking and BlackBerry clicking.

“You go to an airport, or you go to the mall and you hear other people talking on their cell phones . . . it’s just disturbing.”

Sismanis echoes Townshend’s personal warning about tinnitus, the ringing in the ears that results when noise destroys part of the inner ear and damages the hair cells that transmit sound waves to the brain. This kind of damage can result from a brief, intense noise such as a firecracker or gunfire, or from continuous loud noises. Repeated exposure weakens the hair cells’ ability to recover.

While hearing loss is one of the most common conditions affecting older adults, tinnitus isn’t just for the aging anymore, said Sismanis, whose clinic treats more and more younger patients with noise-induced hearing loss.

That will only continue, as baby boomers and younger generations discover they can’t hear as well as they once did. It can take years to notice accumulated damage to your hearing.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health defines hazardous noise as sound exposure exceeding 85 decibels over a typical eight-hour workday.

A normal conversation is about 60 decibels. A ringing phone is about 80 decibels. Chainsaws, hammer drills and bulldozers measure more than 100 decibels. Rock concerts regularly exceed 120 decibels.

About 30 million U.S. workers are exposed to hazardous sound levels on the job, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Industries with a high number of workers exposed to loud sounds include construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, utilities, transportation and the military.

A busier airport, ongoing construction and highway traffic help keep Richmond noisy. In 2002, Richmond, headquarters for Circuit City and host to NASCAR races, garnered a “Noisy Dozen” award from Noise Free America for tolerating and encouraging extreme levels of noise.

The city, where construction imposes on the personal audio space of downtown workers and car stereo systems assault the eardrums of passers-by, still deserves the award, says Chamberlayne Heights resident Mark Huber of the anti-noise coalition NoiseOFF. Such noises take away from sounds we should hear, he said, like the flow of the James River or a street-corner conversation.

“The noise now is overwhelming to me and it never ends. I keep my windows closed and still hear and feel the noise in my own home.”

Huber laments the additional noise that we willingly subject ourselves to.

“Americans,” he complained, “think loud is good.”