Why do my ears hurt when I play my piano through headphones?

[Splarg]

To be clear the organ thing was a pretty specific organ tone, just saying I've had all of these issues on speakers too.

Usually you think of an organ as being a static volume since key velocity doesn't change how loud it is and they don't decay (although more notes = more volume in certain cases). Electric organs often have a percussion feature that produces a sharp tone that decays quickly over top of the sustained tone. This will probably not be very loud on a generic perc organ sample, but I had made a patch where the percussion was like 75% of the sound and it was running through speaker emulation that's designed for high gain and distortion.

[Clovis]

The combinations of certain tones on organs do seem to exacerbate this in my experience. If I play a C and C# simultaneously, the interaction of the two notes can cause really loud noises that sorta convulse intermittently.

[Genkaz]

Perhaps a compressor could be useful afterall as mentioned earlier in the thread, or some other thing that prevents all of the sounds from going above a certain range without harshly cutting them off.

[lavacano]

What kind of pain is it? Is it more of a dull ache, a sharp stab...? Whereabouts in the ear?

As a kind of silly thing that could save you a couple hundred bucks on a doctor's visit later, have you tried this stuff?

https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-ear-wax-removal-drops/ID=prod6100588-product

I've got a real bad wax problem that sometimes leads to sharp stabbing. I blame too much loud music from headphones as a kid.

[Genkaz]

More similar to a dull ache in my case, and a more than likely illusory impression that my ears are sort of "sunk in" from it.