Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year.<p>It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the building running through them with a loud dull noise making going back out to the playground-ridden small library with build int coffee-shop feel like putting on active noise supressing headphones. And the playground + café + it being placed in a mall (as opposed to across the street in the municipality building like it used to be) made reading or browsing a hard task.<p>My fiance who has ASD really has no public space available at all in this city anymore and we are moving to another city where we know of accessible quieter places, including parks and libraries without built-in noise generators.<p>./rant<p>Carpeting here is extremely rare. Scandinavian minimalism everywhere. The article helps me understand why the local chinese restaurang, with carpeting, tablecloth and padded chairs, is so nice to stay at.
There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books.<p>One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter.<p>They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing their food or drink.<p>(Around the same time they also instigated a 30 minute time limit on Wifi if you bought something. Even though I was willing to keep buying, I couldn't get through a new tea every 30 minutes!)<p>Theory being it's more profitable to make your customers leave and make room for others, than to make a place people want to go to.<p>I haven't been back. Even with noise-cancelling headphones(∗), and earbuds under the headphones, it was too loud for me. And the wifi policy was really annoying.<p>Sadly, I've noticed ultra loud music seems to be the policy at a lot of places these days. I find Starbucks and Costa ok - but some of my friends won't go with me because they find the music there too loud as well.<p>(∗) I wear noise-cancellers at most places now. It probably makes me look unsocial or "hipster", but it's to protect my ears from the loud music just about everywhere insists on playing, and helps me concentrate when I'm working in a café. I enjoy talking with people if they want to.
I work remotely and find myself working from a lot of Starbucks. The music level seems consistent no matter where you go to the point where it feels like a policy. It is just loud enough that you can't drown it out with a good set of headphones or take a conference call without annoying the rest of the group. It seems too consistent to be unintentional.<p>Conversely, there's a new coffee shop in Chicago that is designed from the ground up to facilitate work. It has tons of natural light, freely available whiteboards and almost no music call Limitless coffee. It is such a joy to not have to deal with the din that I go there even when I'm not working. You can almost hear yourself think.
This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)
It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this, but one of the reasons restaurants are so loud is that many modern restaurants pack people in like sardines to maximize revenue. Many places I have been to lately give you about a foot of space between you and the people next to you. Not only does this high density create a lot of noise, but a lot of noise actually becomes necessary to have any semblance of privacy. It's ruined a lot of dining for me. If I wanted to eat as fast as possible while not saying anything of substance to the people I'm with for fear of being overheard, I would get take out and bring it back to my workplace to consume.
I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
I hate loud restaurants, I hate loud cafes, I hate when I have to listen to dumb music all the f<i></i>ing time.<p>I am also very surprised that no one has figured out a way to offer a quieter version to customers like me. I'd pay more to have a quieter experience.
One thing that's becoming near-impossible is finding places to drink (as in pubs or bars) without piped music. This contributes significantly to noise. It's done of course so that we shout ourselves hoarse trying to have a conversation, so we buy more drinks to lubricate our throat, but even formerly quiet pubs near me have started doing it.
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the article is that loud restaurants can provide diners with a sense of privacy. In a sea of noise your conversation will easily be drowned out before reaching others. Additionally, more ambient noise means less chances of being irritated by other diners.
I once was at a huge car expo, and French and German halls were adjacent to each other. For some reason, all French car makers had extremely loud music at their spaces, like if they were trying to be louder than each other. It was basically impossible to be there.<p>The German hall (all three major makers) had complete silence inside. So this is also a cultural thing, and a pretty strong one as this happened in Moscow, and most of the workers were Russians of course.
I thought I recognised this title. Did some digging, Vox wrote an article [0] with the same title a while ago.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-levels-loud-decibels" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-lev...</a>
I read once, can't remember where, that once the sound in a room with people talking reaches a certain level, it will get increasingly loud. The reason being, if sound is below a certain level, we can hear each other while we speak at normal volumes and the other person near us will be able to understand us.<p>However, once volume reaches a certain background level, we have to raise our voices to be understood over the background noise which increases the overall background level which causes others to have to raise their voices over the new background level ever increasing.
Restaurants in Germany I've been to are usually pretty quiet. This excludes fast food places, bars (restaurants that serve cocktails are included in that), low-end non-German places (I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places) and all 3 American(-style) restaurants I've been to.<p>For normal restaurants, I can actually have a conversation. But when I go to some club or bar, I need to align my ears carefully and have the speaker talk directly to me, otherwise, I'd have no chance of understanding anything.
Yes! It seems like somehow many bar/restaurant owners have no interest in making their spaces sonically comfortable. I've been in some that felt like they were designed for maximum reverb. The few ones with acoustic panels on the walls / ceilings are so nice in comparison. I really hope caring about the way your place sounds becomes standard.
I strongly dislike restaurants for their extreme noise levels and rarely manage to sit in one for longer than an hour without getting agitated.<p>There are few restaurants I know that allow us to be seated in quiet areas and/or that are much more quiet due to their design, and those are the restaurants that I'll visit often.
The author, Kate Wagner, is also the author of the McMansion Hell blog: <a href="http://mcmansionhell.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mcmansionhell.com/</a> If you haven't read it before, spend a few minutes there. It's a treat.
Some of the best restaurants I've been to, sonically speaking, have been in old houses that were converted into dining establishments. Because there's a limit to how much they can knock out interior walls, there are only two or three tables to a room, and the loud kitchen is necessarily in a different room from the dining. This really keeps a lid on the noise and lets you have an intelligent conversation at your table.
I don’t enjoy going out to eat anymore and prefer to DoorDash food precisely because it’s too loud. The ironic thing is I have hearing damage so you’d think it would bother me less.<p>I can’t think, can’t hear my wife, and can’t relax and enjoy my meal.<p>I do not understand why every small restaurant has to have high ceilings with no plenum so the A/C sounds like a jet engine. Surely I’m not the only customer annoyed by this.
There's a really nice restaurant in our neighbourhood, with amazing food, and you need to reserve a couple days in advance. But whenever we go there, it's ridiculously noisy. They went for a bare stone industrial look, and that clearly doesn't dampen any sound, so you end up hearing everybody in the restaurant all at once.<p>But we are also to blame; when we bought our house, we removed some walls to let more light in, and everything is really tight and smooth, and therefore reflects all sound. We got bad acoustics in our home.<p>We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some sound absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior anywhere.<p>Please the eye and punish the ear, seems to be the interior design rule of today.
Reminds of another problem in restaurants, the annoying music they pipe in.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-music-playlists-ryuichi-sakamoto.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-music-p...</a>
> Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet.<p>Wrong. Restaurants are so loud because people are so loud.<p>My wife and I were at Freeman's in Downtown Manhattan the other day. It was so loud we decided to scream to see if anyone noticed. And since noone seemed to turn their heads, we screamed louder and louder, and literally no one could hear us.<p>This is an American thing, it doesn't happen in Paris, nor in London, nor in Japan, nor in Mexico.