Noise is all around us

I think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it&#x27;d cost you to get freedom from your neighbor&#x27;s lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person&#x27;s brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity.<p>I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we&#x27;ll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone&#x27;s day.

In suburban London and the surrounding countryside, so much of the noise is caused by a handful of motorbikes that have been made deliberately, I think usually illegally, noisy.<p>Stopping noisy vehicles would improve millions of people&#x27;s lives and moderately upset a few thousand bikers.<p>I have no idea why it isn&#x27;t a more popular cause.<p>One person doing laps of a built up area in their modified car is likely waking up tens of thousands of people. The police do nothing. If you had a party that caused equivalent nuisance it would be shut down instantly.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Future of Luxury (1998):<p>Attention. This, too, is a scarce commodity, with all the media competing bitterly for a piece. Watching the melee of money and politics, sports and art, technology, and advertising, leaves little attention leftover. Only the person who turns his back on these overbearing claims on his attention and turns off the roar of the channels can decide for himself what is worth his attention and what is not. In the barrage of arbitrary information our perceptive and cognitive capabilities decline, they grow when we limit our attention to those things and only those things that we ourselves want to see, hear, feel and know. In this we can see an occasion for luxury.<p>Quiet. This, too, is a basic requirement that has become harder and harder to satisfy. Anyone who wants to escape the everyday din must be very extravagant. In general, apartments cost more the quieter they are; restaurants that do not pour musical pollution into the ears of their guests demand higher prices of their discerning clientele. The raging traffic, the howling sirens, the clatter of helicopters, the neighbor&#x27;s droning stereo, the month-long roar of the street fair—the person who can elude all of that enjoys luxury.

I&#x27;m always surprised that we tolerate so much unnecessary noise. We let people fly helicopters around and run leaf blowers. We even allow trucks to go beep beep beep and alert everyone within a kilometer that they are backing up, even though we have rearview cameras, like it&#x27;s everyone else&#x27;s responsibility to scurry out of their way.

&gt; “Telling people to be quiet is not a good thing,” he says. “Part of the charge to us as human beings in the world is to listen to other people, right? Especially if they are suffering. Especially if they are crying out to us for help. If our expectations are ‘I should not have to hear anything,’ and I can convince myself that the right way to live in the world is to live in this acoustically tailored environment, then I don’t have to hear all that stuff. . . .<p>I think the writer here is confused, they very likely mean &#x27;listen&#x27; in the metaphorical sense not the literal sense, since it&#x27;s obvious there are real world scenarios where it&#x27;s physically damaging to actually listen.<p>But if they mean &#x27;listen&#x27; in the metaphorical sense, as in perceiving another&#x27;s mental thoughts through any medium, then the noise levels of everyday environments has little to nothing to do with it.

Big fan of quiet. My home environment sits at about 30dB as measured by NIOSH’s sound level monitoring app, 32 during fridge cycle, 35dB when I have air conditioning running. In previous places I wasn’t able to control external noise as much and I had to use earplugs to focus; I tried half a dozen and found Etymotic’s earplugs to be by far the best (they claim to designed to reduce sound by approximately 20dB at all frequencies, which really feels miraculous compared to most ear plugs - they were at their best on long flights, where I could hear flight attendants and announcements just as easily with them in or out; if you are like me and more sensitive to noise than most people, these feel like a way to increase your threshold by 20dB, I can’t speak highly enough of them).<p>Two things in the article do jump out at me, though. One is that it talks about active noise cancellation - people do find this helpful, but there’s also a smaller community who find it causes problems for them, including worsening tinnitus. All else equal I would say it’s probably safer to <i>reduce</i> incoming sound as much as possible before using noise <i>cancellation</i> -it fundamentally involves “detecting noise and making more noise in a specific way such that the noises cancels out”. The theory is very sound (heh), I’m not suggesting it doesn’t cancel out, but there may be some very weird edge cases or subtle effects we don’t understand there.<p>The other thing is more of a nitpick, it mentions truck horns can be as loud as 150dB. That’s “standing 25 meters away from a jet engine at takeoff” level, like we’re talking “immediate rupture of eardrums” intensity here. I don’t doubt that you can buy truck horns that have “150dB” printed on their box, but I really doubt they’re actually that loud. And yes, looking at someone who’s done the research, only the very loudest of full size train horns that fill up a tank of compressed air get to just barely below 150dB - at 3ft away. At 100ft they all drop below 120dB. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.djdlabs.com&#x2F;horns&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.djdlabs.com&#x2F;horns&#x2F;</a>

Of course this is completely anecdotal, but I was walking around a zoo in a city I&#x27;m visiting today and couldn&#x27;t help but notice how much noisier the zoo was, both in terms of how much traffic and city noise breaches the walls, and how much noise the visitors make (yelling after each other across the zoo, talking loudly, just generally not attempting to keep their own noise down) when compared to visiting zoos in my home country.<p>I also observed that the animals seemed to be a lot more likely to shy away, and (in my completely not zoological&#x2F;biological opinion) perhaps even slightly more on edge or distressed in some cases. This also meant whenever an animal <i>was</i> doing something interesting, the visitors would all be interested in that one exhibit, which caused further noise and commotion.<p>I couldn&#x27;t help but think how much nicer the zoo could&#x27;ve been for both guests and the residents if more of a focus was placed on reducing the noise levels.<p>It was also quite a culture shock to me that smoking was allowed throughout the zoo as it seems to me that a ban would be easily justified on the grounds of animal comfort&#x2F;welfare (not to forget all the children walking around, too).

It pisses me off that NYC still allows through-wall PTAC units to be installed in new buildings.<p>PTACs are the combined heat&#x2F;AC units you will find in cheaper hotels&#x2F;motels. They are installed through giant 4ft x 2ft holes that are left in the exterior wall during construction.<p>Not only are they terrible for energy efficiency because they are impossible to seal correctly + result in a direct thermal coupling with the outdoors due to their sheet metal construction, they are also the #1 vector of outside noise getting into the apartment. You can hear whenever a truck drives by, even when your window is closed.<p>Also worth mentioning they universally use the cheapest compressors available with awful damping so they’re 70db or more when they’re running.<p>All in the name of saving a buck. People pay $5000 a month to be subjected to these things.

The duality of man:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-end-of-silence&#x2F;598366&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-end...</a> - &quot;Why Everything Is Getting Louder The tech industry is producing a rising din. Our bodies can&#x27;t adapt.&quot; (2019)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;let-brooklyn-be-loud&#x2F;670600&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;let-bro...</a> - &quot;Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? The sound of gentrification is silence.&quot; (2022)

I&#x27;ll probably never have proper quiet again, as since 2019 I&#x27;ve got permanent Tinnitus in one ear. I can ignore it sometimes, and I can sometimes cover it up a bit with ambient noise like waves or out in nature, but it&#x27;s always there.<p>Not sure what caused it. Predates Covid so it&#x27;s not that. Might have been working in an open office that always had 4-6 conversations going and I had play music on headphones loud enough to block it out, or my previous car that had a small hole in the muffler I never ended up getting fixed, it got kind of loud at times. Or possibly an antibiotic I took a long time ago I had a bad reaction to that&#x27;s also known to contribute to tinnitus, although that was quite a ways back that I took it now.<p>Regardless of the cause, I&#x27;m stuck with it now. No hearing loss either, at least not yet (I&#x27;ve been tested). Just that stupid ringing.

There is a yoga kriya I learnt called &quot;Dura Shravana&quot;(Far Hearing) which is meant to help one zone out of the surrounding sounds and maintain focus. What one does is to place attention on the farthest sound from one&#x27;s self then successively move to closer sounds in order culminating in the sound of one&#x27;s breathing. And then, mentally recall the sounds in order. (For example, ambient background subtle sounds, car on road, bird outside window, neighbours door, the fridge, the breath). With practice, surrounding sounds dont affect you. If someone is interested, I can send a link to a teaching video. It is meant to be practiced after doing the alternate nostril pranayama as it enhances the effects of the pranayama.

I don&#x27;t know if you city people realize it, but birdsong in cities is <i>freaking nuts.</i> I can barely hear myself think in many cities now, from all the birds. I live out in the country, and I don&#x27;t get anywhere near as much of a cacophany of birdsong as I hear in backyards in Philly and Baltimore inner-city neighborhoods. Take a hike some time and stand still and record the birdsong, and then go into a neighborhood with a few trees in a city and record, and compare.

My neighborhood has become too noisy because of cars with loud mufflers. They sound like Harley Davidson motorcycles. The motor cycles around here are loud too, I think they are modified also to be louder. I actually want to move to a quieter town. I think the cops and the local governments need to pay attention.

The developed nations have known exactly how to build structures that ACTUALLY reduce noise for 70+ years, but they didn’t care enough to mandate such construction techniques into the building codes at our own peril.

Sort of an odd pivot at the end of the essay…<p>COVID brought silence, people enjoyed it, noise can be damaging, so let’s all keep an open ear to the cries of those in need? It’s all true, but it came across a bit jumbled.<p>The level of ambient noise at my house was shocking. I knew the airplane noise was there - we’re only a few miles from Dulles. The road noise was what shocked me. When people got back to life again, it was almost painful. We’re not near an interstate or anything, just a busy 2-lane suburban road.

Good article but where is the mention of the car? I don&#x27;t mean cars with big engines and loud exhausts, just normal cars, doing normal things. Car noise from the tyres, wind and engines is deafening and always with us. You can barely talk to the person beside you on a moderately busy street and we just accept this. Imagine living on that street.

The Environmental Noise Directive (END) doesn&#x27;t stop countries permitting houses to be built along motorways, next to fire stations or near airports&#x2F;flight paths or trains. Once the houses are built people will live there.<p>What we need is some good tech to make our homes and gardens more peaceful and quiet.

I see how it’s easy to agree with this article since everyone has experienced being annoyed by excessive noise, but I do question whether or not the jury is really out on excessive noise causing heart disease, anxiety, etc. As the article also mentioned, silence is a luxury that costs a lot. Since the amount of disruptive noise one experiences on a daily basis is probably exactly correlated with one’s wealth, it seems like this take is very likely inventing a causal link from noise to health when its equally plausible that noise is just another thing that less wealthy people have to put up with (along with worse health).

Silence is a privilege. Several colleagues live in Los Angeles and New York City. It is always noisy outside there, day and night, not just our zoom calls. It makes me very thankful that I live in a quiet neighborhood.

I own a farm in the middle of no where. It’s amazing to be out there, you’ll hear just the breeze.<p>Three generations ago (and all prior generations of humans) had mostly silence. I regularly go and camp, work out there, etc. it’s shocking how different it is.<p>I question if we are really evolved to handle the world we built.

Pandemic was an interesting moment re: noise. For the first time I started to call the cops on sociopathic neighbors who thought it’s ok to put stereo system into the window and blast their radio (literal radio, with ads) so that it was heard 2 blocks away.<p>I was hesitant to do it; also doubted that cops would deal with this thing. Yet I was proven wrong. Never heard the stereo since.<p>Noise pollution on that level should be enforced with fines, no reason not to.<p>Same for cars with music blasting at window-rattling levels

I thought double-pane windows would block city sounds out when I bought my condo.<p>nope.<p>now I wear noise cancelling headphones when I&#x27;m home

I have a split view on this... on one hand, yes, quiet nights are nice to sleep, but on the other hand, busy city centers are meant to be busy... Some people buy an apartment above a restaurant&#x2F;bar from early 1800s here, and then complain about the noise. If you (have a choice and) live in a city center, then it&#x27;s usually because you like &quot;stuff&quot; to be around you, walking distance, stores, bars, restaurants, party places, outside performances, people, etc. Demanding that everything stops and gets quiet the second you come home from a loud party and want to sleep is selfish.<p>On the other hand, we have people moving next to old farms and then complain about cow smell, cow noises, cows in general, cows having sex, cows looking at their windows, etc.<p>Noise insulation, three-pane glass windows, etc., sure. Demanding quiet city centers, maybe not.

I never live without noise. Not thanks to what is around me but due to tinnitus.<p>It is just background noise for me. But have friends where they are more disturbed by it...

Whomever cracks the room- or dwelling-sized noise cancellation (think Bose headphones but a bubble for your house) would deserve the Nobel peace prize.

Always felt that with my ex around

We need a Look Around You for noise

I didn&#x27;t read the article. All I saw was a modal site ad asking &quot;Do you have a moment?&quot;<p>Turns out I didn&#x27;t.