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Our lives are so noisy that the hearing of 10 million Americans has been damaged because of that noise; so full of constant sound that some of us suffer from sleep deprivation, anxiety, hypertension and cardiac problems as a result; so jammed with over-the-top input that pilots caught up in flight data and roster programs forget to land until they are 150 miles past the airport they were scheduled to fly to.
Noise of all types dominates our lives, both symbolizing and embodying a culture, an economy, a society so vast and complex that individuals have lost the ability to fight them, or even establish real control over those lives.
For many, myself included, the noise we make and glory in seems the most important indicator that something is seriously amiss with the culture we live in.
We may not be able to change society in the short term. There is something we can do, however, to live better. We can bring down the level of noise to the point where we can at least understand and think about what is happening to us in such a society, and what to do about it.
The first step is understanding. Here is how to go about it. Wherever you are, turn off your cellphone, iPod, TV, radio, computer (yes, even the one you read this essay on, though it might help to wait till you've stopped reading).
Stop whatever you are doing, and listen. Listen hard. Close your eyes if you want. Soak yourself in the sounds around you.
Now try to identify every sound you hear. We think of most sounds as being simple, obvious, but they are not. Cities have a hum-in my book, I call it the "monsterbreath"-that is made up of a great number of components including car tires, truck diesels, barking dogs, ventilation fans, and the marital spats of neighbors. Most of these sounds have several levels: a low frequency rumble (engine pistons, men arguing), mid-range hum (electric motors, fan blades), a higher keen (small dogs, weed-wackers, helicopter rotors).
Then there's the wind, which evokes different notes in trees and telephone wires. Even in your own familiar body, the stomach gurgles, heart beats, breath winds in and out. These sounds are so soft, relatively speaking, that they don't count as nuisance. Still, whatever the sound is, pinpoint it and try to find its source.
The mere act of paying attention to the quantity and quality of sound can immediately reduce noise-related stress, in part because it implies we are coming to grips with the problem, and hope to resolve it.
The next step it to try to bring the general level of volume down. For these purposes, two types of sound exist: sounds you can control directly, and those you can't. The first type is usually produced by stuff in your immediate environment. Your radio, for example, tuned to NPR, or to an "easy-listening" station? Turn it off. Switch off the sacred TV, which many households turn on when they wake, and extinguish only when they go to bed (and sometimes not even then).
Push that MP3 player's on/off button and hold it till it goes dead. Your cellphone-yes, I know this hurts, who knows what calls you might miss, what crucial text messages ("what r u doing 2nite?") will go unread for an hour. Still, turn it off-all the way, not just the volume. Kill the power.
For those of you who are already serious about understanding and controlling sound, you might want to buy a decibel-meter. Serviceable ones can be purchased for less than $100 on the internet. Learn what "decibel" means: 30 dB is the level of a whisper, 60 the volume of normal conversation, 90-plus the racket of a subway train. A jump from 40 to 50 decibels is not a 25 percent increase but (because decibels are measured exponentially) a 300 percent increase in the power of that sound.
The second type of sound or noise is the kind you cannot control directly. The fan system of the restaurant nextdoor, for example, can be amazingly loud, and can wreck the ability of your home to offer any sort of haven or peace. Communities often have regulations that mandate such systems stay below a set number of decibels. If not, offenders can be fined. The same applies to your neighbor's HVAC.
Traffic is probably the most common example of non-controllable noise: trucks, cars, even pedestrians on a busy street. Or, if you live near an airport, jet airplanes. With high-level noise sources from outside your property the options grow more expensive, even stark. You can install double-glazed windows. If you have a yard or garden you can plant fast-growing cedars or arbor vitae between your house and the noise source; evergreens can cut traffic noise by 25 percent.
You can petition the town to install sleeping policemen to slow the speed of traffic. If you live near an airport, and if this has not been done already, you can start a movement to have pilots change takeoff vectors, or adopt noise-restriction procedures.
Or, of course, you can move.
And don't forget the work environment. Fewer and fewer people work in factories where compressors, drop-forging machines, forklifts, bandsaws, Bessemer converters, and motors of all stripes create a work environment that is ultimately unhealthy, despite all the OSHA rules mandating ear protection. But even office environments, at 65 decibels plus, create long-term background noise that will tense up your mind and raise your blood pressure and lower the quality of your life overall.
A magazine office where I used to work, with the hum of computers, the rumble of heat or airco, the whine of printers, the ringers of phones, the chatter of colleagues, hit levels near deadline that have been proven in the long term to cause concrete bodily harm.
Options exist here as well. Ask to move to a part of the office more distant from airco outlets and so forth. Suggest that printers be moved to a dedicated utilities room. Buy a pair of noise-reducing headphones. Schedule vacations or weekends, not in a city or casino or racetrack, but in places where the levels of sound are low and agreeable.
All this sounds like a lot of work and expense and sometimes it is. But the main work you did at the outset by becoming conscious of your sound environment. The vast majority of people focus on sight as their primary sensory input, and consider sound to be pure background: inevitable, harmless, "life" at best, a tolerable nuisance at worst.
Not so. Just as much as sunlight, sound waves are the environment in which we swim, in which we exist. Light waves can warm us in the spring or kill us with sunstroke and melanoma. Sound waves can be just as pleasant, and as dangerous. But if we learn how to understand, control and use them, they can significantly improve our lives.
