Eavesdropping on Noise Pollution

In 1906, in New York City, Julia Barnett Rice, a musician, physician, and mother of six, founded The Society of Unnecessary Noise. Barnett’s war on tugboat whistles in the Hudson River soon became a crusade for quieter schools, hospitals, and streets. Thirty years later, the City Council passed its first noise code.

Source: Pixabay/Tommumf

These days, author Chris Berdik reminds us in his book Clamor, our indoor and outdoor environments are noisier than ever. He notes that cars rule the roads, airplanes and drones crowd the skies; HVAC systems sound off in homes and office buildings; the racket in workspaces without walls annoys employees; diners in restaurants shout at one another and the waitstaff; construction jackhammers, live music and sports contests test eardrums; and hospitals and iPhones are at “peak beep.”

Berdik, a journalist and the author of Mind Over Mind, provides an informative account of the effects of soundscapes on our physical and psychological health and well-being. According to the American Public Health Association, noise pollution is putting the health of 100 million Americans at risk, with those risks falling disproportionately on poor and non-white people. Students in schools located near airports and heavily trafficked roads, for example, tend to have lower reading and math scores.

Common sense noise-control measures, Berdik demonstrates, can help prevent irreversible hearing loss and reduce sleep deprivation, stress, distraction, loneliness, and hypertension.

Clamor documents the daunting challenges of addressing this widespread, but often ignored, pollutant. Protecting our ears remains a hard sell. In mining, manufacturing, and construction, America’s noisiest industries, which are required by law to offer workers hearing protection, about a third of them do not use it. Only 8 percent of Americans shield their ears at loud concerts. Sales of headphones, by contrast, have exploded, but the sonic isolation they produce reinforces “a related trend… people physically together but mentally scattered.”

Not surprisingly, Berdik endorses measures to reduce decibel levels, including replacing combustion-powered cars, buses, and trucks with electric vehicles. That said, he maintains that the “ultimate goal shouldn’t be a snake-free garden, or for that matter, a noise-free world,” but instead, environments in which we listen to and “think seriously about the sounds of the shared places we want to create.”

Berdik notes that hospital patients consistently cite noise as their main complaint; administrators acknowledge that most alerts don’t require clinical action as they actively seek ways to create a calmer environment that promotes better rest and sleep. Reducing the number of individuals who need to be attached to monitors has helped. Meanwhile, researchers designed softer auditory icons for six alarms—ventilation, drug delivery, temperature, oxygen, cardiovascular, and artificial perfusion (blood pumps)—that would have strong metaphorical connections with these six ways people often die while commanding the attention of doctors and nurses. When laboratory experiments proved these “tunes” were correctly identified far more often than standard alarms, they were endorsed as options by the medical profession’s International Organization of Standardization.

Adding sounds can also make city spaces seem quieter. When urban planners, local officials, and contractors in Montreal arranged seating, tables, and lighting in an abandoned gas station in a busy commercial district and piped in nature sounds with percussive and melodic musical elements, visitors found the setting calmer, more pleasant, and less loud than when the speakers were turned off. In Singapore, people were less bothered by traffic noise when it was accompanied by bird songs or the gurgles from a flowing stream.

“Sometimes we want the world to shut up,” Berdik concludes, so that we can be alone with our thoughts or hear and be heard by others. But, ultimately, we want “sonic environments that are more responsive to our needs.”

What they will look and sound like, he concedes, remains a difficult-to-achieve work in progress.