The Tyranny of Noise

Robert Alex Baron

Part IV — Chapter 10 — It's Up To All Of Us

To be forced to wear ear protectors is like being forced to wear an oxygen mask as the answer to air pollution. This price lessens the life experience. After reviewing the complexities and inadequacies of trying to avoid noise, it makes more sense to reduce noise at the source. We must design for quiet.

But it should be clear by now that a quieter world is up to all of us. Government and industry cannot and will not respond without incentives. Government and industry certainly will not respond if they believe that the demand for less noise is only the feeble outcry of a few hypersensitive "kooks," or "chronic malcontents."

Years of exposure and frustration may have deadened your awareness. Prepare for your attack by forcing yourself to listen. Make up your own list of disturbing noises; or, start with that list of ten most unwanted sounds of 1956:

  1. Refuse collection
  2. Hornblowing
  3. Acceleration of motors
  4. Blaring of radio and TV sets
  5. Aircraft noise
  6. Unmuffled exhausts
  7. Street repairs
  8. Sound trucks
  9. Construction riveting
  10. Doormen's whistles

How many of these sources are you exposed to today? Which new ones would you add to the list? In what order?

Keep a noise diary. List sources, time of day, how you reacted. Were you distracted, conversation halted, sleep lost? How do others react? Next time you visit a hospital, notice whether your friend or relative is shielded from the sounds of other patients and of hospital procedures. Can he really rest?

Visit a school. Does it have an amplified intercom with a shrill speaker? Tiled hall acting like an echo chamber? Noisy lunchroom?

Contrast your regular acoustic environment with the sounds of a natural environment. Can you hear the sounds of birds, murmuring of water, rustling of wind in the trees?

Has noise made your home a place to escape from? How often do you leave your community, not because you want to, but because escape from noise is a necessity? How much additional are you paying to find a quiet vacation spot? Can you find one?

These acts of conscious listening will force you to question the price of progress. You will develop a tangible, albeit ugly, picture of how uncaring people have been permitted to degrade your environment.

The acute awareness of excessive noise may temporarily make you ill, but this should only strengthen your resolve to act. To learn to hear noises is not to learn to love them. Convert your hurt, or that of other noise victims, into curiosity, your curiosity into anger, and your anger into action.

In addition to learning to identify the noises, learn to identify the justifications for noise. Since the dawn of history myths have been used to keep an oppressed group from asking too many questions. Myths are seldom challenged, especially today, when they are created and dispensed by high priests as awesome as physicians, scientists, and engineers.

To spot justifications for noise, watch for the following myths: Noise is the price of progress. Noise is a necessary evil. Noise abatement must be realistic (that is, not cost anything). The public does not want to pay for quiet. Silencing will hurt progress. Background noise is acceptable; it is the intrusive noise that is the problem. Daytime noise is more acceptable than nighttime noise.

(On that last, the Wilson Committee reported evidence that the total annoyance caused to the population is roughly the same by day and by night, and concluded that "a great noise in a residential area will be most disturbing during the night, and in commercial areas...probably during the day.")

Hold suspect "acceptability" goals. Who is behind them? Industry? Government agencies that use industry's definitions of what your acoustic environment is to be like? Is "acceptability" defined as a comfortable environment, or one to be endured?