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The Price in Environmental Quality

Certain things creep up on man without his noticing them. Old age, deafness, the loss of his human rights, and the loss of the quality of life. If the war in Viet Nam stopped tomorrow, if enough housing was built, enough schools, if poverty and discrimination were ended–a noisy technology would still deny us the right to rest, the right to sleep, the right to be let alone. “Technology,” says Wilbur H. Ferry, “touches the person and the common life more intimately and often than does any government. Technology’s scope places in the hands of its administrators gigantic capabilities for arbitrary power.”

Suddenly we see that, impersonal and blind, noise hits the sick and the well, the old and the young, the student and the vacationer, the hospital patient and the doctor, the factory worker and the farmer, the judge and the prisoner. Indeed, we are all prisoners of noise. A political dictator could not have more impact on how one lives than the operators of jets and jackhammers. Democracy gives man the right to vote, but not the right to sleep; the right to dissent, but not the right to minimize the noises of social utility; the right to go to school, but not the right to be able to hear the teacher. Under the guise of waging a necessary, therefore holy, war for progress, technology strips man of his dignity, his right to meditate and work creatively, his means of maintaining the well-being of his soul.

Morale is an intangible asset. What happens to the human spirit? When New York’s new Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans for a Second Avenue Subway, the most typical attitude was that expressed by a middle-aged veteran of city life. Throwing up his hands in despair, he cried out, “I accept it. I live in New York, and I accept what happens.”

But some New Yorkers have fought. They have picketed, petitioned, testified at hearings, tried the courts. All to no avail. The public is ignored into submission. The individual “may roar and yelp a bit,” says Ferry, “and declare there ought to be a law. Then he subsides to a mutter and ultimately silence, which is precisely what the noisemakers count on.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his play No Exit, described Hell as never to be let alone. The growing noise intrusion is creating this type of hell right here on earth. Man has lost the right to be let alone. He must respond to the distractions of noises that are not even meant for his ears. Unable to shut them out, he is constantly at the mercy of the acoustic stimuli generated by others.

To Norman Cousins, “Silence is not nothingness or the absence of sound. It is a prime condition for human serenity and the natural environment of contemplation. A life without regular periods of silence is a life without essential nourishment for both the spirit and the functioning intelligence. Silence offers the vital element of privacy, without which an individual becomes something less than himself…We live at a time when thought alone represents the difference between sanity and total madness. One of the prime requirements of such thought is privacy and a little silence, at least now and then.”

Cousins was addressing himself to the readers of an intellectual magazine in 1962. Five years later, in 1967, Life Magazine, addressing itself to a much broader readership, showed the same concern for the destruction of solitude by noise. “The escalating noise problem,” it editorialized, “may require the widespread rediscovery of the personal value of silence. Most religions throughout human history have insisted that man needs regular intervals of silence for spiritual health.”

It erodes one’s belief in human decency to observe what society does even to the sick.

The telephone rang one sunny day in the CQC office. It was a member of our Board of Directors, the late Dr. William Vogt. His wife, I knew, was a cancer patient at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, one of the leading hospitals in the United States.

“My wife has been in a coma for two weeks; she is dying. There is a construction project outside her hospital room. The noise is dreadful. Ask someone to do something. Call the City!”

Call the City–! He had forgotten that construction noise is the legal price of progress and that city noise must be endured in payment for the amenities of a civilized society.

But are the “amenities” of civilization, whatever those may be, worth the price in degradation? Our ancestors banded together to build walls to keep out marauders and Indian arrows. We moderns are less successful with sound energy.

The failure of home design to insulate the noisy activities of the children is especially distracting to parents who find it difficult to tune out their multiple sounds. The normal stresses of family life are aggravated by this noise. Husbands made irascible by their daily work, plus commuting noise, find it difficult to step into a noisy home with equanimity. Jansen’s studies of German steel workers suggest that men who work in noisy jobs display a higher incidence of domestic difficulties than those who work in quieter jobs. From farmers riding noisy tractors to businessmen who end a day in a noisy office in a rattling bar car that far from tranquilizes the day’s tensions, no one is immune.

Housewives are forced to bear the brunt of society’s legalization of daytime open-air noises. A reader writes to Good Housekeeping Magazine: “I believe the constant din from our busy streets is literally making me ill. My husband says that’s nonsense–that noise may make me deaf, but can’t make me sick. Which of us is right?” The magazine answered: “You may well be.”

If noise isn’t making her sick, it may be undermining her marriage.

In contemporary homes, husband and wife are denied privacy for the intimacies of marriage. Dr. Haim G. Ginott, author of Between Parent and Child, describes our homes as “antisex.” “Few modern houses or apartments,” he writes, “have deliberate safeguards for sexual privacy…It is a sad comment on our civilization that the sounds of legitimate love must be so low.”

In today’s architecture, no allowance is made for keeping outsiders from sharing the bedroom experience with the participants. Thin walls bring neighbors into the bedroom to cheer or jeer, as in the story of the man whose wife played hard to get. When she finally verbalized her assent, cries of “Congratulations, Hugo!” rang out, it is said, from the next two apartments.

Noise is the most personal and psychologically intimate of all the forms of pollution. It allows impersonal machines and other human beings to get unbearably close.

Writers of marriage manuals are starting to recognize the environmental imperatives. The authors of Sexual Adventure in Marriage offer advice on how “to circumvent noise, to create interludes of privacy for two that can refresh the senses and spirit.” One suggestion for quiet surroundings for lovemaking: underwater. In scuba equipment?

Someday, noise is likely to be implicated as a factor in frigidity. Sudden noises will be discovered to short-circuit the sexual response by shunting it to a secondary track while the body goes on to a state of alert. Couples experiencing difficulty in conceiving will be advised to wear earmuffs, or take to the water in snorkels.

Modern man no less than his primitive ancestors must depend upon his ears to warn him of danger. In 1930, New York City’s Noise Commission reported that “There are many places where a tiger from Siberia or Bengal could roar or snarl without attracting the auditory attention of the passersby.” In 1968, human tigers could murder in the city jungle and not be heard. On January 18 of that year, a middle-aged jeweler, held up in his shop in the heart of Times Square, was shot, not once, not twice, but four times without any of the scores of pedestrians hearing a sound. The shots were drowned out by the noise of compressed air hammers and other equipment at construction sites nearby. The two holdup men escaped.

When a 13-year-old New Jersey girl was found beaten and strangled to death 75 feet from the back door of a neighbor’s home, the neighbor’s son told reporters: “My father heard nothing. None of us heard anything. We had the air conditioning running all night.” A quality environment should, at the very least, have noise levels low enough to permit shots and screams to be heard.

When you hear that helicopter noise is not different from any other city noise, think of the two people who were killed when Senator Robert Kennedy’s funeral train was passing through Elizabeth, New Jersey–killed because the noise from the low-flying Secret Service and news media helicopters masked out the warning horn blasts of the approaching train that hit them.

Someday, highway noise will be discovered to be a significant cause of traffic accidents.

Churches are no more a sanctuary from noise assault than the secular environment. Noise intrusion has no respect even for death. Mourners find that the sanctity of the graveside funeral service is violated by construction noise and lawn mowers.

The minister of one local church near a USAF base in England arranged for a “hot line” between the base and his church: a phonecall silences the jets for weddings, funerals, and other special services. Churches near commercial airports are not as fortunate. They must either build soundproofed structures or endure interrupted services. In ruling against the Town of Hempstead’s attempt to control jet noise over its land area, the courts acknowledged that church services were interrupted, but accepted this as the price of progress.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of how commerce and technology are defiling our environment is provided by the advent of the supersonic transport, the needle-nosed SST.

Fear of what the SST will do to man and his environment is being increasingly voiced by scientists and government officials alike. Don Dwiggins, for many years the aerospace editor of the Los Angeles Mirror News, in 1968 wrote a book, The SST Here It Comes, Ready Or Not. At the end of this carefully documented work, he told his readers that he had discovered the villain of his story to be “the SST itself.”

Why all the concern about this new type of plane, while the prosaic noises of surface transportation and even the subsonic jets have yet to arouse the public–or government–to effective action?

The reason is an eerie phenomenon spelled b-o-o-m, sonic boom–a physical reaction to the rupturing of the sound barrier as an airplane travels faster than sound. This boom is not something that happens only once, when the plane breaks the sound barrier. The sonic boom, somewhat like the wake of a ship, is a “sonic carpet” that accompanies the plane as long as it flies supersonically. As described by Dr. Bo Lundberg, a Swedish aviation authority, the conical pressure wave becomes strong and hits the ground in every spot within a “boom carpet” which stretches miles wide continuously along the entire flight path. The typical boom is a shock wave, caused by the air compressed by supersonic flight. The wave of compressed air exerts physical pressure against whatever stands in its path.

We do not as yet know what the commercial sonic boom will be like. But we already know what booms from smaller supersonic planes will be like. We have a Canadian military pilot to thank for giving us some inkling of what the boom can do to structures. Flying an F-104 supersonic jet fighter, he accidentally flew supersonically at an altitude of 500 feet. Nothing much might have happened had he been flying over the desert, but he was flying over the temporary control tower and the terminal building of the almost-completed Ottawa airport.

Don Dwiggins, in his book on the SST, summarized what happened to the structures:

With a mighty concussion the control tower literally exploded, showering glass in all directions. The terminal roof was ripped open and aluminum flashing strips were thrown across the access road. A curtain wall over the ticket lobby was distorted. Large glass panes in the terminal were smashed. Four doorways suffered severe damage. Exterior stucco broke away, and crashed to the ground.

Throughout the new building the ceiling was blown apart, the recessed fluorescent fixtures left skewed, pushed up, or left hanging down, as if wrenched and tortured by a severe earthquake.

It cost the government of Ottawa $300,000 to repair the damage. The flight pattern, was, of course, against the rules.

It may be argued that this was an accident, but even in normal operation the sonic boom has a destructive effect on natural and man-made structures. In 1968, reports of damage to cliff dwellings in the National Parks System prompted the then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to initiate his own study of the boom. Park engineers reported damage in Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona and to geological formations in Bryce National Park in Utah, and potential damage to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. An estimated 80 tons of overhanging cliff fell on a cliff dwelling in Canyon de Muerto.

The Interior Department’s 1968 sonic boom report (Udall) leaves little room for complacency. The scientists who wrote the report observed that unlike subsonic jets, which impact an area basically within a radius of 12 to 15 miles of airports, the SST, even if flown at high altitudes, creates new noise corridors on the ground tens of miles wide along its flight path so that “…potentially no land area would be free from some noise intrusion.”

Dr. Lundberg was the first to warn the world about the meaning of the sonic boom. He believes that “in the supersonic age it will be inadvisable to take a siesta, or leave a child in a pram, on a balcony, or beside a garden wall.” Thanks to military supersonic flight, at least one French family didn’t have to wait for the supersonic age of commercial aviation. Here is the havoc as described by Walter Sullivan, Science editor of The New York Times: “Last week a French farm family, with eight neighbors and hired hands helping in the harvest, gathered for the noon meal in a farmhouse near the village of Mauran in Brittany. Suddenly, according to accounts from France, a sound like a thunderclap was heard. Timbers shook loose and eight tons of barley stored in a loft fell on those eating, killing three and injuring one seriously. Apparently it was the first time that a sonic boom had been blamed for fatal injuries.”

Apparently these Bretons didn’t know enough to adapt to one of the new “minor stresses” of modern living.

Understandably, then, there is a raging controversy over whether or not the SST should be permitted to fly at supersonic speeds over land. If such flights are permitted, according to the Udall study, sometime after 1975 between 20 million and 40 million Americans would be boomed five to fifty times a day under a path 120 miles to either side of the flight paths. An additional 35 million to 65 million people within a path 12Ω to 25 miles to either side of the flight path would be subjected to from one to fifty booms per day of somewhat lower intensity, and 13 million to 25 million more would experience one to four high-intensity booms. In short, up to 130 million Americans a day would be exposed daily to the boom.

According to the Interior Department study, here is how people react to sonic booms:

“…There is considerable initial adaptation following several months of exposure, but even after several years of experiencing booms, most people find the booms objectionable or worse. Extensive research at Edwards Air Force Base, Oklahoma City, and in France, shows that even after some years of continued exposure to sonic booms, 30 per cent of the people exposed to booms at levels anticipated for the SST would find the booms to be ‘intolerable’ or ‘unacceptable’ and an additional 50 per cent would find them ‘objectionable.’

“Persons experiencing sonic booms are startled and diverted or, if asleep, may be awakened in the same manner as those who hear an unexpected loud thunderclap or a large explosion. These effects may be accompanied by increased pulse rate and other minor and transient physiological changes, but they are not believed to be harmful in themselves, nor to endanger hearing.”

It should be noted that in the body of this study it is admitted that “No tests on experimental animals or on human beings have been conducted over a sufficiently long period of time to detect possible chronic effects, or effects of long-repeated exposures to sonic booms…Tests conducted to date have not explored fully many of the situations in which sonic boom annoyance might be amplified. How extensive, for example, would be the interruption of cultural and artistic activities in which quiet and concentration are important? What is likely to be the impact upon infants, sleeping children, hospitalized persons or other individuals whose immediate well-being requires uninterrupted sleep or freedom from excessive noise? Studies to date have not considered these kinds of situations.”

In his documented source book on the SST and the sonic boom, William A. Shurcliff, Ph.D., Director of the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom, provides further information on why the sonic boom is a new noise, to be taken seriously:

“The boom is annoying because it is so loud, so sudden, and occurs with no warning whatsoever. It sounds much like the ‘bang’ produced by a moderate-size explosion a block away. Because it strikes with no warning (and no visible explanation), the boom evokes man’s primitive startle reaction…The surgeon making a delicate incision will jump too.”

This source book further describes the adverse effect of noise on sleep. During the Oklahoma City sonic boom tests (sponsored by NASA and the FAA), “18 per cent of the persons polled complained of sleep-interference by the boom–even though the booms did not start each day until 7:00 A.M., and even though the average overpressure of the booms was only 60 per cent of the overpressure expected of [commercial] SSTs’ booms. Many persons used the 7:00 A.M. boom as an ‘alarm clock’–and did not ‘get used to it.'”

Hidden in the government reports of sonic boom tests is the word “average.” The reference is to the average boom pressure. The incidents reported above were presumably caused by the average type of sonic boom. But Dr. Lundberg has called attention to the “superbang,” a sonic boom that exceeds the average pressure by a multiple of two or more. In the tests conducted at Oklahoma City, Lundberg observed that “at every point within the whole carpet, one boom strike in a thousand is twice as strong or more than the average on the track.” Many factors contribute to the formation of a superbang: atmospheric conditions such as temperature changes, winds, local turbulence, cloud formations, flight operations such as turns and accelerations. It does not look as if local or even Federal laws will stop these.

Though only one boom in 10,000 is likely to be a superbang, they will be frequent occurrences because of the millions of people and structures that will be struck in the boom carpet. Lundberg believes that conservatively speaking, 10 million people could be exposed to superbooms in the boom carpet of the New York-to-Los Angeles run. He further believes that this enormous mass of severe boom strikes will inevitably result in many serious accidents, for example by falling glass, or even deaths, by heart failure.

If overland flights are banned and supersonic speed permitted only over water, how easy will it be for commercial fishermen, and steamship passengers and crew, to settle their claims for sonic boom damage?

How effective will protest be, even if 50 million are boomed? Only a small minority will know how to or be prompted to protest. Also, it will be much simpler to repatch the plaster than to go through the red tape of processing a complaint against the government.

Replying to those who say we must accept the sonic boom as another noise stress, Lundberg says it is illogical and cynical to ask us to accept the sonic boom just because we suffer from jet, traffic, and other noises. “The very fact that local noise is unavoidable these days, makes it, of course, all the more important that the countryside and quiet suburbs are kept undisturbed. Only then will it remain possible for those who are noise ridden during part of the day to recover in the evenings and nights and during weekends, holidays, and sickness.”

Meanwhile the international race to introduce the SST continues.

Less dramatic than the sonic boom, but no less disturbing, is the effect of noise on personal communication. Very rarely these days can we hear the sound of the human voice as a solo. Even in the theater we must listen to the actors’ voices plus the sounds of the ventilating or air conditioning system.

Mechanical noises also pollute the atmosphere of concerts, outdoors as well as indoors. Noise won over music when the New York City Parks Department opened its outdoor stage at Damrosch Park. The music critic of The New York Times accepted seven jets, one four-engine prop plane, and one helicopter, all in the first fifteen minutes of the concert, as “par for an outdoor concert in the city.” But he could not accept the concerto for air conditioning system which played the entire concert from the bowels of the adjacent Metropolitan Opera House, a concerto which “roars like a sizeable waterfall and never stops.” Not even the amplifying system could overcome these external noises.

Kindergarten children attending a school near New York’s Central Park were taken for a walk and then asked to list the outdoor sounds they had heard. The majority of the sounds they named were noises, mostly from transportation. There were few mentions of quiet sounds like birds and human voices. Transportation noises are becoming more “natural” to these youngsters than the sounds of nature.

Will society have to develop special soundproofed “museums” where people can go to hear the pure sounds of music, the spoken word, and nature?

To fully enjoy music and hear it as the composer intended, it is essential to hear the high frequencies. It is true, observes Yeshiva University music professor Dr. Edward Levy, that the fundamental tone is below 2,000 cps, but, if the ear loses its potential acuity, it loses the ability to distinguish timbre, or tone color. Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Berg, and many others carefully took advantage of the differences in timbre among various instruments. As for contemporary composers and their new electronic material, most of it is in the higher frequencies. Those with hearing loss, Dr. Levy believes, will lose contact with this new music. Of course, one may not choose ever to listen to it all, but it’s nice to know one could.

The partial loss of hearing is somewhat analogous to faulty vision. Sounds are blurred, sounds are dimmed, and some sounds are not heard at all.

The transition from mild hearing loss, if we can call the loss of full-frequency hearing mild, to total deafness is like going from a sentence of probation to a lifetime sentence of solitary confinement. One hearing specialist describes the gradual loss of hearing thusly: “The humming, buzzing, rattling sounds of everyday life slip away. Friends’ and relatives’ diction becomes increasingly sloppy.” The person who becomes deaf or “hard of hearing” lives in a world of subdued sound, or even silence. He has lost his primary means of communication and tends to withdraw from the world and live within himself, a comparative recluse.

Deafness, it is said, is more of an isolation from humankind than blindness. Deaf people, it is said, seldom smile. Unverified reports claim a greater tendency to suicide among those who become deaf than among those who go blind. Helen Keller has been quoted as saying that the world’s “normal” people have never been roused to mass sympathy for the affliction. “It causes no fever, no crutches, no seeing-eye dog, not even a sneeze,” she told interviewer Phyllis Battelle.

Earlier Miss Keller had written: “Deafness, like poverty, stunts and deadens its victims.”

Even total deafness offers no escape from traffic and aviation noise, which have much of their energy in the lower frequencies. City planner Clifford R. Bragdon has reported that a totally deaf man living near Philadelphia’s airport conveyed to him that he was constantly awakened by vibrations from low-flying aircraft.

Hearing aids are no panacea. For one thing, they are not always helpful for deafness attributable to noise. For another, their use can exaggerate the impact of sudden noises.

From an article in Today’s Health comes this information: “Another problem of hearing aid users: sudden loud sounds. The roar of a jet, the scream of a police siren–these can be extremely painful.” The article indicates one possible solution, an automatic gain control that cuts out when the sudden sound signal is intense, and comes on again when the noise diminishes.

Note that the hearing aid user is twice a victim–when he suffers his hearing loss, and when he discovers that the device he must use to compensate for that loss in itself adds to his discomfort and alienation from his fellow man.

For the deaf aged, aural separation from the world of wanted sounds adds to loneliness, itself one of the most painful afflictions of old age. Thus in what should be their golden years, our senior citizens must lose their ability to hear the comforting sounds of their loved ones, and must be cut off from the warming, stimulating sounds of music, nature, and so forth. I don’t know why I say “our senior citizens,” as if most of us were not destined to become senior citizens.

The brutalization of our society by noise is revealed by what we are doing to our children, exposing them to such excessive noise in their formative years that they tune out in self-defense and have to be educated to listen to verbal communication. The Mabaan children are taught to listen for self-protection. Educators have told me it is a commonplace in a city like New York that new pupils coming from low-income areas also have to be trained to listen. At home, amid probably many brothers and sisters demanding attention against the external noises of raucous street activities and heavy traffic, the children have heard speech chiefly as grunts, and had to pick even those out from among many other generalized human sounds. Apparently, in the act of screening out the destructive sounds of their environment, they have lost the art of focussing on speech sounds.

Pre-talking-age children who constantly hear noise-masked speech do not receive the full auditory value of the speech sounds in their surroundings. Consonants and vocal nuances are masked, filtered out, and the child learns an imperfect vocal pattern.

Tune-outs, especially among the underprivileged, growing up in noisy environments, may later become drop-outs.

But noise is becoming an economic equalizer, and all children are beginning to suffer. Well-to-do mothers seek apartments that face away from traffic, and they man the picket lines to oppose heliports and jetports.

As if to assure ourselves that our children will be prepared for tomorrow’s noise-saturated world, we allow excessive noise to accompany them during their school hours. Most schools seem designed to be reverberation boxes. Hard floors and ceilings amplify the normal sounds of school activities. The students are sitting ducks for decibels. This is what one small-town Texas high school environment sounded like to a college professor of Health and Physical Education:

“In a single wing of the building, a half dozen classrooms are hammered with afternoon noises–Vocational Education classes. The efficiency and effectiveness of the lecture classes drop and the students strain to hear. Fatigue and irritability of students and teachers is great.”

What happens to the quality of education when teachers are exposed to fatigue and irritation from noise? “I have found the noise to be an abomination,” wrote one private-school teacher. “In the classroom, concentration is difficult and I have to raise my voice to be heard. I must choose between opening the window and not being heard or leaving the window closed and subjecting my pupils to stuffiness and sleepiness. After classes there is no relief. I live here at the school and cannot escape the noise [of construction going on in the vicinity] to relax after a trying day of teaching. Over a period of time, this has seriously interfered with my work, as my enthusiasm and effectiveness in the classroom is directly dependent upon complete relaxation during free hours.”

Too many schools have been built near jetports, or vice versa, and aviation noise is lessening the efficiency of the educational process. So frequent are interruptions from aviation, they are now clocked and inserted into the Congressional Record. The Superintendent of Schools of Inglewood, California, told a Congressional subcommittee:

“As for our instructional program, we must point out that oral communication becomes impossible each time a jet aircraft passes near our schools. This means that approximately 165 teachers and 4,000 students must stop all class discussion until the aircraft has progressed beyond the schools. The result of such disruption goes beyond the actual time involved in the passage of the aircraft and each class must again have its attention focussed on what was being done before the interruption.

…Our teachers tell us that as the number of jet planes increases they find classroom instruction increasingly difficult and it is their feeling that considerable loss in the educational program results.”

Some school architects are now eliminating windows or planning underground classrooms.

Handicapped children suffer most. The impact of sudden noises on children with epilepsy and other diseases forces parents to seek forms of escape. One mother wrote me to inquire after a source for the acoustic earmuffs she had seen me demonstrate on television. “My son is extremely sensitive to loud noises, both sharp and sudden…There are many activities he would like to participate in–but due to this problem he cannot do so at this time. He seems to tolerate moderate noises but anything above a normal high or sharp tone disturbs him. He is a cerebral palsy boy with tension, and has a severe problem with loud and sharp noises.”

By giving moral and legal sanction to noisemaking, we have made outcasts of those who suffer from noise. They are made to be ashamed of their suffering, as if it indicated some flaw in their character, a desire to stop civilization’s progress. They feel constrained not to convey to their family or friends how they feel. Many choose to suffer silently, rather than chance ridicule.

Among the hundreds of letters CQC received after my appearance on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show was one from an elderly woman who found relief in writing to an organization that understood what she was going through. All her life, she wrote, she not only suffered from noise, but had to hold back her complaints.

CQC’s first office was a sublet in the Theatre Guild building. A public relations man wandered into the place one day by accident. Instead of excusing himself and departing, his eyes fastened on our name plate. Cool and poised, this Madison Avenue huckster started asking questions about our operation. Suddenly he plunged from his poised demeanor into an agonizing description of his own noise problem.

“They’ve just opened up the second bar within earshot of my apartment. These two spots have become the ‘in’ spots with the sports car crowd. I can’t sleep. And now the building across the street has just installed a giant air conditioning unit on the roof opposite my window. That constant roaring is driving me bugs–” And then he stopped as suddenly as he had started, visibly embarrassed. “My God, I’m not a complainer. I didn’t mean to complain. I must sound like a kook.”

Torture is defined as something that causes agony or pain, suffering, annoyance. These are the very terms the public and our social commentators use to describe what noise is doing to us.

Noise exposure and its effects are not unlike the non-violent techniques used to torture captives since time immemorial. Dr. Zhivko D. Angelusheff, a staff member of the Speech and Hearing Center of New York’s City Hospital, cites a third-century B.C. Chinese suggestion that instead of hanging criminals, “flutes, drums, and chimes or bells should be sounded without letup, until they drop dead, because this is the most agonizing death man could ever think of…Ring, ring the bells without interruption until the criminals first turn insane then die.”

As man advanced up the rungs of the ladder of civilization he improved his methods of applying noise torture, and expanded their practice. The Nazis used the whine of Stuka dive bombers to terrorize civilian populations; when all else failed, they broke the will of concentration camp prisoners with an unbearable noise.

Dictatorships seem not to be able to forego noise torture. A young Greek told a news conference that he had seen a man accused of being a Communist, but who maintained his innocence, tortured for three months by excessive pressure on his extremities, and by intolerable reverberations from a bell outside his cell. The Russian Communists in turn expose their political prisoners to a novel form of modern noise torture, nothing as primitive as beating bells, or gongs. They simply place them in a noisy factory in a Siberian labor camp.

The Russian writer Anatoly T. Marchenko, himself a prisoner, told The New York Times what happened when another writer, Yuli M. Daniel, was transferred to a machine shop: “The noise in the machine shop was loud enough to split the head of even the least sensitive of men. Daniel suffered from ear trouble, and the prison staff knew this. The result was that Daniel, who was only slightly hard of hearing when he came into the camp, is now almost deaf.”

In the United States and all of the industrialized countries of the world we expose men to the same conditions as the price of earning a living. What kind of a society is it that allows men to work under conditions which in a Soviet prison camp are punishment?

The classical use of torture was for a purpose: to demoralize, to force a confession. The horror of today’s torture by noise is that it is inflicted on a hapless civilian population without purpose. The consumer is not the enemy of commerce and industry; why is he treated as such?

Constant, nagging noise brings out the worst in man. One of the reasons John Connell formed the British Noise Abatement Society was his discovery of “the deep widespread feelings of hatred generated in the minds of captive audiences forced to listen.” Noise is seized upon as a rationale for deep-rooted prejudice, and all too frequently complaints of neighbor noise describe the offending party by ethnic background, as in: “I live in a city project, next door to nine Puerto Ricans, seven teen-agers…a loud juke-box is played all day and most of the night. There is nothing but a drunken cabaret of gaiety going on all day and most of the night…The architects who designed these projects ought to be forced to live in them.”

Mayor Lindsay failed to understand the influence of noise on social relationships when he ordered an investigation of hippie riots in Tompkins Square Park. He wanted a report on why a riot should erupt out of a group engaged in what he saw as “noisy but generally harmless activity.” The bongos and Buddhist love chants were not deemed a harmless activity by the old-timers living in the area. Two youths and eleven policemen were injured and 38 persons were arrested because, among other things, preexisting tensions between the resident Puerto Ricans and Slays were aggravated by an alien noise. One minister described the differing social and cultural values as creating a “powder keg.” An intellectual living in the area told a reporter that the Poles, Czechs, Ruthenians, and Ukranians are a stolid type who go in for law and order in a big way, and hate the disorder of the hippies and their noise.

Fury is also generated by the legalized nuisances of society. One woman who was experiencing nighttime railroad track repair in front of her apartment on the fringes of New York’s East Harlem wrote:

“I am not a violent person and have never had and do not expect to ever have anything to do with the riots in our cities. But having lived on the fringe of East Harlem for 1-10 years I am in a position to begin to understand riots and the reasons for them, and even to sympathize with them…If I were a Negro and had I lived in Harlem always I might be more violent than they have been or ever shall be…Residents have been forced to endure the penetrating noise…and to rise or stay up all night because the noise is so intense.

“If the New York Central Railroad could be bombed with fire bombs or dynamite, or a fire started, without any loss of life, and if I were a native of Harlem, I might turn my lack of cooperation by the authorities into destructive retaliation…At times one has to take things into his own hands, when he has had enough, and has exhausted other means, and use whatever means is available to him.”

Someday, we shall be able to count the dollar cost of noise, and diagnose its price in physical health. But, in trying to assay a direct dollar cost, we must not lose sight of the fact that this life on earth is a limited one. Noise, no matter how one interprets its impact, does “cost” man a portion of his human existence. I am haunted by the phrase environmentalist Ron Linton used before a meeting of the American Public Health Association: “What is the cost of a living day?”