All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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The Costs of the Din Add Up

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We’ve turned the ‘soundtrack of our lives’ into one long visit to the land of auditory commotion.

As readers of this blog will know, sound is a current preoccupation.  I’m not sure if its a curse or blessing, but once a writer starts down the path of a new project, its hard to stop. Everything is seen through the lens of the work.

A new book on the noise in our lives by David Owen (Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World) is a timely reminder of how much racket we tolerate. The modern frenetic existence isn’t just a function of being busy.  It’s also an effect of living full time in a din of disruptive noise. We turned the soundtrack of our lives into one long visit to the land of auditory commotion. It’s the kind of effect you expect entering a busy pre-school or sharing the street with a group of motorcyclists out for a Sunday ride. The areas  surrounding busy airports are especially hazardous to one’s ears and mental health.  Huge amounts of fuel are thrown into a jet engine that compresses and then explodes it.  Even the ostensibly quiet ones are noise demons. It’s din easily passes the 85 db threshold that can cause permanent ear damage over just a few hours.  And the pummeling of the air by helicopter blades overhead is even more brutal: the rough equivalent of watering orchids with a fire hose.  As Owen notes, virtually all of us arrive at adulthood having done some irreparable damage to our hearing.

Below the obvious case of airports, what are the sources of ambient noise that most of us experience on a daily basis?  The list is long: hair dryers, leaf blowers, snow blowers, tree cutters, high aircraft on approach to a distant airport, helicopter traffic, heaters, refrigerators, microwave ovens, mixers, radios and televisions that are often left on to become aural wallpaper, auto and motorcycle mufflers—some tuned  to be loud, vacuums, car alarms, emergency vehicles, general traffic, internal combustion engines, truck pick-ups and deliveries, copying machines, nearby construction equipment, exhaust fans, truck ‘engine braking,’ Muzak, cooling fans, microwave ovens, video games, bars and restaurants, live concerts and sporting events, domestic pumps, clothes and dish washers, lawn mowers and garden equipment, elevators, subway and truck brakes, the impossible-to-block long waves from a bass speaker, nearby foot traffic, portable generators, barking dogs, phone rings, cooling systems for server centers and industrial plants, garages for auto repairs and more.

Of course we don’t confront these sources at once.  But a good guess is that a city resident will experience most of this noise in the short time frame of a few days. And some of this noise pollution—traffic, appliances, planes, lawn equipment—is ubiquitous. Their sounds almost never go away.  That is, until we are old.  Then, creeping deafness and tinnitus leave the marks.  Deafness is one of the great and mostly undiagnosed causes of depression and withdrawal in older Americans.

You can audit your own environment with a simple test.  Turn off the master switch in the electrical panel where you live. You’ve eliminated most of your own noise sources at that point.  But how much still seeps in from your neighbors and the proximate environment?  I live in the country on a one-lane road surrounded by woods. By all accounts the noise level in my home should be below 20 db.  But 30 db is about as low as the sound levels go: a function of distant air traffic, a noisy fan in a cable controller box that can’t be turned off, the noise of a heater, and a new “quiet” refrigerator in a distant room that carries the sound of its motor vibrations through the wood structure of the building.  100 years ago, that 20 db mark would have been easier to achieve.

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American Hustler

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                                      Robert Preston

Delivered at a head-spinning pace, “Ya Got Trouble” seems like it could have only emerged out of the righteous precincts of mid-century America. 

An article in last Wednesday’s New York Times reported that the Broadway show Beetlejuice will be evicted from the Winter Garden Theater in June to make way for a revival of The Music Man.  Apparently, the producers of the weird and ghoulish  Beetlejuice feel like they cannot move the expensive sets and still recover their $21 million in costs.  And it’s not certain any theater is actually available.  The owner of the Winter Garden believes a splashy Music Man will be a bigger draw.

There’s nothing especially wrong with Meredith Wilson’s hopelessly square but entertaining musical. It is an antique built on a familiar kind of middle American monoculture.  Robert Preston did his best to breathe life into a long Broadway run and the  successful 1962 film.

But I have a compromise that should please everyone.  Simply merge the shows.

There’s no reason the two casts and a few script doctors can’t come up with a new production that combines the best of both.  The Music Beetle, perhaps.  Or maybe Beetleman.  The combined show would probably be a little more hip and a lot of more fun.

Problem solved.

As you can see, I’m good with titles.  It’s what follows that’s hard.

There is actually a point to all this. Taken as a whole, The Music Man is full of perhaps too many trombones and more four-part harmony than might be good for a person. But it does offer one song that’s destined for the ages. Wilson hit a rich vein of Americana with the rapid-fire ‘patter’ song, “Ya Got Trouble.”  Wilson’s home of Mason City Iowa was a pretty tranquil place.  But at least he knew how  people loved to parade their righteousness.  It’s a perfect evocation of an American hustler in full flight: filled with trumped up worries that would excite the fantasies of folks in the play’s fictitious River City.  Delivered at a head-spinning pace, “Ya Got Trouble” seems like it could have only been sung and believed in small-town mid-century America.  The fun of the song is that Americans know a lot about pitches for things that are probably more evocative than true.  Peddling fear can also be profitable.  It’s a perfect representation of the sell-at-any-cost spirit that helped build the country.

I’m thinkin’ of the kids in the knickerbockers
Shirt-tail young ones, peekin’ in the pool
Hall window after school, ya got trouble, folks!

The popular historian Daniel Boorstin wrote a great deal about hustlers in America who were constantly on the make (The Americans: the Democratic Experience, 1974). He was right to note that it was a particular American type.  Many went on to be innovators or builders of business empires.  Others were charlatans. Surely the contestants on CNBC’s Shark Tank are heirs to this tradition.  So, I fear, is our President.