Tag Archives: noise

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Paying for the Quiet

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We clearly thrive an aural stimulation.  But it’s doubtful we were meant to handle the high walls of noise that modern life throws up.

Loud and intrusive racket is a part of living in the 21st Century.  Many of us hardly give a second thought to the noise pollution around us:  restaurants with patrons drowning in the din, apartments a few feet from raucous traffic, sidewalks inches from the continuous roar of traffic.  Then there are also theaters and music venues that pitch amplification beyond the margins of what the inner ear can tolerate. If there should be an unexpected lull as we move from place to place, earbuds are at the ready to fill in the gaps.

On my campus a few of us battle teams of leaf blowers who spew their pollution and noise under classroom windows.  The campus looks quieter than it is.  But this inconvenience pales compared to a whole block on the West Side of Manhattan that is apparently in need of tranquilizers. Apparently one of its uber-rich among them is noisily digging a 36-foot hole for a mammoth swimming pool and theater to go under their $100 million dollar townhouse.  According to the New York Times, one neighbor found solace in a quote attributed to Schopenhauer: “The higher your tolerance for noise, the lower your intelligence.”  We may think we thrive an aural stimulation.  But it’s doubtful we were meant to handle the high walls of noise that modern life throws in front of us.

Of course quiet is not an absolute value.  I know plenty of sane people who function with some degree of auditory tumult.  But  I’m always amazed at seemingly oblivious patrons in public establishments, where the sound is barely less than what can be found next to a runway at O’hare. The phrase “I can’t hear myself think” is more than a figure of speech. Thankfully, many still regard any space that can foster a whisper as an island of sanity.

It follows that there is a price to be paid if a person prefers a buffer from the noise of ordinary life.  Prized residential property in most vertical cities almost always exists in the upper floors of a residential building.  A high view in an apartment complex is in several ways “above it all.”  Aside from a better view, these homes are acoustically more isolated.  Sound dissipates as it travels up and away from the reflective surfaces of the street. Rents thus rise dramatically to reflect that height advantage. They are typically even higher if residential spaces are built with double or triple-glazed windows. Vacant spaces between the glass are devoid of air, the prime medium for the transmission of sound.

Deep in the woods in many parts of the United States city dwellers are shocked to hear their heartbeat.

The ultimate escape from noise, of course, is out of the city and away from busy roads and airplane glide paths.  In a secluded forest in many parts of the United States it is possible to hear your heart pump: a phenomenon that can catch a city-dweller off-guard. It is even quieter after a few inches of snow.

I only realized how quiet living in deep woods could be until September 11, 2002.  Airspace in the United States shutdown for days after the disastrous attacks in New York and Washington, with a resulting atmospheric stillness rarely known to those of us who live under the air highways feeding the nation’s airports.

In the meantime, we buy quiet that we can “see” in the bucolic images of landscape paintings and photographs.  I suspect that seeking the silence of an open space is an unsung function of a lot of landscape painting. Alternately, we may set aside time for activities like meditation, prayer or yoga.  All are meant to happen in calmer surroundings.  With regard to meditation, it seems that we now pay to learn practices that happened to previous generations naturally. A farmer taking a break in a corner of his field would be puzzled if asked by a passerby question if he was meditating.  Functionally, however, the peace that is possible in the middle of a field gives his brain the same kind of break.

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Our Neglected Sense

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Most of us are not very practiced in using a tool that have we’ve been given.  We listen to others.  We notice sounds. But we’re not very sophisticated in appreciating what pristine sound can reveal. 

Imagine a relative who rarely strays from home and who has also just bought a luxury performance car.  It will transport him to and from the grocery store, along with a few other places in his community.  But the car will probably never see the open road. So it all seems like a mismatch. The owner will ask so little of a car that is designed to do so much.

The same can be said for how we use the miraculous sense organs thoughtfully attached to both sides of our head.  We and most animals are binaural listeners.  We hear in stereo.  And that gives us the ability to locate where sounds come from.  But that’s only the start.  The mechanical bones and nerves of the middle and inner ear are amazingly sensitive.  They are—pardon the pun—perfect windows fully open to mere whispers coming from the outside world.  Admittedly, if you are my age, they are mostly open.  Hearing acuity is best in children, which is one reason they are easily startled by the rude noises of the everyday life.

Here’s the point.  Most of us are not very practiced in using the tool that have we’ve been given.  We listen to others.  We notice sounds.  But we are too accepting of assaults on our ears in places where we work and play.  These intrusions into our aural space may come from motorcycles, lawn equipment, loud restaurants, car horns and a hundred other sources.  We tolerate loud noise and constant sound—frequently frying ears and brains in the process. A result is a dulling of our hearing, forcing us to miss what pristine sound can tell us.

All of this forces us to overlook the pleasures of natural sound layering, where ambient sounds can mix or contrast with dominant foreground source. For example, stand in a quiet forest long enough, and our aural sense of depth can open up.  In the woods, air moving through trees has its own auditory signature.  Add in a pair of birds calling back and forth to each other over a distance, and the whole scene seems richer and more interesting.  This is dimensional listening, reclaimed when we liberate ourselves from the racket of a world.

The organized sound of music is where we are more likely to pay attention to the spatial capabilities of the aural.  But even here, we frequently ruin the experience by depending on cheap electrical devices that distort, or are too loud for the delicate mechanisms of the ear.  The result flattens music into a one-dimensional experience.

Putting ambient noise into the mix helps us hear the dimensionality that we have often trained ourselves to ignore. 

Consider a variation on this problem. If you view nearly any Hollywood film produced after 1950, the sound of the actors singing will usually not match the space they are in.  Most were recorded on a sound stage first, lip-syncing later on the set.  So at the start of the landmark musical Oklahoma! Curly rides his horse across the open prairie gloriously singing Oh What a Beautiful Morning, but in the incongruous acoustics of a reverberant studio. The same is true with most action sequences, where dialogue is re-recorded later on. “On location” sound is difficult to capture. There is an old assumption that “pre” or “post” dubbing will not be noticed.  But your ears can easily recognize the aural discontinuity of different spaces.

Try this simple experience.  Listen to a good acoustic recording on good headphones.  And see, if over time, you can place the layout of the players or singers.  Are they all in the same acoustic?  Who is in front and who is in back?  Where is the piano on the ‘sound stage’?  And what is the room contributing to the sound? Hearing dimensionality recovers what we have often trained ourselves to ignore.

Listen to the iconic recording of Chan Chan from the Buena Vista Social Club below.  You can hear the musicians spread out in the space of an old Havana studio once owned by RCA.  The recording, like some live concerts, is a feast of coherent aural information.  To use the old cliche, it seems like we are with these musicians, some of whom remembered when Havana at night was a rival to Miami.