Tag Archives: sound-centric persons

What is High-Decibel Sound Doing To Us?

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Our sense of being adequately entertained has grown dependent on amplified sound.

During the recent World Cup games this summer in North America, spectators had many chances to see some amazing soccer in the frenzy leading up to the final championship game. But some of the games on television left me relieved that I was not in the loudest stands. Punishing sound levels were off the charts and easily sustained for several hours.

Our lives need to unfold in environments where ambient noise is significantly less than 100 decibels (dB), which is well under the sound energy of most sporting events and rock concerts. For those keeping track, apparently the loudest game was in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. That June 13 match between Scotland and Haiti at times registered an ear-damaging 125 dB. And that was not a record of recorded noise, which is still held by Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium at 142 dB! These sound levels amount to a severe attack on the tiny bones and hair cells that make up the middle and inner ear. The cost of such noise is usually permanent hearing loss, most of which cannot be repaired by the body over time. The visual equivelant would be staring into the sun.

Predictably, sports fans, musicians, and members of large crowds suffer from some hearing loss over their lives. Some may wear ear protection. Many do not.

It is sobering to note how hearing loss correlates with a person’s sense of isolation and social withdrawal. The challenge is to convince young concertgoers and earbud users that the other end of their life will be faced with missed opportunities to hear what was once so easily taken for granted.

Our sense of being adequately entertained has grown dependent on amplified sound. As every musician knows, even if performing in a small intimate space, a group will use microphones to augment their acoustic output. Somehow they have become badges of authenticity. As a former drummer, I can testify that there is usually no need to surround a standard jazz drum kit with a set of pickups hovering over cymbals and toms. Some famous clubs, like New York City’s legendary Blue Note are small enough to not need amplification. Recording is one thing. And arenas are obviously an exception. But in many venues playing live could easily be done without playing loud. Sadly, the drama of performance now brings the expectation that it will occur at greater sound levels north of 100 dB that voices and instruments alone may not produce; reasonable hearing levels be damned. In addition, a wall of amplified sound usually the sacrifices the natural harmonics of many musical sources. The next time you are near someone playing a good grand piano, listen and you will hear overtones that are often crushed by amplification.

What Have We Done to Our Sanity?

The writer and novelist Franz Kafka famously struggled to live within a noisy household in Prague while trying to write. He frequently complained that the noise of family and city life sabotaged his ability to focus. He exists in a long line of authors before and since who have sought out ways to cloister their hearing from the detritus of human activity. Gustav Mahler, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf,  Roald Dahl, and Michael Pollan are only a few samples from a much longer list. Journalist Pollan wrote A Place of My Own (1997) about his experience building a writing shed behind his Connecticut home (above). The building and the book were his homages to the life of the mind that can be saved from the clutter and distractions of the modern world.

There is also a degree of cognitive energy that is forced into overdrive by too much racket. UCLA Health cites four common effects:

  • an increase in the release of stress hormones, increased risk of heart disease,
  • increases in rates of depression and anxiety, and
  • weakened cognitive functions. It is common to notice some elements of cognitive decline in older friends who are already wearing hearing aids.

Individuals vary greatly in their tolerance of noise.  We are all different. Since the 1990s some behavioral scientists have noticed a cluster of personality traits one has described with the unusually clear name, the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). In general, these folks may make up the ten percent or more of the general population who can be overwhelmed and overstimulated by various forms of human activity, including sound. When first coming upon this idea in a recent article in the BBC Music Magazine, it made sense, and can include a grab bag of positive indicators. Many are similar to what I have previously described as “sound-centric” persons.

With regard to music, one common positive effect HSP includes an overwhelming swoon upon hearing a particular performance, as well as a capacity to hear “into” sounds that others may miss. We have all seen audience members melt away upon hearing a portion of a performance. For film and theater director Mike Nichols it could be enough to hear an actor perfectly capture the meaning of some pivotal lines in a script. I’ve seen teen singers fight back tears singing Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes” within a choir. It is also easy to find audience members with moist eyes from listening to a performance of John William’s “Hymn to the Fallen” or the Main Theme from the film Schindler’s List. My own experience includes a quickening heartbeat in anticipation of the final third of Saint-Saën’s Organ Symphony, or the first notes of the Third Movement in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

As is so often the case, music gives and takes away. No one would want to lose the chances to experience wonderful musical highs. But those opportunities come with the proviso that we must still have enough hearing to appreciate these sonic miracles.

Loving What is Available to our Ears

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“Swoon” is an old but good word. I see it as a particular form of ecstasy.

There are rough estimates by those that study such things that perhaps five to ten percent of the population experience what is sometimes called “musical anhedonia.”  This is the clinical term used to describe a person who is mostly immune to the pleasures of music. The late polymath and neurologist Oliver Sacks isolated and studied this phenomenon, which can be imagined as an unaccountably empty room in a person’s otherwise complex life. I would guess that there is an additional ten or fifteen percent who can’t muster much enthusiasm for any form of music. They would have probably included my father, who was in most ways a great dad. But for him music was a disposible experience: occasionally OK, but not worth much attention. During my high school years we had some tense exchanges over how much of my summer work money should be spent on the glories of the Count Basie Band or North German organ music. Record stores were one of the joys of my life but alien places for him. If music meant anything, it was bandleader Lawrence Welk’s corny covers of pop songs on ABC television. Welk is perhaps what Jello with marshmellows is to those who love fine dining. We did the smart thing and declared a truce.

Ironically, a person’s musical anhedonia is probably harder on avid music lovers than the people with this trait. Those of us who are “sound centric” are surely mystified by others who are indifferent. We all know the experience of discovering that a person we are close to is not appreciating what is at the doorstep of their ears. The effect is like taking someone to the Grand Canyon and discovering that they see it as nothing special. What does not produce a rich and fulfilling experience in another can be a puzzle.

A comment once made by the influential psychologist Stephen Pinker partly reflects this unexpected vacuum of feeling. He once compared music to “auditory cheesecake:” certainly OK, but “biologically functionless.”

Really?

The statement is stunningly dismissive. The comparison of a piece of unhealthy food with a consequential form of human expression suggests the kind of indifference that is so puzzling about musical anhedonia. More than most, a psychologist should know that most of us need music to complete the space between what we can verbalize and and experience that goes beyond what words can express. Music can be its own therapy.

The Victorians understood what it meant to “swoon” over something. The word has gone out of favor but was usually meant to suggest a profound emotional response to someone or something: a trigger to feelings of ecstasy. Old it is. But it’s a good word, and it works for all of us who can name exactly what it is about a musical forms that can send us to welcome arcadias. Those prompts represent our musical melting points: perhaps a chord sequence in an old pop hit, a mix of voices or instruments, the “resolution” of a dark section of a classical piece that resolves in sunnier key.

There were surely saw swoons to see a few years ago in a video concert of In Performance at the White House. The guests were in the East Room listening to singers that meant a lot to the Obamas. When the singer Usher led into the first chords of the Marvin Gaye classic, Mercy Mercy Me, the faces of the staffers and First Family in attendance lit up like signs in Times Square. Check out the video below. The audience swayed; they smiled; many found it impossible not to move with the rhythm of Gaye’s catchy song. It’s as good a representative moment as any to sense why so many musicians and appreciators live to listen.