48 ms·

How Restaurants Got So Loud

213 points by zimbu668 8y ago

Alreadyobsolete 8y ago
It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.
- philpem 8y ago
  I try to find the quieter places... I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones. It completely throws me off the conversation I'm trying to have with the person I'm with.
  - zimpenfish 8y ago
    > I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones. I can't even reliably pick out one voice in a largely empty room if there's other sources of noise (ie music playing in a pub, etc.) It makes things like meetups impossible and working in an open plan office a nightmare.
- ainiriand 8y ago
  I can attest to that. I am deaf from my left ear and when I walk on the street I need to be on the left of any person walking with me, it is impossible to hear anything. In restaurants, pubs, bars, I have already given up and I know that I will miss most of the conversations.
  - jlokier 8y ago
    Same here. I'm not usually deaf, but from time to time one ear blocks for a few weeks. When that happens, I totally know what you mean about being unable to hear conversations in restaurants, bars, etc. Even when my talking partner is aware, localising their voice from the din with one ear is really difficult. (Btw, there's some really impressive research at using AI techniques to help with that, which will makes it way into hearing aids eventually.) Its at times like that I find it's way too easy to maintain a conversation with nods and yes/nos without having a clue what it's about. I've even done it in languages where I don't understand a word. I feel it says something about the speaker, that they can talk for ages without any confirmation that it's understood and no meaningful talk the other way :)
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  Yeah, my hearing's not the best and I really just cannot hear what people are saying half of the time. It's like... everybody's struggling to hear each other, but I really cannot hear. I just can't do those kinds of spaces, at least not if I want to have a conversation.
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    Test your hearing on higher frequencies, those are usually the first lost when hearing degrades. Normal headphones/loudspeakers can go way higher than people can hear, so you can do basic test yourself. I have something similar - normal conversations are OK, but in loud environment it becomes very hard. Its not great to be the only one in group who doesn't understand what others are saying. I blew my hearing probably in front rows on metal concerts.
    - JohnBooty 8y ago
      (I realize that online hearing tests aren't reliable, but they would have false positives, not false negatives) Frustratingly, I've done those online hearing tests which test your ability to hear human voices amidst background noise and they tell me I have no hearing loss. However, my hearing cuts out around 9khz, which is low. Definitely not my listening equipment because my wife can hear >9khz just fine on the same gear.
  - justinph 8y ago
    Might be worth looking into hearing aids. I have the same thing and got hearing aids, which help an immense amount.
    - JohnBooty 8y ago
      Definitely in my future, I think! Perhaps my present, as well...
  - tass 8y ago
    Visit an audiologist for a test. I recently had a hearing test for the reason you described and was told there were no problems. I started to ask people if they could actually hear or understand while with them at a loud place and many told me they couldn’t - they were mostly pretending to understand after eventually giving up.
erdo 8y ago
This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)
- mnw21cam 8y ago
  The Met Office in the UK has a canteen, and at one point, they decided that it was too noisy. Their solution was to make a load of person-sized wool "clouds", and hang them from the ceiling. They look cool, and they absorb noise. A couple of months ago, I went to a conference in San Diego, and went to a restaurant in the evening with colleagues. We could hardly hear the person next to us shouting. I left as soon as I had eaten.
  - philpem 8y ago
    With regard to the restaurant, maybe that's the goal: encourage people to settle up and leave quicker so the restaurant can serve more customers? Or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical...
    - wccrawford 8y ago
      If you read blogs like "not always right" you'll find that most food service employees are not on board with the customers sitting around and taking up tables. They take it as a personal attack on their income and are very rude about people who sit there. Even if the management isn't against it, the employees are.
      - mmkhd 8y ago
        This is a direct consequence of how food service employees are paid in the U.S. They have an income of next to nothing and depend on tips. Tips do not play such a large part in (most? all?) of Europe and are smaller than in the U.S., so customers that stay longer mean less work without too much pay reduction. At least that is my pet theory. I only visit the U.S. every couple of years and this year I noticed that the "standard" tip crept up to 15%-20% instead of the 10%-15% that I remember. Seems that employers are paying food service workers even less of a wage than before.
mnx 8y ago
Yes! It seems like somehow many bar/restaurant owners have no interest in making their spaces sonically comfortable. I've been in some that felt like they were designed for maximum reverb. The few ones with acoustic panels on the walls / ceilings are so nice in comparison. I really hope caring about the way your place sounds becomes standard.
fredley 8y ago
One thing that's becoming near-impossible is finding places to drink (as in pubs or bars) without piped music. This contributes significantly to noise. It's done of course so that we shout ourselves hoarse trying to have a conversation, so we buy more drinks to lubricate our throat, but even formerly quiet pubs near me have started doing it.
- philpem 8y ago
  I help organise events and it's been our biggest complaint for some venues: that as the afternoon progresses, the music gets so loud it's impossible to hold a conversation. We pass the complaints along, but the response is usually "Corporate insists we do this, we hate it too, apparently it makes people buy more drinks". In practice, at least from the data I've gathered, it drives people away.
  - briandear 8y ago
    > In practice, at least from the data I've gathered, it drives people away It would really depend on the venue, but I managed and worked in a few bars and clubs in the mid 2000s and the daytime crowd preferred more quiet, but then in the evening, if the music was soft, there was a perception that the bar was “dead” or had fewer people tha. It actually did. A loud bar with few people gets more interest from the potential patrons because it’s perceived as more lively and crowded than it may actually be. Then it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and actually becomes more lively and crowded. When your business is based on customer volume, quiet and contemplative is a fast way to go out of business. Exceptions are high end, romantic martini bars selling $18 drinks or scotch bars selling high end spirits to a discerning clientele. For your average brew-pub or standard “bar,” silence equals death. You can see this anywhere there is a strip of bars and clubs, the quiet places are the ones not selling as much. Most people go to bars at night for the purpose of socializing and having fun. Most bar patrons don’t associate “fun” with quiet. Anyone that has worked in the bar business knows that you make more money with loud than you do with quiet — with some exceptions of course. Restaurants on the other hand, in my experience, quiet does better for the restaurants that have been around awhile, while loud and lively tends to prop up the newer places because the “energy” reinforces the “hype” around perceived popularity.
tapland 8y ago
Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year. It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the building running through them with a loud dull noise making going back out to the playground-ridden small library with build int coffee-shop feel like putting on active noise supressing headphones. And the playground + café + it being placed in a mall (as opposed to across the street in the municipality building like it used to be) made reading or browsing a hard task. My fiance who has ASD really has no public space available at all in this city anymore and we are moving to another city where we know of accessible quieter places, including parks and libraries without built-in noise generators. ./rant Carpeting here is extremely rare. Scandinavian minimalism everywhere. The article helps me understand why the local chinese restaurang, with carpeting, tablecloth and padded chairs, is so nice to stay at.
- vegardx 8y ago
  I don't think it's just Scandinavian minimalism. You want hard floors when you know there will be snow and rain for a large part of the year. It would be impossible to keep things clean otherwise. Just look to Svalbard where you take of your shoes even when going to a bar.
- willvarfar 8y ago
  I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.) What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains have added quiet carriages. I don't know which libraries you are meaning, but it sounds like their study rooms are broken, rather than the whole concept is broken. So, lets fix the study rooms! :)
  - keiferski 8y ago
keiferski 8y ago
I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
- SuperGent 8y ago
  Traffic makes a big difference. I was in Venice recently, and the only noise I could hear was suitcases rolling over the cobbles. It really brought home how much noise traffic makes.
- adwhit 8y ago
  Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded. The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1]. What is the endgame here? [1] eg https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf
  - probably_wrong 8y ago
    I agree with cars being the problem. I only thought about that when I learned that laws were drafted to force electric cars to make noise - for a brief couple of seconds I realised how different the world would be if all cars were silent... and then I got my hopes crushed. I truly cannot picture what life would be like without car noise and light pollution.
    - 8y ago
Agnosco 8y ago
I guess it also helps getting people to eat and leave faster, which enables restaurants to seat tables more frequently.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I think McDonalds are designed for that purpose in a way less obtrusive way - ironically enough by the decorating being loud making people not want to linger. The chairs and seats are tight and limited in manuverabilify for one in addition to the "openness". How well does it work? Well do you want to go hang out at a McDonald's? Ironically they later tried McCafe iniative to make lingering spaces to try to compete with Starbucks after seeing how many go there for coffee - often taking the form of a nook which fails pretty badly at the task because of the previous decorating. Illustrating quite a few other negative things about the leadership.
  - dpeck 8y ago
    A LOT of people hang out at McDonald’s. Older folks, kids after school, etc. In some neighborhoods they function as something like community hubs (third spaces) during their non-peak times.
    - philpem 8y ago
      I noticed similar in a MAX in Upplands Vasby (Sweden, near Stockholm). People just hanging out, but similar fast-food-style high-contrast decor. The big difference between that and the McD's (or even the Subway down the road) was the food at MAX was far better...! (so I can see why people were hanging around and ordering more)
Semaphor 8y ago
Restaurants in Germany I've been to are usually pretty quiet. This excludes fast food places, bars (restaurants that serve cocktails are included in that), low-end non-German places (I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places) and all 3 American(-style) restaurants I've been to. For normal restaurants, I can actually have a conversation. But when I go to some club or bar, I need to align my ears carefully and have the speaker talk directly to me, otherwise, I'd have no chance of understanding anything.
- biztos 8y ago
  > I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places In Berlin there are a lot of low-end (as in cheap) Vietnamese and to a lesser extent Thai restaurants that I would call real restaurants. Tend to be pretty quiet in my experience even when they're relatively full.
asib 8y ago
I thought I recognised this title. Did some digging, Vox wrote an article [0] with the same title a while ago. [0] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-levels-loud-decibels https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-lev...
- kirykl 8y ago
  Also that one was discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629497
orloffm 8y ago
I once was at a huge car expo, and French and German halls were adjacent to each other. For some reason, all French car makers had extremely loud music at their spaces, like if they were trying to be louder than each other. It was basically impossible to be there. The German hall (all three major makers) had complete silence inside. So this is also a cultural thing, and a pretty strong one as this happened in Moscow, and most of the workers were Russians of course.
pcarolan 8y ago
I work remotely and find myself working from a lot of Starbucks. The music level seems consistent no matter where you go to the point where it feels like a policy. It is just loud enough that you can't drown it out with a good set of headphones or take a conference call without annoying the rest of the group. It seems too consistent to be unintentional. Conversely, there's a new coffee shop in Chicago that is designed from the ground up to facilitate work. It has tons of natural light, freely available whiteboards and almost no music call Limitless coffee. It is such a joy to not have to deal with the din that I go there even when I'm not working. You can almost hear yourself think.
- firepoet 8y ago
  Where is this mystical coffee shop? I live in Chicago and would appreciate the tip. :-)
  - L_Rahman 8y ago
    I imagine it's one of these: https://limitlesscoffee.com/store-locator/ https://limitlesscoffee.com/store-locator/
    - pcarolan 8y ago
      That's the one.
- technobabble 8y ago
  Thank you for the recommendation
- jtreminio 8y ago
  Honest question, have you considered it might be on purpose so you are not using Starbucks as your personal office?
  - rhacker 8y ago
    It seems a bit strange that they encourage laptop usage at Starbucks then if they don't want people to use it as an office. The have laptop plug in ports at special bars and tables all over the place.
asah 8y ago
"The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible." which works because everybody's on their phones... :-(
ryanmarsh 8y ago
I don’t enjoy going out to eat anymore and prefer to DoorDash food precisely because it’s too loud. The ironic thing is I have hearing damage so you’d think it would bother me less. I can’t think, can’t hear my wife, and can’t relax and enjoy my meal. I do not understand why every small restaurant has to have high ceilings with no plenum so the A/C sounds like a jet engine. Surely I’m not the only customer annoyed by this.
seanalltogether 8y ago
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the article is that loud restaurants can provide diners with a sense of privacy. In a sea of noise your conversation will easily be drowned out before reaching others. Additionally, more ambient noise means less chances of being irritated by other diners.
- bluGill 8y ago
  It also means I can't understand my wife when she speaks. It is bad enough at home with my kids yelling at the top of their lungs (any ideas on how to break them of this?), when we go out it is impossible.
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    > any ideas on how to break them of this? separate them when play becomes loud. take away toys etc. restore peace, give the toys back. they will scream and fight it a lot the first few time, but if you keep a constant, predictable and strict response they'll get the idea, eventually, that they need to play in acceptable ways. also make it clear that it only applies in specific time/places (evening, home, public indoor building) and where it's acceptable (afternoons, parks, etc)
  - jtreminio 8y ago
    Use a water spray bottle - No one, including [children], like to be squirted with water, so you can try a quick spritz at your [child] if they are somewhere or doing something they shouldn't be.
    - flying_kangaroo 8y ago
      This reads like advice for how to train a cat and I would feel kinda weird doing it to a child. Is this actually effective?
    - sequoia 8y ago
      Respectfully, this advice is absolutely idiotic. If your toddler pees their pants, do you rub their face in it too? I'm not a proponent of treating children identically to adults, but children should still be afforded some aspects of human dignity. Spraying them with a water bottle like a malfeasant feline is not a polite way to treat anyone, regardless of age. If you do this to your child, you are teaching them that this is an acceptable way to treat people that bother them. If you do not end up with an egocentric and inconsiderate child after subjecting them to this, it will be from pure luck.
mcv 8y ago
There's a really nice restaurant in our neighbourhood, with amazing food, and you need to reserve a couple days in advance. But whenever we go there, it's ridiculously noisy. They went for a bare stone industrial look, and that clearly doesn't dampen any sound, so you end up hearing everybody in the restaurant all at once. But we are also to blame; when we bought our house, we removed some walls to let more light in, and everything is really tight and smooth, and therefore reflects all sound. We got bad acoustics in our home. We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some sound absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior anywhere. Please the eye and punish the ear, seems to be the interior design rule of today.
- naravara 8y ago
  >We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some sound absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior Can't you just mount them on a wall or ceiling? Otherwise you can do lots of good by just putting down rugs or hanging woven artwork. Plants work too
  - mcv 8y ago
    We could, but we're not sure where. No matter where we put them, they would ruin the lines of the room. My wife hates rugs. We have some plants, but that's clearly not enough.
Thriptic 8y ago
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this, but one of the reasons restaurants are so loud is that many modern restaurants pack people in like sardines to maximize revenue. Many places I have been to lately give you about a foot of space between you and the people next to you. Not only does this high density create a lot of noise, but a lot of noise actually becomes necessary to have any semblance of privacy. It's ruined a lot of dining for me. If I wanted to eat as fast as possible while not saying anything of substance to the people I'm with for fear of being overheard, I would get take out and bring it back to my workplace to consume.
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
I strongly dislike restaurants for their extreme noise levels and rarely manage to sit in one for longer than an hour without getting agitated. There are few restaurants I know that allow us to be seated in quiet areas and/or that are much more quiet due to their design, and those are the restaurants that I'll visit often.
jlokier 8y ago
There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books. One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter. They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing their food or drink. (Around the same time they also instigated a 30 minute time limit on Wifi if you bought something. Even though I was willing to keep buying, I couldn't get through a new tea every 30 minutes!) Theory being it's more profitable to make your customers leave and make room for others, than to make a place people want to go to. I haven't been back. Even with noise-cancelling headphones(∗), and earbuds under the headphones, it was too loud for me. And the wifi policy was really annoying. Sadly, I've noticed ultra loud music seems to be the policy at a lot of places these days. I find Starbucks and Costa ok - but some of my friends won't go with me because they find the music there too loud as well. (∗) I wear noise-cancellers at most places now. It probably makes me look unsocial or "hipster", but it's to protect my ears from the loud music just about everywhere insists on playing, and helps me concentrate when I'm working in a café. I enjoy talking with people if they want to.
- something2 8y ago
  Does wearing noise-cancelling headphones actually protect your ears? My understanding of noise-cancelling(at least the active kind) is that it would play the noise you would normally hear but in a mirrored fashion to dampen out the noise you'd hear. I'm just wondering if that would protect your ears, do as much harm, or double it.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    Noise is noise, and if you cancel it out it's gone. Sound waves obey the superposition principle, which means that if I take 1 psi and superimpose -1 psi, I get 1-1=0 psi.
    - kevincennis 8y ago
      That's true, of course. But it's much harder to actively cancel higher frequencies. This is why noise cancelling works brilliantly on an airplane (relatively low frequency background noise) but it does almost nothing to filter out the sounds of conversations around you.
sevensor 8y ago
Some of the best restaurants I've been to, sonically speaking, have been in old houses that were converted into dining establishments. Because there's a limit to how much they can knock out interior walls, there are only two or three tables to a room, and the loud kitchen is necessarily in a different room from the dining. This really keeps a lid on the noise and lets you have an intelligent conversation at your table.
post_break 8y ago
There is a chinese place I go to specifically because it is quiet. I'm so tired of loud places to eat. It's draining on you after a while.
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
I hate loud restaurants, I hate loud cafes, I hate when I have to listen to dumb music all the fing time. I am also very surprised that no one has figured out a way to offer a quieter version to customers like me. I'd pay more to have a quieter experience.
- f_allwein 8y ago
  From the article, it seems like it's not about "figuring it out", but about noisy places being more fashionable/ profitable. That said, I hope some keen entrepreneur will open, say, a restaurant in London with curtains, carpets and tablecloths. Don't think such a place exists, but maybe the time is ripe...
- trophycase 8y ago
  Yes nearly everywhere plays music nowadays. I think it's to drown out the feeling of existential dread of actually having to hear yourself. Don't think about it too hard people, just buy more.
  - cr0sh 8y ago
    > I think it's to drown out the feeling of existential dread of actually having to hear yourself. To a certain extent, this is actually true. I have read more than a few stories recently where people have literally said they hate quietness, and need noise surrounding them (especially other people), so that they didn't have to be alone with their thoughts. I find that to be depressing.
scott_s 8y ago
The author, Kate Wagner, is also the author of the McMansion Hell blog: http://mcmansionhell.com/ http://mcmansionhell.com/ If you haven't read it before, spend a few minutes there. It's a treat.
swayvil 8y ago
loudness + bright lights = eat it and get out The shift over time appears to be a dwindling respect for people.
the_clarence 8y ago
Note that restaurants are not loud if you go to Europe (except for the UK) or Asia. I don’t know why it’s so loud in the US.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  it's quite venue dependent. in some italian trattoria you can get people almost screaming at their table, even without a loud music, because they need to overcome the loud mouths at the nearby table to have a conversation.
analogmemory 8y ago
Reminds of another problem in restaurants, the annoying music they pipe in. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-music-playlists-ryuichi-sakamoto.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-music-p...
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d--b 8y ago
> Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet. Wrong. Restaurants are so loud because people are so loud. My wife and I were at Freeman's in Downtown Manhattan the other day. It was so loud we decided to scream to see if anyone noticed. And since noone seemed to turn their heads, we screamed louder and louder, and literally no one could hear us. This is an American thing, it doesn't happen in Paris, nor in London, nor in Japan, nor in Mexico.
- compiler-guy 8y ago
  Yes, Americans are loud. But the acoustics of the space one talks do in fact make a difference. If the surrounding space reflects a lot of sound, the restaurant will be louder than if the surrounding space absorbs a lot of sound. And that, in fact is what the article is about.
  - d--b 8y ago
    sure, yes, but architects _never_ paid attention to acoustics when designing restaurants (or maybe the very few super sound-concious).
Sniffnoy 8y ago
Non-mobile link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-restaurants-got-so-loud/576715/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r...
compsciphd 8y ago
I read once, can't remember where, that once the sound in a room with people talking reaches a certain level, it will get increasingly loud. The reason being, if sound is below a certain level, we can hear each other while we speak at normal volumes and the other person near us will be able to understand us. However, once volume reaches a certain background level, we have to raise our voices to be understood over the background noise which increases the overall background level which causes others to have to raise their voices over the new background level ever increasing.
- iamlemec 8y ago
  Definitely consistent with my experience. One time I was in a restaurant where this sort of arms race dynamic was occurring, and at some point a guy just did one of those really loud two-fingered whistles, then in the resulting silence said something like "let's all try to keep it down in here". It worked incredibly well, and the effect was actually very persistent.
Soundhunter 8y ago
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scirocco 8y ago
Can't believe how Joe & The Juice are allowed to play so loud music at airports
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wenc 8y ago
Tip: get noise-cancelling/in-ear headphones, and use a white-noise app like Noisli. This combination makes most cafes tolerable as a work space.

213 points by zimbu668 8y ago

It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.

philpem 8y ago
I try to find the quieter places... I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones. It completely throws me off the conversation I'm trying to have with the person I'm with.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  > I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones. I can't even reliably pick out one voice in a largely empty room if there's other sources of noise (ie music playing in a pub, etc.) It makes things like meetups impossible and working in an open plan office a nightmare.
ainiriand 8y ago
I can attest to that. I am deaf from my left ear and when I walk on the street I need to be on the left of any person walking with me, it is impossible to hear anything. In restaurants, pubs, bars, I have already given up and I know that I will miss most of the conversations.
- jlokier 8y ago
  Same here. I'm not usually deaf, but from time to time one ear blocks for a few weeks. When that happens, I totally know what you mean about being unable to hear conversations in restaurants, bars, etc. Even when my talking partner is aware, localising their voice from the din with one ear is really difficult. (Btw, there's some really impressive research at using AI techniques to help with that, which will makes it way into hearing aids eventually.) Its at times like that I find it's way too easy to maintain a conversation with nods and yes/nos without having a clue what it's about. I've even done it in languages where I don't understand a word. I feel it says something about the speaker, that they can talk for ages without any confirmation that it's understood and no meaningful talk the other way :)
JohnBooty 8y ago
Yeah, my hearing's not the best and I really just cannot hear what people are saying half of the time. It's like... everybody's struggling to hear each other, but I really cannot hear. I just can't do those kinds of spaces, at least not if I want to have a conversation.
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  Test your hearing on higher frequencies, those are usually the first lost when hearing degrades. Normal headphones/loudspeakers can go way higher than people can hear, so you can do basic test yourself. I have something similar - normal conversations are OK, but in loud environment it becomes very hard. Its not great to be the only one in group who doesn't understand what others are saying. I blew my hearing probably in front rows on metal concerts.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    (I realize that online hearing tests aren't reliable, but they would have false positives, not false negatives) Frustratingly, I've done those online hearing tests which test your ability to hear human voices amidst background noise and they tell me I have no hearing loss. However, my hearing cuts out around 9khz, which is low. Definitely not my listening equipment because my wife can hear >9khz just fine on the same gear.
- justinph 8y ago
  Might be worth looking into hearing aids. I have the same thing and got hearing aids, which help an immense amount.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    Definitely in my future, I think! Perhaps my present, as well...
- tass 8y ago
  Visit an audiologist for a test. I recently had a hearing test for the reason you described and was told there were no problems. I started to ask people if they could actually hear or understand while with them at a loud place and many told me they couldn’t - they were mostly pretending to understand after eventually giving up.

erdo 8y ago

This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)

mnw21cam 8y ago
The Met Office in the UK has a canteen, and at one point, they decided that it was too noisy. Their solution was to make a load of person-sized wool "clouds", and hang them from the ceiling. They look cool, and they absorb noise. A couple of months ago, I went to a conference in San Diego, and went to a restaurant in the evening with colleagues. We could hardly hear the person next to us shouting. I left as soon as I had eaten.
- philpem 8y ago
  With regard to the restaurant, maybe that's the goal: encourage people to settle up and leave quicker so the restaurant can serve more customers? Or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical...
  - wccrawford 8y ago
    If you read blogs like "not always right" you'll find that most food service employees are not on board with the customers sitting around and taking up tables. They take it as a personal attack on their income and are very rude about people who sit there. Even if the management isn't against it, the employees are.
    - mmkhd 8y ago
      This is a direct consequence of how food service employees are paid in the U.S. They have an income of next to nothing and depend on tips. Tips do not play such a large part in (most? all?) of Europe and are smaller than in the U.S., so customers that stay longer mean less work without too much pay reduction. At least that is my pet theory. I only visit the U.S. every couple of years and this year I noticed that the "standard" tip crept up to 15%-20% instead of the 10%-15% that I remember. Seems that employers are paying food service workers even less of a wage than before.

mnx 8y ago

Yes! It seems like somehow many bar/restaurant owners have no interest in making their spaces sonically comfortable. I've been in some that felt like they were designed for maximum reverb. The few ones with acoustic panels on the walls / ceilings are so nice in comparison. I really hope caring about the way your place sounds becomes standard.

fredley 8y ago

One thing that's becoming near-impossible is finding places to drink (as in pubs or bars) without piped music. This contributes significantly to noise. It's done of course so that we shout ourselves hoarse trying to have a conversation, so we buy more drinks to lubricate our throat, but even formerly quiet pubs near me have started doing it.

philpem 8y ago
I help organise events and it's been our biggest complaint for some venues: that as the afternoon progresses, the music gets so loud it's impossible to hold a conversation. We pass the complaints along, but the response is usually "Corporate insists we do this, we hate it too, apparently it makes people buy more drinks". In practice, at least from the data I've gathered, it drives people away.
- briandear 8y ago
  > In practice, at least from the data I've gathered, it drives people away It would really depend on the venue, but I managed and worked in a few bars and clubs in the mid 2000s and the daytime crowd preferred more quiet, but then in the evening, if the music was soft, there was a perception that the bar was “dead” or had fewer people tha. It actually did. A loud bar with few people gets more interest from the potential patrons because it’s perceived as more lively and crowded than it may actually be. Then it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and actually becomes more lively and crowded. When your business is based on customer volume, quiet and contemplative is a fast way to go out of business. Exceptions are high end, romantic martini bars selling $18 drinks or scotch bars selling high end spirits to a discerning clientele. For your average brew-pub or standard “bar,” silence equals death. You can see this anywhere there is a strip of bars and clubs, the quiet places are the ones not selling as much. Most people go to bars at night for the purpose of socializing and having fun. Most bar patrons don’t associate “fun” with quiet. Anyone that has worked in the bar business knows that you make more money with loud than you do with quiet — with some exceptions of course. Restaurants on the other hand, in my experience, quiet does better for the restaurants that have been around awhile, while loud and lively tends to prop up the newer places because the “energy” reinforces the “hype” around perceived popularity.

tapland 8y ago

Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year. It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the building running through them with a loud dull noise making going back out to the playground-ridden small library with build int coffee-shop feel like putting on active noise supressing headphones. And the playground + café + it being placed in a mall (as opposed to across the street in the municipality building like it used to be) made reading or browsing a hard task. My fiance who has ASD really has no public space available at all in this city anymore and we are moving to another city where we know of accessible quieter places, including parks and libraries without built-in noise generators. ./rant Carpeting here is extremely rare. Scandinavian minimalism everywhere. The article helps me understand why the local chinese restaurang, with carpeting, tablecloth and padded chairs, is so nice to stay at.

vegardx 8y ago
I don't think it's just Scandinavian minimalism. You want hard floors when you know there will be snow and rain for a large part of the year. It would be impossible to keep things clean otherwise. Just look to Svalbard where you take of your shoes even when going to a bar.
willvarfar 8y ago
I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.) What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains have added quiet carriages. I don't know which libraries you are meaning, but it sounds like their study rooms are broken, rather than the whole concept is broken. So, lets fix the study rooms! :)
- keiferski 8y ago

keiferski 8y ago

I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.

SuperGent 8y ago
Traffic makes a big difference. I was in Venice recently, and the only noise I could hear was suitcases rolling over the cobbles. It really brought home how much noise traffic makes.
adwhit 8y ago
Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded. The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1]. What is the endgame here? [1] eg https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  I agree with cars being the problem. I only thought about that when I learned that laws were drafted to force electric cars to make noise - for a brief couple of seconds I realised how different the world would be if all cars were silent... and then I got my hopes crushed. I truly cannot picture what life would be like without car noise and light pollution.
  - 8y ago

Agnosco 8y ago

I guess it also helps getting people to eat and leave faster, which enables restaurants to seat tables more frequently.

Nasrudith 8y ago
I think McDonalds are designed for that purpose in a way less obtrusive way - ironically enough by the decorating being loud making people not want to linger. The chairs and seats are tight and limited in manuverabilify for one in addition to the "openness". How well does it work? Well do you want to go hang out at a McDonald's? Ironically they later tried McCafe iniative to make lingering spaces to try to compete with Starbucks after seeing how many go there for coffee - often taking the form of a nook which fails pretty badly at the task because of the previous decorating. Illustrating quite a few other negative things about the leadership.
- dpeck 8y ago
  A LOT of people hang out at McDonald’s. Older folks, kids after school, etc. In some neighborhoods they function as something like community hubs (third spaces) during their non-peak times.
  - philpem 8y ago
    I noticed similar in a MAX in Upplands Vasby (Sweden, near Stockholm). People just hanging out, but similar fast-food-style high-contrast decor. The big difference between that and the McD's (or even the Subway down the road) was the food at MAX was far better...! (so I can see why people were hanging around and ordering more)

Semaphor 8y ago

Restaurants in Germany I've been to are usually pretty quiet. This excludes fast food places, bars (restaurants that serve cocktails are included in that), low-end non-German places (I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places) and all 3 American(-style) restaurants I've been to. For normal restaurants, I can actually have a conversation. But when I go to some club or bar, I need to align my ears carefully and have the speaker talk directly to me, otherwise, I'd have no chance of understanding anything.

biztos 8y ago
> I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places In Berlin there are a lot of low-end (as in cheap) Vietnamese and to a lesser extent Thai restaurants that I would call real restaurants. Tend to be pretty quiet in my experience even when they're relatively full.

asib 8y ago

I thought I recognised this title. Did some digging, Vox wrote an article [0] with the same title a while ago. [0] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-levels-loud-decibels https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-lev...

kirykl 8y ago
Also that one was discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629497

orloffm 8y ago

I once was at a huge car expo, and French and German halls were adjacent to each other. For some reason, all French car makers had extremely loud music at their spaces, like if they were trying to be louder than each other. It was basically impossible to be there. The German hall (all three major makers) had complete silence inside. So this is also a cultural thing, and a pretty strong one as this happened in Moscow, and most of the workers were Russians of course.

pcarolan 8y ago

I work remotely and find myself working from a lot of Starbucks. The music level seems consistent no matter where you go to the point where it feels like a policy. It is just loud enough that you can't drown it out with a good set of headphones or take a conference call without annoying the rest of the group. It seems too consistent to be unintentional. Conversely, there's a new coffee shop in Chicago that is designed from the ground up to facilitate work. It has tons of natural light, freely available whiteboards and almost no music call Limitless coffee. It is such a joy to not have to deal with the din that I go there even when I'm not working. You can almost hear yourself think.

firepoet 8y ago
Where is this mystical coffee shop? I live in Chicago and would appreciate the tip. :-)
- L_Rahman 8y ago
  I imagine it's one of these: https://limitlesscoffee.com/store-locator/ https://limitlesscoffee.com/store-locator/
  - pcarolan 8y ago
    That's the one.
technobabble 8y ago
Thank you for the recommendation
jtreminio 8y ago
Honest question, have you considered it might be on purpose so you are not using Starbucks as your personal office?
- rhacker 8y ago
  It seems a bit strange that they encourage laptop usage at Starbucks then if they don't want people to use it as an office. The have laptop plug in ports at special bars and tables all over the place.

asah 8y ago

"The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible." which works because everybody's on their phones... :-(

ryanmarsh 8y ago

I don’t enjoy going out to eat anymore and prefer to DoorDash food precisely because it’s too loud. The ironic thing is I have hearing damage so you’d think it would bother me less. I can’t think, can’t hear my wife, and can’t relax and enjoy my meal. I do not understand why every small restaurant has to have high ceilings with no plenum so the A/C sounds like a jet engine. Surely I’m not the only customer annoyed by this.

seanalltogether 8y ago

One thing I didn't see mentioned in the article is that loud restaurants can provide diners with a sense of privacy. In a sea of noise your conversation will easily be drowned out before reaching others. Additionally, more ambient noise means less chances of being irritated by other diners.

bluGill 8y ago
It also means I can't understand my wife when she speaks. It is bad enough at home with my kids yelling at the top of their lungs (any ideas on how to break them of this?), when we go out it is impossible.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  > any ideas on how to break them of this? separate them when play becomes loud. take away toys etc. restore peace, give the toys back. they will scream and fight it a lot the first few time, but if you keep a constant, predictable and strict response they'll get the idea, eventually, that they need to play in acceptable ways. also make it clear that it only applies in specific time/places (evening, home, public indoor building) and where it's acceptable (afternoons, parks, etc)
- jtreminio 8y ago
  Use a water spray bottle - No one, including [children], like to be squirted with water, so you can try a quick spritz at your [child] if they are somewhere or doing something they shouldn't be.
  - flying_kangaroo 8y ago
    This reads like advice for how to train a cat and I would feel kinda weird doing it to a child. Is this actually effective?
  - sequoia 8y ago
    Respectfully, this advice is absolutely idiotic. If your toddler pees their pants, do you rub their face in it too? I'm not a proponent of treating children identically to adults, but children should still be afforded some aspects of human dignity. Spraying them with a water bottle like a malfeasant feline is not a polite way to treat anyone, regardless of age. If you do this to your child, you are teaching them that this is an acceptable way to treat people that bother them. If you do not end up with an egocentric and inconsiderate child after subjecting them to this, it will be from pure luck.

mcv 8y ago

There's a really nice restaurant in our neighbourhood, with amazing food, and you need to reserve a couple days in advance. But whenever we go there, it's ridiculously noisy. They went for a bare stone industrial look, and that clearly doesn't dampen any sound, so you end up hearing everybody in the restaurant all at once. But we are also to blame; when we bought our house, we removed some walls to let more light in, and everything is really tight and smooth, and therefore reflects all sound. We got bad acoustics in our home. We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some sound absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior anywhere. Please the eye and punish the ear, seems to be the interior design rule of today.

naravara 8y ago
>We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some sound absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior Can't you just mount them on a wall or ceiling? Otherwise you can do lots of good by just putting down rugs or hanging woven artwork. Plants work too
- mcv 8y ago
  We could, but we're not sure where. No matter where we put them, they would ruin the lines of the room. My wife hates rugs. We have some plants, but that's clearly not enough.

Thriptic 8y ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this, but one of the reasons restaurants are so loud is that many modern restaurants pack people in like sardines to maximize revenue. Many places I have been to lately give you about a foot of space between you and the people next to you. Not only does this high density create a lot of noise, but a lot of noise actually becomes necessary to have any semblance of privacy. It's ruined a lot of dining for me. If I wanted to eat as fast as possible while not saying anything of substance to the people I'm with for fear of being overheard, I would get take out and bring it back to my workplace to consume.

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

I strongly dislike restaurants for their extreme noise levels and rarely manage to sit in one for longer than an hour without getting agitated. There are few restaurants I know that allow us to be seated in quiet areas and/or that are much more quiet due to their design, and those are the restaurants that I'll visit often.

jlokier 8y ago

There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books. One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter. They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing their food or drink. (Around the same time they also instigated a 30 minute time limit on Wifi if you bought something. Even though I was willing to keep buying, I couldn't get through a new tea every 30 minutes!) Theory being it's more profitable to make your customers leave and make room for others, than to make a place people want to go to. I haven't been back. Even with noise-cancelling headphones(∗), and earbuds under the headphones, it was too loud for me. And the wifi policy was really annoying. Sadly, I've noticed ultra loud music seems to be the policy at a lot of places these days. I find Starbucks and Costa ok - but some of my friends won't go with me because they find the music there too loud as well. (∗) I wear noise-cancellers at most places now. It probably makes me look unsocial or "hipster", but it's to protect my ears from the loud music just about everywhere insists on playing, and helps me concentrate when I'm working in a café. I enjoy talking with people if they want to.

something2 8y ago
Does wearing noise-cancelling headphones actually protect your ears? My understanding of noise-cancelling(at least the active kind) is that it would play the noise you would normally hear but in a mirrored fashion to dampen out the noise you'd hear. I'm just wondering if that would protect your ears, do as much harm, or double it.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Noise is noise, and if you cancel it out it's gone. Sound waves obey the superposition principle, which means that if I take 1 psi and superimpose -1 psi, I get 1-1=0 psi.
  - kevincennis 8y ago
    That's true, of course. But it's much harder to actively cancel higher frequencies. This is why noise cancelling works brilliantly on an airplane (relatively low frequency background noise) but it does almost nothing to filter out the sounds of conversations around you.

sevensor 8y ago

Some of the best restaurants I've been to, sonically speaking, have been in old houses that were converted into dining establishments. Because there's a limit to how much they can knock out interior walls, there are only two or three tables to a room, and the loud kitchen is necessarily in a different room from the dining. This really keeps a lid on the noise and lets you have an intelligent conversation at your table.

post_break 8y ago

There is a chinese place I go to specifically because it is quiet. I'm so tired of loud places to eat. It's draining on you after a while.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

I hate loud restaurants, I hate loud cafes, I hate when I have to listen to dumb music all the fing time. I am also very surprised that no one has figured out a way to offer a quieter version to customers like me. I'd pay more to have a quieter experience.

f_allwein 8y ago
From the article, it seems like it's not about "figuring it out", but about noisy places being more fashionable/ profitable. That said, I hope some keen entrepreneur will open, say, a restaurant in London with curtains, carpets and tablecloths. Don't think such a place exists, but maybe the time is ripe...
trophycase 8y ago
Yes nearly everywhere plays music nowadays. I think it's to drown out the feeling of existential dread of actually having to hear yourself. Don't think about it too hard people, just buy more.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  > I think it's to drown out the feeling of existential dread of actually having to hear yourself. To a certain extent, this is actually true. I have read more than a few stories recently where people have literally said they hate quietness, and need noise surrounding them (especially other people), so that they didn't have to be alone with their thoughts. I find that to be depressing.

scott_s 8y ago

The author, Kate Wagner, is also the author of the McMansion Hell blog: http://mcmansionhell.com/ http://mcmansionhell.com/ If you haven't read it before, spend a few minutes there. It's a treat.

swayvil 8y ago

loudness + bright lights = eat it and get out The shift over time appears to be a dwindling respect for people.

the_clarence 8y ago

Note that restaurants are not loud if you go to Europe (except for the UK) or Asia. I don’t know why it’s so loud in the US.

LoSboccacc 8y ago
it's quite venue dependent. in some italian trattoria you can get people almost screaming at their table, even without a loud music, because they need to overcome the loud mouths at the nearby table to have a conversation.

analogmemory 8y ago

Reminds of another problem in restaurants, the annoying music they pipe in. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-music-playlists-ryuichi-sakamoto.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-music-p...

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d--b 8y ago

> Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet. Wrong. Restaurants are so loud because people are so loud. My wife and I were at Freeman's in Downtown Manhattan the other day. It was so loud we decided to scream to see if anyone noticed. And since noone seemed to turn their heads, we screamed louder and louder, and literally no one could hear us. This is an American thing, it doesn't happen in Paris, nor in London, nor in Japan, nor in Mexico.

compiler-guy 8y ago
Yes, Americans are loud. But the acoustics of the space one talks do in fact make a difference. If the surrounding space reflects a lot of sound, the restaurant will be louder than if the surrounding space absorbs a lot of sound. And that, in fact is what the article is about.
- d--b 8y ago
  sure, yes, but architects _never_ paid attention to acoustics when designing restaurants (or maybe the very few super sound-concious).

Sniffnoy 8y ago

Non-mobile link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-restaurants-got-so-loud/576715/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r...

compsciphd 8y ago

I read once, can't remember where, that once the sound in a room with people talking reaches a certain level, it will get increasingly loud. The reason being, if sound is below a certain level, we can hear each other while we speak at normal volumes and the other person near us will be able to understand us. However, once volume reaches a certain background level, we have to raise our voices to be understood over the background noise which increases the overall background level which causes others to have to raise their voices over the new background level ever increasing.

iamlemec 8y ago
Definitely consistent with my experience. One time I was in a restaurant where this sort of arms race dynamic was occurring, and at some point a guy just did one of those really loud two-fingered whistles, then in the resulting silence said something like "let's all try to keep it down in here". It worked incredibly well, and the effect was actually very persistent.

Soundhunter 8y ago

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scirocco 8y ago

Can't believe how Joe & The Juice are allowed to play so loud music at airports

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wenc 8y ago

Tip: get noise-cancelling/in-ear headphones, and use a white-noise app like Noisli. This combination makes most cafes tolerable as a work space.