20 ms·
Everything Is Getting Louder
- technocratius 7y agoIn last few months I've travelled to the US a few times. In all 3 hotels I've stayed in, I've had to switch rooms (in one hotel even 3 times in the course of a week) due to low frequency noise of ACs of neighbouring rooms and/or general ventilation system. Ear plugs simply don't cut it anymore these days.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoThe US is generally pretty noisy. House walls are thin and there is a lot of AC and heating noise. Whenever I come back to Germany I notice how quiet the houses are due to brick walls.
- vinay427 7y agoThe church bells create a very regular cacophany from seemingly every direction however, at least here in Switzerland (can't speak for Germany). This seems to be much less common in the US.
- ridewinter 7y agoThe church in the small Swiss town I lived in rang its bell every 15 minutes, even in the middle of night. Maybe the locals find it comforting. It kept me up.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoChurch bells are the same in Germany. Church bells don't bother me but I hate white noise like heating or AC. Americans on the other hand often seem to find white noise soothing. Maybe because they grew up with it.
- skunkpocalypse 7y agoYou might be biased by the US West coast, which is an earthquake zone. Thick brick walls like that are common in the Midwestern US.
- karakot 7y agoI guess it depends, when I returned home from Cologne, I noticed how quite it is. No tram sounds, no cars sounds, no drunken crowds sounds, nobody is taking a piss in the dark corner etc.
- bgeeek 7y agoI have that in the UK, so it's not just a US problem. IME, unless you pay for an expensive/specific room, hotels seem to push you towards the horrible rooms first, mostly the noisey ones - front facing near traffic, rear rooms next to ducts/aircon systems, etc. I suffer with insomnia, so the first hint of noise and I'm off to complain/change room!
- Judgmentality 7y ago> IME, unless you pay for an expensive/specific room, hotels seem to push you towards the horrible rooms first, mostly the noisey ones So a weird tip a lot of people don't know is you get different rooms depending on how you book (this is also true for seats on airplanes). If you use Expedia or something similar you are buying from a different pool of rooms (even if the price is the same). So if you book directly with the hotel/airline you will likely get a better room/seat.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoThere isn’t a different pool of rooms (at least not in a standard chain hotel with 80 to 150 rooms), you’re just a higher value guest since people coming from travel agents offer less net income due to having to pay commissions. Also, rewards members with status get priority, because they’re spending more year round.
- Judgmentality 7y agoThank you for the correction. My limited understanding is it's actually a mixture of both (and will vary on a case by case basis), but I admit I'm not an expert.
- bluedino 7y agoHah. Last time I stayed in Chicago at The Palmer House, they just left "complimentary" earplugs on the nightstand.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- abjKT26nO8 7y agoFor me the trigger is TVs. I've been renting a flat in a poorer area for over a year now. The walls are a lot thinner than in other places. There are a lot of people today (mostly 50+ year-olds) who cannot fall to sleep without the TV on. My neighbor is one of them. And the thing with TVs is that the most irritating sound frequency they emit is the one that is barely audible when you're in the same room, but when you are in the next room and trying to sleep it is the main frequency that you hear. Another problem is that with a cheaper flat came generally noisier neighbors, i.e. frequently throwing out late-night parties, denying anyone around the luxury of sleep. Then there are dogs whose owners don't seem to realize that dogs need to be walked and otherwise they will bark without end. This happens most often in the mornings and can go on for 2 hours easily and sets the tone for the day just right... It seems dog owners develop a special indifference to noise and their dogs. All of that made me miserable. There were actually moments when this situation triggered suicidal thoughts. I don't have a problem with cars passing by on the nearby high-speed road. If anything, the sound they make (very different from the sound of cars in traffic) is calming during the night. I've recently got a new job which pays a lot better than the previous one, so in a couple of months I plan to move to a quieter neighborhood.
- htk 7y agoI use Howard Leight’s Max every night during sleep to keep my sanity.
- abjKT26nO8 7y agoAs blunte pointed out[1], earplugs make the situation worse. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237273
- caseyf7 7y agoAnother reason why drones should be banned from residential and public areas.
- LeoPanthera 7y agoThat seems like quite a leap. Drones are far from the worse source of noise. They can’t even stay in the air that long.
- tbihl 7y agoPlus you don't notice them once they get about 100-150 feet up.
- btrettel 7y agoWhoever decided to make cars beep when you lock or unlock them did humanity a disservice in my view. I don't think the small benefit of helping the driver locate their vehicle outweighs the shear number of times that has woken people up.
- zamadatix 7y agoI don't usually find the lock beeping to be noticeable, certainly not louder than people's cars starting or that one asshole with the "loud and proud" engine that likes to idle it for heat in the morning. What gets me are the people that have car alarms. I've never seen one do anything useful and people still get them. One in particular goes off weekly to the point I'm amazed it hasn't gone off due to someone putting a crowbar through the windshield. I just can't imagine having one of these go off weekly and 1) not disable it after the third time 2) not have "this must drive everyone bonkers" come across my mind.
- opencl 7y agoWho has a car without an alarm? Almost everything manufactured in at least the past 2 decades has one installed from the factory, at least in the US.
- macintux 7y agoNot my 2005 Jeep Wrangler, and I don’t recall my 2012 Civic having one, but I didn’t have it very long so that may be a flawed recollection.
- petre 7y agoThe Civic doesn't have an alarm and does not beep when you lock it. German cars and appliances do. Like our coffee filter. We make "achtung! alarm!" jokes about it all the time.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoCar alarms come standard in most cars, and you generally can't disable them (that's the point). Even my 20 year old VW has a car alarm, and there's no simple way to disable it, short of never locking my car door or disconnecting the horns (which are also activated by pressing on the steering wheel). I wish I could disable it, because this specific model has faulty door-open sensors that sometimes detect an open door when it's shut, triggering the alarm.
- zamadatix 7y agoFor anyone looking for what the article is (mainly) about before reading it all: chiller whine for large datacenters/complexes between 630-1000 Hertz. Ironically at no point in the story did anyone actually find out how loud the noise was.
- jjeaff 7y agoThat's what was so weird to me. The guy was an engineer and it never occurred to him to go out and get some scientific measurements? Instead, he just wastes time sending daily emails to city council members and contacting other authorities like the police. It also appears that the sounds not only don't bother most everyone else, but they can't even hear them. If you are going to make such a concerted effort to fix something, at least get some objective data or else you risk looking like someone with a mental illness or like someone who is "allergic" to WiFi.
- t34543 7y agoI suffer from misophonia, I can’t live in an apartment or work from an office. It’s really difficult to deal with. Everyone is used to loud noises and nobody cares, but I get seriously annoyed.
- wozniacki 7y agoSo how do you deal with it? Are there any federal rules / regulations currently in the pipeline to help such sufferers? Do other countries - perhaps Scandinavian - have standardized noise norms that you cannot exceed or are they pretty much non-existent everywhere?
- Swizec 7y agoAs a fellow misophonia enthusiast (it’s not an officially recognised condition) — noise cancelling headphones and music are the only way I can survive office environments. A pinch of stoicism and deep breaths helps when stuff gets through. For me the worst trigger sounds are eating noises and crinkly food wrappers. Trying to open a crinkly wrapper quietly makes it worse. The misophonia gets worse when I’m otherwise stressed which leads me to believe dealing with it is like dealing with any other stressor: You just man or woman up and deal. Me and my sister both have it so we obviously used to use it to poke fun at the other. Squishing bananas in your mouth is the quickest way to provoke a reaction. You might get punched* *the punching response is, of course, restrained in the office. If I get that annoyed, I just walk away.
- lowercased 7y agoloud road noises have made it hard to go to sleep. white noise generators (well, brown) using cheap $5 earbuds has helped immensely. I have Bose qc-20 for daytime stuff, but you can't sleep with them very long - they'll break, and it's very expensive to replace. The $5 earbuds don't last forever, but I often get 2-3 months out of a pair.
- oriettaxx 7y agothe worst are * bells from catholic churches (when they play early Sunday morning they just invite you to blaspheme) * muezzin shouting from the mosque (aggravated from the fact that they talk Arabic, were in many countries, e.g. Turkey, nobody talks arabic, so nobody understand!) and the worst of the worst is that in both cases sound comes from tapes (no live at all, and very bad taped). Any national new legislation must face this issue: as to say it will be very hard deal with, without touching religions' susceptibility.
- WalterBright 7y ago> bells from catholic churches The huge bronze bells in Germany are another thing entirely. They sound wonderful (dare I say heavenly?). But the cheap electric klaxons used in American churches are horrible.
- Ao7bei3s 7y agoThere's nothing wonderful about them when you live half a km/mi from them and they go off at 9AM, don't stop for 10-15 minutes and you really wanted to sleep.
- jfnixon 7y agoI'm sure they put them up after you moved to that location, correct?
- loco5niner 7y agoHonestly, It's hard to fault someone for failing to notice something that happens irregularly like that. Unless you're willing to camp out in the front yard of a prospective home 24x7 for a week, you're likely to miss this. The onus is on the noisemaker to make less noise, not everyone else to avoid the area. If they didn't move there, someone else with less money would have.
- rogerthis 7y agoThat's surely a sign.
- CalChris 7y agoI have 3M PELTOR X5A Ear Muffs. I use them all the time, from getting a snooze while my car charges, to working in louder than necessary cafes, to getting decent if slightly uncomfortable sleep in a hotel. They're $31 delivered from Amazon. It amused the hell out of me that I had to click through an agreement saying I was a profession. I am a professional. Since these are 31db ear muffs, they're heavier than something with less protection. These are over the head model and I may get the X5B behind the neck model. Harder to get though. Not on Amazon. I tried noise cancelling headphones. When they work, they're great. But anything unusual and I'd get feedback. Dumb ear muffs work all the time plus they're super ugly and so people leave you alone. I don't understand why noise cancelling doesn't recognize it's in feedback.
- vinay427 7y agoNoise isolating ear tips or IEMs for listening to audio are another great option if you want to maybe sacrifice a little bit of comfort for wonderful audio reproduction and probably portability/convenience.
- jcrawfordor 7y agoA local industrial supply house like Grainger should have a range of Peltor products available in-store, so you'll get to try them on first. Look for any general industrial supply or specifically safety distributor in the warehouse-and-factories part of town, they're almost always happy to sell you one unit. Otherwise these kinds of things can be hard to find. Otherwise McMaster-Carr is a mail/online-order industrial supply house, their online ordering is just a bit old-fashioned and they do more 'white-box' than name brand.
- blunte 7y agoMany people either cannot hear very low frequency sound, and they cannot understand what it’s like for those of us who can. The sounds don’t necessarily get louder at night - there are just fewer competing sounds to mask them. Earplugs and other sound barriers make it worse by filtering out higher frequency sounds, making the remaining VLF sounds seem louder. VLFs also penetrate earth, stone, concrete, etc. And because of their long periods, especially when accidentally synced with parallel walls, some locations in your house can behave like an amplifier. There’s no real solution other than moving, and there’s no guarantee that human progress will not catch up with you in your next location.
- riku_iki 7y agoDo you have any citations to support this claim?..
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DocNoise 7y agoMost of what I am writing is pretty basic otoneurological knowledge. Researchers like Bohne, Harding, Dallos, Salt, Lichtenhan, Hudspeth, Moller, Kugler, Drexel et al. have published extensively on this issue. Some links to peer-revieved literature are listed in my Stackexchange post.
- crazygringo 7y agoI have never heard of this and have a hard time believing it but I’m curious. What causes “low frequency sound” for you? And why do you think other people can’t hear it? At low frequencies tones degrade into individual pulses but can still be heard/felt. Noise-cancelling headphones actually work best with low frequencies like train and plane noise... do those help you? Googling “VLF” only gives results about radio waves, none I can find referring to sound waves...
- blunte 7y agoi’m not going to post the same reply twice, but if you would read my reply to a sibling post you’ll see what i’m talking about.
- surfmike 7y agoFor those who own their place and can afford it, I found this site a great resource for soundproofing. https://www.soundproofingcompany.com/soundproofing-solutions/soundproofing-ceilings https://www.soundproofingcompany.com/soundproofing-solutions...
- Waterluvian 7y agoMy wife and I bought our first house this summer. We moved from a city of 300k to the suburbs of a city of 40k about 45 mins away. We thought through a ton of things when buying but the one thing that caught us by surprise was the change in noise level. It's quiet here. The only ambience is a train that runs through the middle of the city like 10-20 times a day but we are far enough away that this this wonderfully peaceful low rumble for a minute. I fall asleep to it. The inside is also an interesting lesson on noise. The main floor is a big open concept with 10 foot ceilings. Sound echoes like mad and we were forced, counter intuitively, to speak more quietly if we wanted to hear each other across the room. I think it's slowly training us to be quieter people and I love it for no immediate practical reason.
- heymijo 7y agoDo you have neighbors and/or are you in an area with lawns that need maintenance? Suburbs in the midwest are inundated with noise: lawnmowers, leaf blowers, trimmers, and cars.
- Waterluvian 7y agoOur neighborhood is built into a protected maple forest. Beautiful 100foot maple trees. The side effect is that most back yards don't have grass. Mine is artificial. And front yards grow a shade grass that people cut irregularly. Leaf blowers just aren't a thing anywhere I've lived. Another random tidbit I thought about corded electric mower is not quiet but far quieter than my neighbours' mowers. They aren't bad!
- heymijo 7y agoThat sounds very nice!
- Waterluvian 7y agoUp until a tree falls on us one day. :)
- 7y ago
- myroon5 7y agoThe number of appliances that intentionally make noise and cannot be configured to stop making noise irks me. I never want microwaves, dishwashers, laundry machines, etc. to make any noise. Even worse is how many of them continue making noise until you unload them. I'd like to one day be able to run a load of laundry or dishes overnight without being constantly woken up.
- tempestn 7y agoMany newer washers and dryers can be configured not to make a noise at the end of the cycle. (Of course they will make some noise when running, but I assume that's not what you're talking about.)
- myroon5 7y agoThat would be perfect.. still unfortunate for renters stuck around less configurable appliance models
- dpark 7y agoHow is being a renter relevant? If the appliance has a beep that can be turned off, the renter can turn it off as easily as the owner. Just find the user manual for the appliance online.
- myroon5 7y ago"If the appliance has a beep that can be turned off" If it doesn't, you're out of luck
- matttproud 7y agoTry living in a place (e.g., the U.S.) where being a renter carries the assumption[1] with being in the bottom-third economic bracket with the property owners thereby opting to provision units with the cheapest-available accoutrement and equipment (often the most poorly-designed). Poor product design often entails poor user experience like environmental pollution of light and sound. [1] --- Exclude high-income and nominal high-cost metropolises like New York or Bay Area.
- KoftaBob 7y agoOne of the biggest benefits of electric vehicles will be quieter streets. Gasoline cars are so damn loud when you really pay attention.
- clarry 7y agoRound where I live, it's the wheel noise that gives me a massive headache whenever I go for a walk. Engine noise barely registers, except in the case of some (intentionally) loud cars or trucks. Simply reducing speed limit in urban & residental areas would help a lot, but that appears to be an unpopular proposition. I guess people really are in a hurry to sit in the next set of red lights.
- stellar678 7y agoTwenty's plenty! Popular in the UK, but in the US we seem to think it's more appropriate to mark residential streets at 25 but design them to encourage driving at 45+.
- ridewinter 7y agoThere's a decent chance we're now at peak noise. EVs and self driving cars that don't honk their horns becoming more and more ubiquitous. Someday electric trucks. Better appliances. Silent discos becoming more and more popular:) A clean & silent future is a happy thought.
- hadlock 7y agoI'm looking forward to this. We live near a tourist area and by far and away the largest noise contributors are the 400-600hp diesel engines of the tour busses. They seem to have two modes, slow/low idle of about 650rpm, and then fast idle of about 1200 rpm. Both are banned with big red signs up and down the street but the drivers either don't notice or don't care that they are by far and away the largest noise contributors to the neighborhood.
- MisterTea 7y agoI can understand how low frequency sound can be incredibly annoying. Oddly, some are soothing to me. There's this point when waking up where if I hear a gentle hum, it becomes comforting and I want to lay there and listen until it lulls me to sleep. There was something about the distant hum of the old Mack DSNY trucks, before the Volvo engine switch. I'd wake up to them but it was so nice to just lay in bed with that sound. I can also hear the MTA subway diesel engines on the elevated tracks a block from me. I also used to enjoy the sound of my mother vacuuming down stairs when I was a kid sleeping in on the weekend. At work I sometimes retreat to the pump room where the whine of machinery can be sort of soothing. I do have this ADHD anxiety thing and my head gets all swirly with things so the noise helps. Sometimes I use a white noise sleep app and combine a few machine sounds into a sort of whining whirr of machinery. And I put it on low as if I'm sleeping in a room off down the hall from a machinery room. Though sometimes it can be too much. Sometimes you just want to turn the sound off. I do hear a hum at night in my south Queens NYC neighborhood. Always begins around 9PM. I can't explain it but it's like a buzzing whirr that pulsates or whines a few times and then dies out in an echoey fashion. Then comes back minutes later. Often with large gaps between them. I could even describe it as almost like some alien spacecraft engine whine from a sci fi flick. They don't bother me a lot but if it became constant, I don't think I could sleep as its very low and shrill. I am near JFK and major roads so who knows.
- bob1029 7y agoAs a gulf coast region resident, I can attest to this phenomenon. When the cold front came through this weekend, it was like someone just turned down the volume outside. The difference is incredible, but you can never quite put your finger on any particular source. I do think it's just everyone's HVAC compressors & fans combining into this noise soup. Everyone says they can sleep better when it's colder at night, but I think it's just because it's so much quieter at night around here when its below 70F. The noise floor had to have dropped by 6dB or better overnight.
- excalibur 7y agoTinnitus sufferer here. Left ear no longer hears anything in the environment, but rings loudly at all times. Stereo is a distant memory, locating the source of any noise involves spinning in a circle. Let me get out my tiniest violin for you all.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoThe article includes an interview with Stéphane Pigeon of mynoise.net, a website for creating dynamic noise machines. I use it all the time and think it would appeal to a lot of people on HN.
- spicyusername 7y agoClick bait title should actually read "Everything is getting louder for people who live near loud things"...
- boomlinde 7y agoPeople are increasingly living near loud things.
- fancyfish 7y agoIn NYC the screeching of the subway trains at the station is easily loud enough to be physically painful to my ears. Especially in underground local stations where you have a local train arriving + express trains rolling past. That can be 90-100 decibels (equivalent to a jet engine taking off 300m away). Restaurants here are regularly 70-90 decibels. Equivalent to the noise of a blender next to you. Everything in the restaurant reflects sound and its not unusual to be sitting about 2 feet from the person at the table next to you. I’m genuinely worried for my long-term hearing living here. Noise-cancelling headphones and even ear plugs are a must.
- paulcole 7y agoWhat decibel meter are you using to get those readings? Seems insane that the loudest restaurant is equivalent to a jet engine taking off.
- leetcrew 7y agosmall, busy restaurants without sound deadening can be really loud, but I doubt it's actually 90dB. that's like the opening band at a small music venue.
- udfalkso 7y agoIt’s a real phenomenon. Most restaurants aren’t quite that high but there are a surprisingly large amount that are. I’m the cofounder of an app that crowd sources noise levels at bars and restaurants. You may find it useful. It’s called SoundPrint.
- fancyfish 7y agoI am in a restaurant now, a midsize place doing brunch, and my Apple Watch is recording 80 decibels. It would be louder if I were at a table but I’m off to the side at the bar. I enjoyed this article, albeit it’s from 2012: “Working or Playing Indoors, New Yorkers Face an Unabated Roar” (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/nyregion/in-new-york-city-indoor-noise-goes-unabated.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/nyregion/in-new-york-city...) For more reading, there are articles for various cities linked at the bottom of this NIH page: https://www.noisyplanet.nidcd.nih.gov/have-you-heard/noise-levels-restaurants https://www.noisyplanet.nidcd.nih.gov/have-you-heard/noise-l...
- spodek 7y agoI live across the street from a firehouse in Manhattan. They are noisy and politically untouchable so calling 311 doesn't help. They test these devices to get through doors that are basically chainsaws every day at random times. I once asked a fireman why they test them daily. He said, "It would be a shame to find out it didn't work when we got there." I asked innocently, "When you test it, you know it works, but as soon as you stop it, you don't know if it works any more. That test might have been its last working. How do you know daily is the right amount?" He said, "It would be a shame to find out it didn't work when we got there." I took away that there was no reason for daily. They just did it that way. If anyone out there knows a proper testing frequency for chainsaws, I'd love to find out, especially if it's well documented and less often than daily.
- BurningFrog 7y agoMy impression is that there isn't much to do in a firehouse when there is no fire. So "testing the chainsaw again" might end up being done a lot. Since it's a thing you can do.
- brendanw 7y agoI vaguely recall reading a few articles about how firehouses are less necessary as we have less fires today, but we struggle to reduce their numbers as they are heavily unionized. This is the narrative I at least have floating in my mind. https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/19/palo-alto-cuts-11-firefighter-jobs-after-stanford-reduces-contract/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/19/palo-alto-cuts-11-fir...
- switch007 7y agoThis is a UK perspective but IMO much of the reduction in fires has been because of the work done by the Fire Brigade. Education, information campaigns, pushing for reforms, calls to action etc. Any reduction in numbers – and the manner in which it happens (in case it has a multiplying effect of disuasing new recruits when they're actually needed) – should be done very, very carefully.
- 01100011 7y agoIf you don't hear a hum, don't look for it. Once you're aware of it, it can drive you nuts. I spent quite a while looking for the source of a low-frequency hum at my old house and never came up with anything. As far as I could tell, it wasn't just the sound of blood rushing in my veins or tinnitus. Out of curiosity, is there a good sensor for picking up acoustical vibrations between, say, 0.5-50Hz? Would a MEMS sensor go that low and have a flat response?
- Simulacra 7y agoWasn't there some type of legislation or something that mandated that all sound from a single TV channel stay at the same volume? IIRC it was something around the car commercials etc. that were always louder that the other programs.
- thaumaturgy 7y agoI slept for about 18 months in a second-story room overlooking one of the busier streets in town. That'll never happen again. Motorcycles were especially obnoxious; I usually sleep like the dead, including all the way through an energetic northern California earthquake, but we had a regular that would rip up and down the street sometime after 1 a.m. and it often interrupted my sleep. Also -- and this hasn't previously been a popular thing to say on HN, but here it is again -- this is largely an urban living problem. Smaller towns have their noisy bits too, but they don't tend to have the constant, non-stop din that is a signature aspect of metropolitan areas. I've been camping at a few different parks and the like since moving out, just getting some R&R, and it's amazing how much better I'm sleeping and, gradually, feeling.
- ProfessorLayton 7y agoI used to live near a freeway exit, and motorcycles were by far the worst compared to literally any other traffic. They are dangerously loud, and can cause ear damage. The silver lining is that obnoxiously loud bikes are a dying breed (Harley Davidson sales have been taking for years) + general electrification of personal transportation should quiet things up in the not too distant future.
- toastal 7y agoI live in an area where old Vespa scooters from the 70s-80s are used as the main form of transportation for textiles between businesses probably because of the wide rack at the back and ease of buying used vehicle. Not only do most of them spit out blue smoke, but the putter of the engine is absurd compared to anything modern. Counter point that with electric scooters that scare you when they whiz by because they're barely audible and there's hope for a future.
- bllguo 7y agosimilar situation for me currently but i manage to survive using a white noise machine. I also leave the fan on in the summer for the noise. I wonder if I would feel better if i transitioned to a quiet sleeping environment. i've thought many times about how loud motorcycles are even legal, especially at late hours. I even see ebikes that are just as loud which is absolutely insane to me. The worst part was when my downstairs neighbor owned a motorcycle. Occasionally he'd rev the engine or something at 1 am for 10 whole minutes before actually driving it away. Very thankful he's gone now.
- egypturnash 7y ago> Everything is getting louder > posted by tintinnabula Eponysterical.
- liquidify 7y agoI've got a low frequency hum that has been permeating my environment for years. I have no idea where it is coming from. Low frequencies are especially hard to locate by ear due to their omnidirectional nature. I'm pretty sure there is nothing I can do about it. It has messed up my ability to record music though. I used to be able to record and mix in my living room but that has not been possible for many years now without constantly hearing that noise.
- goda90 7y agoI was pleasantly surprised when I walked out in front of my house the other day. When we bought it last year, in early spring, we had hoped the nearby small wooded area would block out some freeway noise once the leaves grew in, but it didn't help. Now there's a big new high school under construction between us and the freeway. That direction is almost entirely silent in the evening. We might not be so lucky when football games start next year, but that's better than constant engine braking sounds.
- epistasis 7y agoI found this article's style infuriatingly slow. If it had been a quarter or a third of the length I think it would have been much stronger. It took quite a while to figure out what the hell was going on. And then you get to things like this halfway through: > Thallikar took his campaign to his homeowners’ association and to his neighbors. The response was tepid, though he did persuade one person to email the city. Which makes it seem like it's just the personal bugaboo of one person rather than a serious problem, and having read far too many words already I just want to give up. Where were the editors for this piece?
- umeshunni 7y agoThe article clocked in at 8900 words and had a vague click-baity 'tech industry' sub-title. Hard pass.
- x220 7y agoJesus Christ that's longer than a novel chapter. What kind of conceited ass actually writes this and thinks it's good?
- belltaco 7y agohttps://www.azmirror.com/2019/04/01/bill-aims-to-incentivize-data-centers-as-residents-plug-their-ears/ https://www.azmirror.com/2019/04/01/bill-aims-to-incentivize...
- billfruit 7y agoI have been getting that feeling about some articles on the Atlantic in the recent months, poor editing resulting in overlong articles when the subject matter plainly does not require such confused and long winded treatment.
- Laforet 7y agoI liked the structure and delivery. The writer tries to sound sympathetic and paint the complaints as genuine, but it's delibrately left vague whether the person was misunderstood or delusional judging by the reaction of everyone else in the story. The seek for vindication motivates the reader to follow the text and the payoff was very well executed towards the end. I'm sorry you didn't like it but it doesn't take that long to read anyway. Maybe a Medium style "time to read" notice would have helped, but I just think people don't give long form content the respect it deserves.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoLoudly beeping lifts in stations, like a fire alarm, while no moving parts whatsover are exposed inside or outside. The beeping of cars when the doors are open. The short blaring of car alarms, when they are closed remotely via key fob, just to make sure they work! The beeping of bus and train doors when they are closing. The banging hissing vents of overpressure in the pneumatic tanks of busses and trucks. The humming and hissing of HVAC for the refrigeration of supermarkets. The blaring of music in supermarkets (special case: Kylie Minogue with 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' which somehow seems to be in the eternal Top 20ies of supermarket music. La la la, lall lall, la la la lall lall....), the penetrant marketing displays activating from some endless loop when anything comes near them. The stupid video walls in stations, blaring uninteresting shortnews, weather, and adverstisements while almost everybody is sunken into their smartphones. Talk about wasted effort! The same goes for so called information displays in Trains, Subways, Metros, Buses installed every 2nd to 3rd row of seats. I could, and sometimes do counter that with something playing over my earphones, but i don't like to, because it messes with my situational awareness.
- laegooose 7y agoOh man, good to know I'm not alone
- emptybits 7y agoIf your acoustic environment is driving you nuts, you may want to speak to an audiologist and/or ENT. There is a condition called hyperacusis[1] worth asking about. If everyday noise is debilitating or anxiety-inducing for and it doesn't seem like others are affected to the degree you are, it wouldn't hurt to speak to a hearing specialist. The causes and treatments of this (spectrum?) condition aren't entirely agreed upon, but tinnitus retraining therapy or other adaptation techniques might improve your life. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis
- hmwhy 7y agoThank you very much for pointing that out! I'm not sure why it never occurred to me that mine could be a medical condition, and all this time I have been quietly hating myself for being extremely intolerant of others while the condition gets worse.
- ars 7y agoI hate motorcycles, AKA fart-mobiles. Why do all of them seem to have broken mufflers? Is it really that hard to make motorcycle mufflers so they don't break?
- nshepperd 7y agoPeople intentionally remove them to make them louder.
- mmckelvy 7y agoMan made noise is certainly a nuisance, but I think “nature” is not always as quiet as we like to think. A few years ago I spent a week out in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle — miles from anyone. One thing that stuck with me was how loud the jungle was, especially at night. The bugs would start buzzing around dusk, the frogs would add to the chorus around midnight with loud croaking, and then in the wee hours of the morning we’d be treated to the piercing shrieks of monkeys. Not exactly an ideal soundscape for a peaceful night’s sleep or quiet reflection.
- Itsdijital 7y agoWhy are we building data centers in the desert? From an efficiency perspective, it just seems like a comically bad idea.
- Animats 7y agoThere's an app opportunity here. Write something which captures audio, timestamps it with millsecond accuracy, annotates it with GPS info, and sends it to a web site for correlation. When you want to find some noise source, get a few people to walk around running this app. Then the site can locate it from the time differences, with a much longer baseline than human inter-ear distance.
- j-conn 7y agoLove this idea. My first thought is that calibrating mics could be difficult. I wonder how good existing decibel meter apps are
- Animats 7y agoYou locate using time, not amplitude, so microphone calibration isn't an issue. Take the incoming waveforms with close timestamps and convolve them on the server to line them up. Get ΔT values for each pair of phones picking up the matching sound. Each ΔT value places the source on a hyperbola. You need at least 3 phones to get a location where the hyperbolas intersect. More will be better. Multipath always makes a delay longer, not shorter, which helps in resolving ambiguity in areas with reflective building walls.
- wutbrodo 7y agoFrom the subtitle: > The tech industry is producing a rising din. Our bodies can’t adapt. This is a great article, but did I miss something or is this subtitle more or less irrelevant? The only source of noise mentioned related to the tech industry is the lead-in story's data center cooling system, and 95% of the article has nothing to do with it. This is interesting to me in and of itself: it's another unfortunate example of The Atlantic's long-established internal struggle between quality journalism and clickbait, but it's also another fascinating data point for how the term "tech industry" has become a universal-purpose scapegoat for the kinds of simpletons looking for simple, singular explanations for all of the world's ills.
- sak5sk 7y agoEver since I moved to the states, I've had nothing but stress from noise. First in Midwest where neighbor never walked their dog. They blasted music at 3 am (confronted many times and all). Then on the west coast - noisy streets nearby my apt. Then between the 405 and the 5 in Irvine (the highway noise never ends) Then again when I moved to Washington and had an upstairs neighbor who would have kids over every day running, all day no carpets. When running stopped, vacuum came on. Rinse and repeat. All those years I have developed hate for the way things were. It seems no matter where I went there was no escape from noise. Three years ago I moved to rural Japan and my life has changed dramatically. Over here, everyone has kids in my neighborhood. Naturally, they get quiet around 8pm and I don't hear a single sound by 9-10pm. It's been heaven. Now when I sleep through the night it's dead silent and I can rest my weary soul. The area lacks in so many other ways, but the dead silence of the night makes up for all of them. I wish everyone had a chance to sleep in complete silence (unless you are one of those people that needs sound to sleep).
- burntoutfire 7y agoI'm quite sensitive to noises. Here are some of my hard-learned lessons: - try to always rent the flat on the top floor - the noises coming through the celing are by far the worst. The roofs in my country are usually poorly insulated, which means hot apartment in the summer. It's still better than the noise - heat can be dealt with by installing AC, while you can't do anything about the neighbors. - try to live in a building with as few apartments as possible. Noise travels well through construction materials, and if you live in say 200-meter long building, chances are there will often be someone currently renovating his flat with a jackhammer etc. and that noise will be infuriatingly loud in your apartment. - no windows coming out to the street that's a transit street (i.e. used regularly by anyone else than the people who live on the street and around). Double no if public transit goes there. Also, it's worse to have a window near a crossroad with lights or near a turn (people slow down and/or stop there, and then accelerating generates a lot of noise). Ideally, no windows coming on a street at all, but for example cull-de-sac road is ok, because it's guaranteed to be used by locals only. Apart from that, I'm always insiting on seeing some landscape, or at least a big patch of the sky, out of my window. Nothing more depressing than 100% of your view being just a wall of the opposing building.
- pythonbase 7y agoLiving in Karachi, Pakistan, I so agree with this. Karachi is 3rd largest city in the world and it is getting louder by the day. First thing you notice when you land here is the level of noise. From honking cars to people shouting on the roads, it is unbearable.
- IkmoIkmo 7y agoI think it's time we start to think seriously about noise pollution and regulation. Most countries have laws around noise, but policing typically isn't helpful. You tend to have a 'self-mediation first', 'police warnings second' and 'court cases third', policy, which I think is mostly fine. But if authorities don't take it seriously, it usually gets stuck in the first phase and never progresses beyond neighbour-disputes. Frequent-noise makers aren't typically the most reasonable bunch to speak to.
- xavi 7y agoI think that when there's regulation, the problem is that sometimes filing a complaint may take too much time, and same for the police to check anything. It should be automated. I submitted this to Hacker News some months ago, and seems relevant here... Tell HN: Steal idea for product to automate reporting of barking dogs complaints https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436807 (although I was thinking of dog barking when I wrote it, it's actually applicable for any kind of noise pollution)
- kingofpee 7y ago“Sound is when you mow your lawn, noise is when your neighbor mows their lawn, and music is when your neighbor mows your lawn,” says Arjun Shankar, Someone should develop a silent air handling system
- huffmsa 7y agoNoise isn't really what these people are complaining about, it's manmade noise. The loudest thing I've ever hear is the sound of total silence. Your brain is so used to hearing something that it will manufacture sound when you're completely isolated, and it does a bad job of it. Which is why sensory deprivation makes great torture.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y agoI've also heard (pun not intended) that the ear itself and the sensory system has an inherent "noise floor", you can hear it when you are in an anechoic chamber.
- huffmsa 7y agoIt's that sound that the brain tries to amplify up to normal volumes. The sound of the little hairs swishing, blood flowing, shit (literal) moving through your guts. A decent write-up here https://www.wired.com/2015/05/big-question-can-silence-make-hear-things-arent/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/big-question-can-silence-make-...
- laegooose 7y agoThis thread is amazing. People I know don't care much about sounds, and I feel alone with me being easily annoyed by all the sirens, honks, music, PA in airports, cars blazing by, etc. Good to know there are more people who care about silent environment.
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- GWSchulz 7y agoHell yeah.