20 ms·

Noise pollution hurts the heart

246 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
I see the top few comments talking about motorcycles, leaf blowers, and automobiles. My pet peeve are jets. Living within ~5 miles of an air force base, or any major airport, is terrible. Everyone stops what they're doing for the for whatever duration a plane is in the area. Local and state politicians are powerless to do anything because of "the jobs".
- joncrane 6y ago
  That's a good one. Mine is helicopters. Military Blackhawks and a Sikorsky known as Marine-1 at times, to be specific. I live on the flight path from the White House to Camp David and they practice this flight multiple times per week. It makes sense because they need a full roster of people so they can provide minimum 2-deep 24 hour coverage and the folks need to be able to do it in their sleep in any weather conditions. It's still jarring to hear a trio of Blackhawks fly past me at a relatively low altitude.
- undefined1 6y ago
  imagine adding flying cars to the mix! it'd be hard to escape.
belly_joe 6y ago
I feel the sound -> stress connection palpably. Especially sudden loud noises like a horn honking cause me to feel upset for a long while after being startled. Seems like a convincing argument to me for car-free spaces, although honestly I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car's horn.
- Guest42 6y ago
  Agreed. I also don’t like it when locking a car via remote causes the horn to go off and in order to make sure people hit it multiple times.
  - stevenpetryk 6y ago
    There's someone who does this every day outside my apartment at around 7:15. It is infuriating. 4-5 loud, inconsistently-spaced honks "just to be sure" when I'm sure their car locks silently on the first request. Most modern cars only beep if you lock them twice.
  - RootReducer 6y ago
    A neighbor used to come home from work late at night and lock their doors three or four times, and every time it would wake me up. I wish there was a silent door lock and it would just flash the headlights.
    - emdashcomma 6y ago
      My car lets me configure it to work that way. It's one of my favorite features. I haven't heard it honk on lock in years.
      - exac 6y ago
        Most cars have this if you look in the user manual. Even old cars with no graphical radio have konami-code-like sequences of button presses you can input to turn them off.
        dazc 6y ago
        Maybe no surprise to learn that, for a person who thinks it acceptable for the horn to sound for no real reason, this would be considered far too much effort?
    - csunbird 6y ago
      Cars in Europe lock silently.
    - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      I’m in Australia and I have never seen a car that doesn’t lock this way, you hear a slight mechanical latching sound and the lights flash.
- airstrike 6y ago
  I have this wild pet idea that we should be have a meter connected to a car's horn and at the end of the year you have to pay a bill for the amount you used. Something like $0.10 / second. You'll still honk when you need to but think twice before using it to annoy other drivers.
  - flycaliguy 6y ago
    I like your thinking but the dystopian reality would be a wealthy elite class of honkers giving us all heart attacks.
    - teddyh 6y ago
      Scale it by income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
  - ricardobayes 6y ago
    Spanish drivers surely go bankrupt after a week :) It's common here to toot the horn to greet a friend. And since everyone knows everyone, everyone toots all the time.
    - dgrcode 6y ago
      Well not everywhere in Spain, but definitely in some places. I lived in a small town where that was the case. Some people used to meet at a small shop just in front of my house and cars would honk all the time just to say hi. They would then stop the car and actually talk with them, but honking was somehow mandatory
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    > Something like $0.10 / second This is a low enough cost that I bet people would use and hold their horn for longer, to show their annoyance in $.
    - airstrike 6y ago
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  I have stopped explaining people how my neighbor's friends honking when coming in and leaving drives me up the wall. There's the sound and then there's the rage from "that was fucking useless to do, you just spent 15 minutes saying goodbye on the doorstep, it 11PM, please be quiet" but I am the grumpy one. So I say nothing anymore. Fun thing is, when I am in the city, I like opening the windows in summer and car noises don't bother me much because it's normal and part of the scenery. But then I am perfectly capable of putting on my pajamas past 10PM, climb down the stairs from the flat to the street, knock on the car's window and ask the driver to turn off the engine because the low humming noise I hear in my bed is driving me insane. It's when the sound is useless and could be easily prevented that I get crazy. Misophonia very much also.
  - dazc 6y ago
    Maybe it's the lack of consideration that annoys you more than the noise itself?
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      Definitely, should have written it down in my comment rather than describing my experience. This is a huge aspect of what grinds my gears. But there's also some speech patterns that get on my nerves in public transport and it's not really (at least most of the time) a lack of consideration from the people though (but it happens way less often).
      - chrbr 6y ago
        Yeah, that's the part that gets me too - the lack of consideration. I live near a hospital and have zero problem with the near-constant sirens, but people gunning their loud engines at stoplights will cause me to rage.
    - remir 6y ago
      Not the parent, but that's the main reason for me. I can tolerate loud noises like thunder, road work, renovation in the building (at reasonable hours, of course) without much of an issue. However, stuff like - Modified motorcycle that makes an insane amount of noise for no intelligent reasons - People playing bassy music that resonate across the walls of the entire building (low frequencies) - Constant pop music everywhere you go Are seriously getting on my nerves.
- firstfewshells 6y ago
  Well, I hope you never have to travel to India where people honk when the red light is on. Why? Coz they're bored and they "want" the light to turn green.
  - fwn 6y ago
    For the sake of the people living in India we probably all hope that such norms fade over time. I've read about an experiment where increasing the noise level of carhorns on the inside of the car reduced horn usage significantly. Maybe there's some smart way to use tweaks like that in future regulation.
- frankish 6y ago
  I strongly empathize. I usually wait a few seconds, then just flash my high beams for most situations.
- Karawebnetwork 6y ago
  I wonder if ear plugs help at all. My partner snores so I wear them at night. Even then, sometimes I get woken up by the low frequencies of large trucks idling (snow removal operations, mostly). The vibrations are not even felt in my ears but through my entire body.
  - jeanofthedead 6y ago
    When earplugs fail (as in the case of neighbor's bass, partner's snoring, or rambunctious nocturnal pets), I highly recommend the Bose SleepBuds II. Best purchase of the year for me, and my sleep tracking apps have proven to me that these things work. Might be worth looking into.
    - Karawebnetwork 6y ago
      This is amazing. I am surprised I never noticed this product before. I even tried to sleep with my Bose headset (this was unsuccessful as it's hard to sleep with those on.) Have you tried it? Do you consider it would block the loud snoring of a large man? The website says it's not active noise canceling but noise masking. My ear plugs are masking 38dB and the snoring makes it through. So I am worried that I would end up hearing heavy snoring with a musical background.
  - RootReducer 6y ago
    This is my issue too. Earplugs don't help for idling trucks, or subwoofers. Nothing I've found does.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  This was interesting for me, too. At the end of 2017 I moved into a new apartment, with a great view on a very busy road. I immediately felt much more "off". Maybe stressed in a way, but since I'm not usually the stressed kind, I had a hard time identifying the feeling. At around the same time, the AC in the office developed a constant hum. This drove me nuts. When I went to my parents' house in the suburbs, I could hear the silence and really, really enjoy it. I realized that basically, during a regular day, I could never get to spend a moment in silence. There would always be some kind of noise: traffic outside my apartment window, metro / bus / traffic during the commute, random people talking / AC hum at the office. This made me wonder whether all the people that I see around me being constantly angry and "on the edge" might be that way in part because they basically never catch a break. They are constantly under this continuous noise. And I don't think we can really get used to it. I remember a friend said that I'd get used to the noise when I would complain. It's more than 3 years later, and it still annoys to me no end. I may sometimes forget the noise is there, but I think it still has its effect on my stress level. It's not like getting used to lifting weights or something to which the body adapts.
  - x3iv130f 6y ago
    It was a culture shock for me as a Californian to visit Tokyo. In my mind cities are dirty, loud, and dangerous. Tokyo despite being one of the densest and busiest cities in first world countries is incredibly clean, quiet, and safe.
    - 0_____0 6y ago
      Can you say a little bit more about this? What's the difference in how the cities are structured that makes this so?
      - avidiax 6y ago
        Very strong mass transit systems, so there are fewer cars on the road. The cars that are on the road tend to be quite new, which is a result of a stringent mandatory inspection after a car gets older that makes it more economical to export the car and buy a new one. So cars are typically in excellent repair, with a small economical engine. The driving culture is generally conservative. People don't race each other, compete for the loudest exhaust, roll coal, etc.
- kiliantics 6y ago
  > I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car I feel the same way but with the sentence stopping here
  - croddin 6y ago
    Electric cars are starting to get cheaper than ICE cars and that should contribute to making cities quieter in general.
    - kiliantics 6y ago
      yeah but it won't change how hostile cities are to the people on foot or on bikes, or how much land is destroyed to make way for urban sprawl and other road infrastructure, only a reduction in car use will change that
- pharmakom 6y ago
  A simple solution would be to require car companies to make the horn as loud inside the vehicle as it is outside. However, general motor traffic noise - tyres, engines, displaced air - is loud enough to be a serious problem anyway. I don't know how we solve this. Car dependency is so ingrained in our collective consciousness; is it politically feasible to find a way out?
  - avidiax 6y ago
    https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-noise-camera-trial-to-crack-down-on-illegal-vehicles https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-noise-camera-trial-to... Noise cameras. Just like a speed camera, but it measures noise levels and issues a ticket in the mail. There's unfortunately a regressive element (some people can't afford to fix their noisy exhaust), but I see no reason not to issue tickets for noise outside of normal hours, e.g. 7am-10pm.
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      I'd guess that most people working "outside of normal hours" are doing it by necessity doing some kind of low wage job, and therefore poorer. e.g. anyone who works in restaurants or bars or music or nightlife after 10pm, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, Uber drivers, 24/7 gas station and supermarket employees, security guards, delivery truck drivers, garbage collectors, train drivers, etc.
- defterGoose 6y ago
  That's all well and good, but the horn is, at its core, a safety device. What we really need is for law enforcement to start actually enforcing the laws we have on the books against things like loud stereos and mufflers. These are far more disruptive, especially at night when most people are trying to sleep. I'd even go so far as to posit that the link discussed between noise and heart health is actually via psychological stress, rather than physiological stress.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    This seems very location specific. Where I grew up (DC suburbs) sound systems and loud engine noise were common and I’d agree with you that was the problem. Where I live now (Seattle) neither are common but traffic congestion and impatient drivers are. Horns aren’t used for safety, they’re used to communicate crowded aggressive driving. I agree with GP that for this scenario restricting cars overall is a better solution. The laws on the books certainly apply but they’re only enforceable in a meaningful way if you have traffic cops on every arterial. And that’s not something I think anyone wants. > I'd even go so far as to posit that the link discussed between noise and heart health is actually via psychological stress, rather than physiological stress. Why is this even a distinction? The psychological stress leads to the physiological stress impact on heart health.
baron816 6y ago
There are few things that make me angrier than when a Harley-Davidson style motorcycle (or a pack of them) drive past me while I’m walking down the street. I can’t believe cities haven’t prohibited them, especially at night. Those things are specifically designed to create noise pollution. They’re so fucking obnoxious, even just thinking about it while I’m writing this is working me up.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  if the typical biker was a 24 year old hispanic man, they would be outlawed before you could say "ay caramba". Instead, boomers and genx white guys get a pass.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  Yes, it's frustrating that some people just don't believe in the human right to peace and quiet. That's one reason why I have no hope for self-organizing models of society. There are griefers who only respond to force, and it doesn't take many of them to fuck up the whole game.
  - boredumb 6y ago
    You believe we need a more authoritarian society because some people live lives that are louder than you deem appropriate and enough so that you are willing to 'respond with force' and you somehow see them as the people who are "fucking up the whole game"?
    - dilutedh2o 6y ago
      amen
    - LurkersWillLurk 6y ago
      I don't think the city council is oppressing anyone by having the police issue citations to people who wake me up at night with their obnoxious mufflers. The personal satisfaction from having a loud muffler is actually less important than my ability to sleep at night.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
The main problem seems to be stress; with loud noises comes stress, which is a chronic killer. There's also the correlation between loud noise and air pollution, loud noise and sleep disruption, vibrations, disruptions to daily habits, inconvenience of construction and transit, etc. Personal story, there were workers using an extremely loud diesel powered crane to redo the facade of our building. They without fail began work at 705, outside of a building of 100 mostly young people, dozens of whom were still in bed. Why do construction crews schedules, 3 people, get precedence over the dozens of residents? My personal stress and anger was peaked every time that crane turned on, I wanted to shout at the workers by the end. The coup de grace was the turning on of the crane at 630 on Saturday morning, someone had bribed them to lift their own personal AC unit on top of the building. Bathrobed me went out and told them a few words. They responded they wanted to get it done early so it wouldn't bother people. WTF!
- centimeter 6y ago
  I think it’s unfortunate that society has become pacified to a point that people generally will not use e.g. minor equipment sabotage to deal with nuisances like this that otherwise take excessive bureaucratic nonsense to combat.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    With cameras everywhere and such a litigious society? The stress is probably less impactful in the short run compared to after they get fucked over by a lawsuit and/or criminal charge.
  - 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
    you have to fight an asshole like an asshole - few people are able to pull this off. most people prefer to suffer and pretend to themselves to be "tolerant" instead of just standing up for themselves.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      Then you just end up with a world full of assholes. Not sure that's "winning".
angst_ridden 6y ago
There's construction going on here, and has been for the past few months. That 7am powerup of the jackhammers definitely triggers a primitive, visceral reaction.
nickt 6y ago
I live near a highway in Colorado which is very quiet except for summer weekends when the noisy motorbikes turn up and it becomes borderline intolerable (I’m not against motorbikes, I ride, I just hate the lack of consideration for others piece and quiet). On a thread about air pollution a few days ago [1] I mentioned sensor.community [2]. They are promoting crowdsourced environmental data, including noise and I’m currently building their DNMS so I can contribute [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915103 [2] https://sensor.community/en/ https://sensor.community/en/ [3] https://sensor.community/en/sensors/dnms/ https://sensor.community/en/sensors/dnms/
- neolog 6y ago
  Some unicode issues on that site "â ï¸"
bsd44 6y ago
I used to live in a flat with a window onto the main road and I would violently wake up 4-6x every night and my heart rate would be through the roof. It's not easy to go back to sleep after that. I can get used to consistent noise and filter it out, but I can never get used to an extremely loud noise coming rapidly out of dead silence. Those were mostly custom exhausts, motorcycles and sirens. If I really needed sleep I would get myself drunk for a week straight, that was the only time I slept through the night. But the chronic lack of sleep and sleep disturbance made me generally angry and quick to explode at every little thing. I was really miserable for years. Luckily I saved enough money to move to a quiet cul de sac. I honestly can't wait for electric cars to come en mass, even if it costs the environment the same or more than ICE, because you can't complain about noise pollution in a way that someone would take you seriously. Everyone just waves their hand "it's just a loud car passing by", but they don't see the negative consequences that has for both mental and physical health.
- zemvpferreira 6y ago
  I'm sorry you went through that awful situation but... was there anything stopping you from wearing earplugs? I religiously wear the best earplugs and face mask I can find to sleep. Even in controlled environments, they make a hell of a difference.
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    When I lived on a similar main road, I ended up with some form of noise turned up as loud as possible (to attempt to mute sirens), and I wore ear plugs to minimise that, and I still occasionally got woken up by the vibration of a large or loud vehicle passing by.
  - bitcurious 6y ago
    What are the best earplugs in your opinion?
    - zemvpferreira 6y ago
      I haven't found anything better than classic foam earplugs - 3M, Mack's, any good brand will be a safe choice. The biggest difference comes from using proper technique to insert them. Mask-wise I really like the Tempur-pedic sleep mask. I dislike their mattresses intensely but the mask is really good, especially for airplane sleeping.
ryanianian 6y ago
Damaging the heart sounds right. My neighbor has a unique obsession with his leaf-blower. It's like his daily 30-120 minutes of exercise at random times of the day. Even with all the noise-cancelling technology in the world, it ruins me for at least 2-3 hours and makes both video-conferencing and deep work basically impossible. Here's the thing: Nobody cares. The neighbor can say no to polite requests to figure out a compromise, and your local officials will tell you that you have the right to make as much noise as you want, and nobody else can do anything about it. Noise ordinances restrict decibels, not the tones or revving patterns or high-pitch "safety" beeping or other things that cut right through the heart despite them not technically being over a decibel level for a sustained period of time. With more people doing deeper work from home, I hope there are some pioneering cities that can establish protocols that protect work environments and locals' sanity - while still allowing noisy work to get done at predictable times of the day and with reasonable limits on meaningful impact to those living within earshot. Like TFA, we have to paint noise more like the health problem it actually is.
- centimeter 6y ago
  > high-pitch "safety" beeping This drives me insane. I know some shithead lawyer or safety “activist” somewhere is responsible for all the bullshit beeping I have to deal with in my life. A fire alarm going off for no reason. (I would accept the negligible marginal risk of burning to death than have to deal with legally mandated fire alarms.) My car beeping because I didn’t put the seatbelt over the luggage in the passenger seat. Even airplanes aren’t as annoying with the audible alerts as cars. The only time I get beeped at when I’m flying is if I’m stalling or something. At least in aircraft, designers have the understanding and latitude to treat noises as the pointless distractions they are.
  - dgrcode 6y ago
    I lived in Dublin, Ireland, for a while and every. Single. Day. There was a fire alarm going off. It drove me insane. I had already forgotten how crazy that was and your message made me remember it. Now I can appreciate more not having that where I currently live :)
  - 6y ago
macg333 6y ago
I live near a busy road, close to an intersection with a stoplight, and have my desk at a window that faces said road. The constant slowing a revving of traffic around the light is very distracting and I run an air purifier on high throughout the day to stabilize the noise and drown out the shifting traffic noises. I have also shifted my desk so that it does not overlook the road and thus I don't have to watch individuals sitting at the light all day. These two adjustments have made a positive impact on my focus when I'm working. While I am excited for EVs to become more mainstream, I'm afraid for roads such as mine where the speed limit is 40 and people often drive 50+ that the quiet engine won't make much of a difference given the speed and that the sound of tires on the road and wind rushing around the vehicle are still somewhat loud in their own right. It makes me want to move to a more rural environment where the loudest noise is the refrigerator.
- UweSchmidt 6y ago
  With more EVs the local pollution is going go down a lot. Probably also something that you'd notice more you could do a quick A/B test.
  - 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
    Not sure about the long run development, though. There are people who install mp3-players attached to powerful speakers which are synchronized with the gas paddle. Those are insanely loud and sometimes sound more like perverted space ships. Meaning - for many idiots a loud car or motorcycle never was about enjoying the mechanics to begin with.
DigitallyFidget 6y ago
I'd like to see an actual legitimate source of research regarding this. I can understand how some people are sensitive to the disruption of noises and how that can induce stress to those individuals, but the connection between noise and heart damage seems indirectly related.
- sjg007 6y ago
  With the new apple watches and iphones it should be possible to get a widespread map of noise pollution even finer grained than EPA monitors.
  - graeme 6y ago
    True. Noise gets logged in the health app from the apple watch, so a research study could tap into that quite easily. They already do that for heart rate and other metrics.
elicash 6y ago
A bit unrelated, but I'd love to use a Zillow-like platform but filtering homes for noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution. (Also climate and flooding.) Most people wouldn't use it, because they've basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home. But it'd be very useful to me, personally, as someone who can do my job from anywhere. Also, I'd imagine it's impossible to get detailed enough data for some of this stuff. Noise being the toughest, I'd bet, though maybe you could approximate based on various factors (traffic, etc).
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I've thought about how one would design and market soundproofed apartments and houses. You'd need to condense full-spectrum measurements of ambient levels, indoor transmission, and outdoor transmission into just one or a few numbers or letter grades, and convince other apartment buildings and homebuilders to let you run measuring microphones and speakers for a week. Are there any standards for soundproofed construction like there are for energy-minimized construction?
  - telchar 6y ago
    There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Cool! Though unfortunately it only goes down to 125Hz or so, so it won't cover water hammer pipe noise, flushing toilets, or footsteps on higher floors. > The STC is useful for evaluating annoyance due to speech sounds, but not music or machinery noise as these sources contain more low frequency energy than speech. There's also Room Criteria or Noise Criteria, which measures ambient noise from 16Hz to 4kHz, but not transmission. My dream is to have greater than 60dB of isolation across 20-20k, and preferably more like 80+. I'd like to be able to sleep inside if there's a marching band, a motorcycle tour, an airshow, and a hurricane all going on outside at the same time (and, in reverse, to be able to do all those things inside without bothering the neighbors).
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Those who are living in the noisy environments, have you tried the recent noise cancelling earphones/headphones? Do you prefer noise cancelling or adding white noise over long period of use? Also I'm looking for noise cancellation algorithms which can add noise cancellation to any generic TWS earphones by processing through smartphone[1]. Google has added audio amplification for any TWS earphones through android as an accessibility feature, but not the noise cancellation; Is it because the latency matters for the latter more? [1]I've added the link to it on my profile.
- ricardobayes 6y ago
  Noise cancelling doesn't do much for impact noises which seem to annoy people more.
- lukastr0 6y ago
  Noise cancelling, in order to work really well, requires extremely fast processing and microphones that are directly on the ears. And then you need earphones with very well-defined frequency characteristics - which would make any approach with generic earphones very difficult. And not only that, the exact distance between earphones and ear matters a lot - that's why high-end ANC headphones like the Sony ones include a calibration routine.
pims 6y ago
I've been suffering from tinnitus and hyperacusis for over three years. It led me to read a bit about hearing in general, and more and more studies show that most of the hearing loss we experience as we grow old is nothing natural but the result of the years of abuse we inflict upon our ears in our everyday lives ( https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/33/6357 https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/33/6357 ). Even though my situation is specific, this article does not surprise me at all. I believe it has also been proven that loud noise reduces brain activity levels and cognitive performance. I wasn't a fan of loud noises before my hyperacusis appeared, but now I've grown to absolutely despise motorcycle drivers who seem to feel obligated to make as much noise as possible in dense areas, accelerating as strong as they can regardless of common sense and speed limits. I won't even mention those doing this late at night throughout the city, not worried about waking up hundreds if not thousands of people. I've moved out of a big city to be less exposed to traffic noise, unfortunately the area I'm now in is coastal and often has said drivers "enjoying" the coastline in their own unique way as soon as the sun is out. I hope that this major public health issue will be tackled in the upcoming years, and that strong limitations on engine noise will be put in place, enforced by sound radars, heavy fines, and incentives to go electric.
- ricardobayes 6y ago
  Some European countries like Austria have been doing this for many years. Roadside noise level measurements with harsh penalties. If you exceed the limits, they take the licence plate off.
  - pims 6y ago
    Lucky them, here in France we're probably far from ever seeing such laws given the high percentage of bikers who simply don't care about making harmful levels of noise even right next to small kids. I've considered reaching out to my neighborhood council about it, but I'll probably have moved again due to motorcycles before it goes up to the city/county/department/region...
    - vladvasiliu 6y ago
garyclarke27 6y ago
Low frequency, wall penetrating, non-stop, droning noises like heat pumps (becoming pervasive with the green energy bandwagon) and a/c compressors are even worse than intermittent noise like planes or vehicles. They go all night and drive me crazy ruining my sleep and health.
solinent 6y ago
It's really more about signal-to-noise ratio I'd say, if there are often loud noises then your brain will have to attend to them, if there is constantly a fan noise, for example, then your brain will actually focus since there is no signal--but I've definitely found it's best to get rid of both in almost all domains.
jborichevskiy 6y ago
The Atlantic also wrote "Why is the World so Loud?" in 2019, a great read into the psychological effects of noise pollution and the legal means by which people try and fight back. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end...
- thebigspacefuck 6y ago
  I’m guessing the Atlantic office is not a quiet place
- dang 6y ago
  Discussed at the time: Everything Is Getting Louder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229540 - Oct 2019 (305 comments)
dgrcode 6y ago
I lived in NY for 3 months and the amount of noise pollution there was insane. The one that I really couldn't believe was the J train on Brooklyn's Broadway. You could be yelling at someone 3ft/1m apart and they couldn't hear you because of the train noise. I wonder if New Yorkers realise how absolutely crazy that is.
- kiliantics 6y ago
  As someone who lives in NY for 10 years, I don't know how I wasn't so aware before but I've lately become acutely conscious of how we are surrounded by near constant extreme noise pollution levels. Maybe most people just exist in this the way I used to, not thinking about it, it's so normalised that people can't imagine how it could be any different. The worst to me is that people have internalised this so far that they don't see any problem in contributing to this pollution themselves. Just a few weeks ago, someone on my block wanted to move their car at 4 am on like a Wednesday for whatever reason. Unfortunately for this person, someone else had double parked next to their car overnight (a chronically common issue in Brooklyn where I live for some reason). This neighbour somehow thought it would be perfectly reasonable to start honking constantly to alert the person who should move their car to let them out. At 4 am. When they would obviously be waking up many other people nearby that had nothing to do with the issue. In my 10 years here, that level of inconsideration was still pretty shocking to me.
  - MetallicCloud 6y ago
    I lived in NY for about 4 years, and I'm still amazed by the similar things I saw. For example, one day my upstairs neighbour didn't feel like pulling up the drive way, so she just parked her car in the middle of our cramped, busy one way street so she could run upstairs and grab some things. Of course all the people stuck trying to drive down the street started honking and yelling. She got back to the car, yelled back at them and drove off. I wouldn't consider doing something like that in a million years, but for native New Yorkers, it's par for the course.
timdaub 6y ago
Here's some anecdotal evidence from my experience: I've lived close to a loud 4 lane road for 4 years. My windows were bad too. When trucks drove over a bump in the road, I sometimes was able to notice the vibrations. Given this radical experience and all the pain caused by sleep-deprevation and having to move away finally, I second the article's message whole-heartedly (lol). Though I was luckily to be able to move, I've stayed sensitive to noise. It's a major stressor in my life and I take it seriously. In fact, I think that particularly in cities, the German aurhorities should implement tighter rules when it comes to noise pollution, e.g.: - tone down ambulance's horns or fund technical approaches that work without the high pitch sound - stop building airports near neighborhoods and restrict air traffic heavily - enforce stricter rules when honking for stupid reasons - have cars comply to noise maximums
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I live just uphill of a minor state highway intersection that's near several industrial sites. I hear jake brakes going down the hill end engines going up the hill. And there's hourly-ish trains on the overlooking hill, one of the industrial sites sometimes smells a little. One of my neighbors parties. Another one has dogs that bark at everything. Yet a third has all manner of 2-stroke powered toys. I have never been more stress free because the kind of people who live here aren't the kind of people who care what I do. Sure it would be great if I lived on a bunch of acres in the country but putting up with some noise is a pretty good middle ground.
  - timdaub 6y ago
    Fair enough. Actually, in the place I lived I could be as loud as I wanted too.
nothinggoesaway 6y ago
Folks with sensitivity to sound: consider supplementing chelated magnesium. When I tried magnesium glycinate to help with sleep, I happily discovered my daytime sensitivity to loud sounds improved too. Turns out this is common: https://psychcentral.com/blog/living-with-extreme-sound-sensitivity https://psychcentral.com/blog/living-with-extreme-sound-sens... > In my practice, 85 percent of my patients came to me with a severe magnesium deficiency. A deficiency in this mineral often leads to anxiety, mood swings, personality disorders, sound sensitivity, light sensitivity, and insomnia. Magnesium has been shown to mitigate the neurotransmitter glutamate while easing the anxiety and anger experienced by someone with most types of sound sensitivity. Chelated magnesium is one of the best types of mineral supplements as it is very small and easy for the body to absorb and make use of. Mg deficiency is widespread in industrialized populations, due in part to nutrient depleted soils. It’s heavily implicated in medical literature for anxiety, irritability, insomnia. The link to noise sensitivity seems more anecdotal so far.
- graeme 6y ago
  Why chelates specifically? As opposed to, say, magnesium citrate.
  - GloriousKoji 6y ago
    I often hear that Chelated magnesium has the highest bio-availability of all the different types of magnesium supplements. One might think they can just take more magnesium citrate to compensate but then it might be a full on laxative at that point.
AltruisticGapHN 6y ago
A reminder that noise cancel headphones are amazing. If you’re solo in the summer ypu can just watch tv with the headphones, the NC is really good a5 canceling the rumble from traffic, works great in trains too. Talking about a sony headphones above 300 eur though... but as someone healing trauma, it’s a life changer. Its not just less nouse, it gives you a bubble, an island of safety. You can get an hour of quiet before bed...
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  > Talking about a sony headphones above 300 eur though... Agree. Living in an appartment with inconsiderate neighbors, my Sony noise cancelling headphones are a lifesaver. (the bluetooth sucks btw, I mostly use them via minijack).
- Jakobeha 6y ago
  Personally I use ear plugs (silicone). If I want to listen to music or watch a movie I have AfterShokz bone-conducting headphones. You can get both for a bit over $100 and they work better than noise-cancelling headphones.
graeme 6y ago
Does anyone know what decibel thresholds are? I’ve been falling asleep with podcasts played quietly. It isn’t loud at all and feels comforting, but obviously is louder than no podcast. I’m wondering if that would be enough to trigger some of the hormonal cascade they discuss.
carapace 6y ago
Contrarywise, get up early before dawn and listen to the birds sing in the day. It can give you a wonderful sense of peace and fulfillment. I don't have any scientific basis for it, but I suspect birdsong is important somehow. Almost like it's a kind of nutrient.
thethethethe 6y ago
I spent a year living in a house on a load road and it was awful. The worst part was the inconsistency. Every ten minutes or so a really load motorcycle or truck would drive by and shake the entire house. It was a constant distraction and it would wake me up several times a night. I left as soon as my lease up. I could see this environment taking years off your life if you in it for many years. In addition to the noise, diesel fumes would waft into my room if left the window open on a hot day. I will never live on a load road ever again, no matter how “nice” the pace is.
kingnothing 6y ago
This is bringing several interesting questions to my mind. I wonder if the quality of noise has any bearing. For example, if you listen to pleasant music all day at work in an open plan office, does it have the same negative health effects as if it was road noise? Do the deaf suffer the same effects of being exposed to noise? As in, is it a physiological effect of being near something loud or does your brain have to process the sound?
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
This makes me wonder about 'white noise'? I finally caved and bought a non looping white noise machine after years of being woken up by car engines, ambulances, god forsaken LEAF BLOWERS cranking up at 7am every morning. Now, I notice I often sleep until my alarm. I would think that constant white noise would have a positive, or at least no negative impact but I have no evidence, and googling only pulls up intermittent noise studies.
mancerayder 6y ago
I've had noise issues from apartments in cities for decades, a mix of being easily bothered by music and noise from other people, and people loving to play loud music at home. Most of my friends seem a lot less bothered, to the point that they can mostly ignore it. Not sure if it's cultural, due to individual environmental conditions growing up, or biological. I'm starting to wonder if it's biological because I'm also a light sleeper.
- Reason077 6y ago
  Noise cancelling headphones are a godsend. Someone needs to design ones that can be comfortably worn while sleeping, though!
jtsuken 6y ago
Hey, here is a startup idea. I've been sitting on for a while and given my lack of engineering experience will probably never work on. Problem: Unnecessary/excessive noise from outdated/not properly maintained or purposefully broken devices (e.g. combustion engine powered leaf blowers, excessive and outdated reverse gear warning sounds on large vehicles, hollow motorbike ~mufflers~, garbage bins with metal wheels/lids) Solution: Create noise pollution maps, showing the areas with most frequent/most excessive noise pollution. Noise data will exercise economical and political pressure putting an actual market price on the noise levels and requiring the governments to enforce noise limits on vehicles and other registered devices. Approach 1: Mobile apps capturing and mapping noise levels in a privacy friendly way, while providing useful diagnostics and recommendations for the users. Approach 2: Low power GPS-enabled devices distributed across the city contributing real-time noise data to a central database system for evaluation.
- ColFrancis 6y ago
  The big trouble you'll have is incentives. Who has an incentive to put them up in a noisy place?
filistine 6y ago
I can hardly wait to bring this up with the local LA Fitness manager. Gyms seem to be a Petri dish for bad experimental music which, to my ears, is noise.
whiteboard18 6y ago
We’ve started working on some functionality like you are describing - to show noise levels for a given real estate location. If you have a sec, I’d love any constructive feedback. (The demo is just U.S. locations for now but the service is global)”. And then add the link: https://tether-data.com/noise-report/ https://tether-data.com/noise-report/

246 points by prostoalex 6y ago

I see the top few comments talking about motorcycles, leaf blowers, and automobiles. My pet peeve are jets. Living within ~5 miles of an air force base, or any major airport, is terrible. Everyone stops what they're doing for the for whatever duration a plane is in the area. Local and state politicians are powerless to do anything because of "the jobs".

joncrane 6y ago
That's a good one. Mine is helicopters. Military Blackhawks and a Sikorsky known as Marine-1 at times, to be specific. I live on the flight path from the White House to Camp David and they practice this flight multiple times per week. It makes sense because they need a full roster of people so they can provide minimum 2-deep 24 hour coverage and the folks need to be able to do it in their sleep in any weather conditions. It's still jarring to hear a trio of Blackhawks fly past me at a relatively low altitude.
undefined1 6y ago
imagine adding flying cars to the mix! it'd be hard to escape.

belly_joe 6y ago

I feel the sound -> stress connection palpably. Especially sudden loud noises like a horn honking cause me to feel upset for a long while after being startled. Seems like a convincing argument to me for car-free spaces, although honestly I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car's horn.

Guest42 6y ago
Agreed. I also don’t like it when locking a car via remote causes the horn to go off and in order to make sure people hit it multiple times.
- stevenpetryk 6y ago
  There's someone who does this every day outside my apartment at around 7:15. It is infuriating. 4-5 loud, inconsistently-spaced honks "just to be sure" when I'm sure their car locks silently on the first request. Most modern cars only beep if you lock them twice.
- RootReducer 6y ago
  A neighbor used to come home from work late at night and lock their doors three or four times, and every time it would wake me up. I wish there was a silent door lock and it would just flash the headlights.
  - emdashcomma 6y ago
    My car lets me configure it to work that way. It's one of my favorite features. I haven't heard it honk on lock in years.
    - exac 6y ago
      Most cars have this if you look in the user manual. Even old cars with no graphical radio have konami-code-like sequences of button presses you can input to turn them off.
      - dazc 6y ago
        Maybe no surprise to learn that, for a person who thinks it acceptable for the horn to sound for no real reason, this would be considered far too much effort?
  - csunbird 6y ago
    Cars in Europe lock silently.
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    I’m in Australia and I have never seen a car that doesn’t lock this way, you hear a slight mechanical latching sound and the lights flash.
airstrike 6y ago
I have this wild pet idea that we should be have a meter connected to a car's horn and at the end of the year you have to pay a bill for the amount you used. Something like $0.10 / second. You'll still honk when you need to but think twice before using it to annoy other drivers.
- flycaliguy 6y ago
  I like your thinking but the dystopian reality would be a wealthy elite class of honkers giving us all heart attacks.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    Scale it by income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
- ricardobayes 6y ago
  Spanish drivers surely go bankrupt after a week :) It's common here to toot the horn to greet a friend. And since everyone knows everyone, everyone toots all the time.
  - dgrcode 6y ago
    Well not everywhere in Spain, but definitely in some places. I lived in a small town where that was the case. Some people used to meet at a small shop just in front of my house and cars would honk all the time just to say hi. They would then stop the car and actually talk with them, but honking was somehow mandatory
- learnstats2 6y ago
  > Something like $0.10 / second This is a low enough cost that I bet people would use and hold their horn for longer, to show their annoyance in $.
  - airstrike 6y ago
johnchristopher 6y ago
I have stopped explaining people how my neighbor's friends honking when coming in and leaving drives me up the wall. There's the sound and then there's the rage from "that was fucking useless to do, you just spent 15 minutes saying goodbye on the doorstep, it 11PM, please be quiet" but I am the grumpy one. So I say nothing anymore. Fun thing is, when I am in the city, I like opening the windows in summer and car noises don't bother me much because it's normal and part of the scenery. But then I am perfectly capable of putting on my pajamas past 10PM, climb down the stairs from the flat to the street, knock on the car's window and ask the driver to turn off the engine because the low humming noise I hear in my bed is driving me insane. It's when the sound is useless and could be easily prevented that I get crazy. Misophonia very much also.
- dazc 6y ago
  Maybe it's the lack of consideration that annoys you more than the noise itself?
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    Definitely, should have written it down in my comment rather than describing my experience. This is a huge aspect of what grinds my gears. But there's also some speech patterns that get on my nerves in public transport and it's not really (at least most of the time) a lack of consideration from the people though (but it happens way less often).
    - chrbr 6y ago
      Yeah, that's the part that gets me too - the lack of consideration. I live near a hospital and have zero problem with the near-constant sirens, but people gunning their loud engines at stoplights will cause me to rage.
  - remir 6y ago
    Not the parent, but that's the main reason for me. I can tolerate loud noises like thunder, road work, renovation in the building (at reasonable hours, of course) without much of an issue. However, stuff like - Modified motorcycle that makes an insane amount of noise for no intelligent reasons - People playing bassy music that resonate across the walls of the entire building (low frequencies) - Constant pop music everywhere you go Are seriously getting on my nerves.
firstfewshells 6y ago
Well, I hope you never have to travel to India where people honk when the red light is on. Why? Coz they're bored and they "want" the light to turn green.
- fwn 6y ago
  For the sake of the people living in India we probably all hope that such norms fade over time. I've read about an experiment where increasing the noise level of carhorns on the inside of the car reduced horn usage significantly. Maybe there's some smart way to use tweaks like that in future regulation.
frankish 6y ago
I strongly empathize. I usually wait a few seconds, then just flash my high beams for most situations.
Karawebnetwork 6y ago
I wonder if ear plugs help at all. My partner snores so I wear them at night. Even then, sometimes I get woken up by the low frequencies of large trucks idling (snow removal operations, mostly). The vibrations are not even felt in my ears but through my entire body.
- jeanofthedead 6y ago
  When earplugs fail (as in the case of neighbor's bass, partner's snoring, or rambunctious nocturnal pets), I highly recommend the Bose SleepBuds II. Best purchase of the year for me, and my sleep tracking apps have proven to me that these things work. Might be worth looking into.
  - Karawebnetwork 6y ago
    This is amazing. I am surprised I never noticed this product before. I even tried to sleep with my Bose headset (this was unsuccessful as it's hard to sleep with those on.) Have you tried it? Do you consider it would block the loud snoring of a large man? The website says it's not active noise canceling but noise masking. My ear plugs are masking 38dB and the snoring makes it through. So I am worried that I would end up hearing heavy snoring with a musical background.
- RootReducer 6y ago
  This is my issue too. Earplugs don't help for idling trucks, or subwoofers. Nothing I've found does.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
This was interesting for me, too. At the end of 2017 I moved into a new apartment, with a great view on a very busy road. I immediately felt much more "off". Maybe stressed in a way, but since I'm not usually the stressed kind, I had a hard time identifying the feeling. At around the same time, the AC in the office developed a constant hum. This drove me nuts. When I went to my parents' house in the suburbs, I could hear the silence and really, really enjoy it. I realized that basically, during a regular day, I could never get to spend a moment in silence. There would always be some kind of noise: traffic outside my apartment window, metro / bus / traffic during the commute, random people talking / AC hum at the office. This made me wonder whether all the people that I see around me being constantly angry and "on the edge" might be that way in part because they basically never catch a break. They are constantly under this continuous noise. And I don't think we can really get used to it. I remember a friend said that I'd get used to the noise when I would complain. It's more than 3 years later, and it still annoys to me no end. I may sometimes forget the noise is there, but I think it still has its effect on my stress level. It's not like getting used to lifting weights or something to which the body adapts.
- x3iv130f 6y ago
  It was a culture shock for me as a Californian to visit Tokyo. In my mind cities are dirty, loud, and dangerous. Tokyo despite being one of the densest and busiest cities in first world countries is incredibly clean, quiet, and safe.
  - 0_____0 6y ago
    Can you say a little bit more about this? What's the difference in how the cities are structured that makes this so?
    - avidiax 6y ago
      Very strong mass transit systems, so there are fewer cars on the road. The cars that are on the road tend to be quite new, which is a result of a stringent mandatory inspection after a car gets older that makes it more economical to export the car and buy a new one. So cars are typically in excellent repair, with a small economical engine. The driving culture is generally conservative. People don't race each other, compete for the loudest exhaust, roll coal, etc.
kiliantics 6y ago
> I just wish we had stronger social norms against unnecessarily using a car I feel the same way but with the sentence stopping here
- croddin 6y ago
  Electric cars are starting to get cheaper than ICE cars and that should contribute to making cities quieter in general.
  - kiliantics 6y ago
    yeah but it won't change how hostile cities are to the people on foot or on bikes, or how much land is destroyed to make way for urban sprawl and other road infrastructure, only a reduction in car use will change that
pharmakom 6y ago
A simple solution would be to require car companies to make the horn as loud inside the vehicle as it is outside. However, general motor traffic noise - tyres, engines, displaced air - is loud enough to be a serious problem anyway. I don't know how we solve this. Car dependency is so ingrained in our collective consciousness; is it politically feasible to find a way out?
- avidiax 6y ago
  https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-noise-camera-trial-to-crack-down-on-illegal-vehicles https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-noise-camera-trial-to... Noise cameras. Just like a speed camera, but it measures noise levels and issues a ticket in the mail. There's unfortunately a regressive element (some people can't afford to fix their noisy exhaust), but I see no reason not to issue tickets for noise outside of normal hours, e.g. 7am-10pm.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    I'd guess that most people working "outside of normal hours" are doing it by necessity doing some kind of low wage job, and therefore poorer. e.g. anyone who works in restaurants or bars or music or nightlife after 10pm, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, Uber drivers, 24/7 gas station and supermarket employees, security guards, delivery truck drivers, garbage collectors, train drivers, etc.
defterGoose 6y ago
That's all well and good, but the horn is, at its core, a safety device. What we really need is for law enforcement to start actually enforcing the laws we have on the books against things like loud stereos and mufflers. These are far more disruptive, especially at night when most people are trying to sleep. I'd even go so far as to posit that the link discussed between noise and heart health is actually via psychological stress, rather than physiological stress.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  This seems very location specific. Where I grew up (DC suburbs) sound systems and loud engine noise were common and I’d agree with you that was the problem. Where I live now (Seattle) neither are common but traffic congestion and impatient drivers are. Horns aren’t used for safety, they’re used to communicate crowded aggressive driving. I agree with GP that for this scenario restricting cars overall is a better solution. The laws on the books certainly apply but they’re only enforceable in a meaningful way if you have traffic cops on every arterial. And that’s not something I think anyone wants. > I'd even go so far as to posit that the link discussed between noise and heart health is actually via psychological stress, rather than physiological stress. Why is this even a distinction? The psychological stress leads to the physiological stress impact on heart health.

baron816 6y ago

There are few things that make me angrier than when a Harley-Davidson style motorcycle (or a pack of them) drive past me while I’m walking down the street. I can’t believe cities haven’t prohibited them, especially at night. Those things are specifically designed to create noise pollution. They’re so fucking obnoxious, even just thinking about it while I’m writing this is working me up.

metalliqaz 6y ago
if the typical biker was a 24 year old hispanic man, they would be outlawed before you could say "ay caramba". Instead, boomers and genx white guys get a pass.
ReactiveJelly 6y ago
Yes, it's frustrating that some people just don't believe in the human right to peace and quiet. That's one reason why I have no hope for self-organizing models of society. There are griefers who only respond to force, and it doesn't take many of them to fuck up the whole game.
- boredumb 6y ago
  You believe we need a more authoritarian society because some people live lives that are louder than you deem appropriate and enough so that you are willing to 'respond with force' and you somehow see them as the people who are "fucking up the whole game"?
  - dilutedh2o 6y ago
    amen
  - LurkersWillLurk 6y ago
    I don't think the city council is oppressing anyone by having the police issue citations to people who wake me up at night with their obnoxious mufflers. The personal satisfaction from having a loud muffler is actually less important than my ability to sleep at night.

Dumblydorr 6y ago

The main problem seems to be stress; with loud noises comes stress, which is a chronic killer. There's also the correlation between loud noise and air pollution, loud noise and sleep disruption, vibrations, disruptions to daily habits, inconvenience of construction and transit, etc. Personal story, there were workers using an extremely loud diesel powered crane to redo the facade of our building. They without fail began work at 705, outside of a building of 100 mostly young people, dozens of whom were still in bed. Why do construction crews schedules, 3 people, get precedence over the dozens of residents? My personal stress and anger was peaked every time that crane turned on, I wanted to shout at the workers by the end. The coup de grace was the turning on of the crane at 630 on Saturday morning, someone had bribed them to lift their own personal AC unit on top of the building. Bathrobed me went out and told them a few words. They responded they wanted to get it done early so it wouldn't bother people. WTF!

centimeter 6y ago
I think it’s unfortunate that society has become pacified to a point that people generally will not use e.g. minor equipment sabotage to deal with nuisances like this that otherwise take excessive bureaucratic nonsense to combat.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  With cameras everywhere and such a litigious society? The stress is probably less impactful in the short run compared to after they get fucked over by a lawsuit and/or criminal charge.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
  you have to fight an asshole like an asshole - few people are able to pull this off. most people prefer to suffer and pretend to themselves to be "tolerant" instead of just standing up for themselves.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Then you just end up with a world full of assholes. Not sure that's "winning".

angst_ridden 6y ago

There's construction going on here, and has been for the past few months. That 7am powerup of the jackhammers definitely triggers a primitive, visceral reaction.

nickt 6y ago

I live near a highway in Colorado which is very quiet except for summer weekends when the noisy motorbikes turn up and it becomes borderline intolerable (I’m not against motorbikes, I ride, I just hate the lack of consideration for others piece and quiet). On a thread about air pollution a few days ago [1] I mentioned sensor.community [2]. They are promoting crowdsourced environmental data, including noise and I’m currently building their DNMS so I can contribute [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915103 [2] https://sensor.community/en/ https://sensor.community/en/ [3] https://sensor.community/en/sensors/dnms/ https://sensor.community/en/sensors/dnms/

neolog 6y ago
Some unicode issues on that site "â ï¸"

bsd44 6y ago

I used to live in a flat with a window onto the main road and I would violently wake up 4-6x every night and my heart rate would be through the roof. It's not easy to go back to sleep after that. I can get used to consistent noise and filter it out, but I can never get used to an extremely loud noise coming rapidly out of dead silence. Those were mostly custom exhausts, motorcycles and sirens. If I really needed sleep I would get myself drunk for a week straight, that was the only time I slept through the night. But the chronic lack of sleep and sleep disturbance made me generally angry and quick to explode at every little thing. I was really miserable for years. Luckily I saved enough money to move to a quiet cul de sac. I honestly can't wait for electric cars to come en mass, even if it costs the environment the same or more than ICE, because you can't complain about noise pollution in a way that someone would take you seriously. Everyone just waves their hand "it's just a loud car passing by", but they don't see the negative consequences that has for both mental and physical health.

zemvpferreira 6y ago
I'm sorry you went through that awful situation but... was there anything stopping you from wearing earplugs? I religiously wear the best earplugs and face mask I can find to sleep. Even in controlled environments, they make a hell of a difference.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  When I lived on a similar main road, I ended up with some form of noise turned up as loud as possible (to attempt to mute sirens), and I wore ear plugs to minimise that, and I still occasionally got woken up by the vibration of a large or loud vehicle passing by.
- bitcurious 6y ago
  What are the best earplugs in your opinion?
  - zemvpferreira 6y ago
    I haven't found anything better than classic foam earplugs - 3M, Mack's, any good brand will be a safe choice. The biggest difference comes from using proper technique to insert them. Mask-wise I really like the Tempur-pedic sleep mask. I dislike their mattresses intensely but the mask is really good, especially for airplane sleeping.

ryanianian 6y ago

Damaging the heart sounds right. My neighbor has a unique obsession with his leaf-blower. It's like his daily 30-120 minutes of exercise at random times of the day. Even with all the noise-cancelling technology in the world, it ruins me for at least 2-3 hours and makes both video-conferencing and deep work basically impossible. Here's the thing: Nobody cares. The neighbor can say no to polite requests to figure out a compromise, and your local officials will tell you that you have the right to make as much noise as you want, and nobody else can do anything about it. Noise ordinances restrict decibels, not the tones or revving patterns or high-pitch "safety" beeping or other things that cut right through the heart despite them not technically being over a decibel level for a sustained period of time. With more people doing deeper work from home, I hope there are some pioneering cities that can establish protocols that protect work environments and locals' sanity - while still allowing noisy work to get done at predictable times of the day and with reasonable limits on meaningful impact to those living within earshot. Like TFA, we have to paint noise more like the health problem it actually is.

centimeter 6y ago
> high-pitch "safety" beeping This drives me insane. I know some shithead lawyer or safety “activist” somewhere is responsible for all the bullshit beeping I have to deal with in my life. A fire alarm going off for no reason. (I would accept the negligible marginal risk of burning to death than have to deal with legally mandated fire alarms.) My car beeping because I didn’t put the seatbelt over the luggage in the passenger seat. Even airplanes aren’t as annoying with the audible alerts as cars. The only time I get beeped at when I’m flying is if I’m stalling or something. At least in aircraft, designers have the understanding and latitude to treat noises as the pointless distractions they are.
- dgrcode 6y ago
  I lived in Dublin, Ireland, for a while and every. Single. Day. There was a fire alarm going off. It drove me insane. I had already forgotten how crazy that was and your message made me remember it. Now I can appreciate more not having that where I currently live :)
- 6y ago

macg333 6y ago

I live near a busy road, close to an intersection with a stoplight, and have my desk at a window that faces said road. The constant slowing a revving of traffic around the light is very distracting and I run an air purifier on high throughout the day to stabilize the noise and drown out the shifting traffic noises. I have also shifted my desk so that it does not overlook the road and thus I don't have to watch individuals sitting at the light all day. These two adjustments have made a positive impact on my focus when I'm working. While I am excited for EVs to become more mainstream, I'm afraid for roads such as mine where the speed limit is 40 and people often drive 50+ that the quiet engine won't make much of a difference given the speed and that the sound of tires on the road and wind rushing around the vehicle are still somewhat loud in their own right. It makes me want to move to a more rural environment where the loudest noise is the refrigerator.

UweSchmidt 6y ago
With more EVs the local pollution is going go down a lot. Probably also something that you'd notice more you could do a quick A/B test.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
  Not sure about the long run development, though. There are people who install mp3-players attached to powerful speakers which are synchronized with the gas paddle. Those are insanely loud and sometimes sound more like perverted space ships. Meaning - for many idiots a loud car or motorcycle never was about enjoying the mechanics to begin with.

DigitallyFidget 6y ago

I'd like to see an actual legitimate source of research regarding this. I can understand how some people are sensitive to the disruption of noises and how that can induce stress to those individuals, but the connection between noise and heart damage seems indirectly related.

sjg007 6y ago
With the new apple watches and iphones it should be possible to get a widespread map of noise pollution even finer grained than EPA monitors.
- graeme 6y ago
  True. Noise gets logged in the health app from the apple watch, so a research study could tap into that quite easily. They already do that for heart rate and other metrics.

elicash 6y ago

A bit unrelated, but I'd love to use a Zillow-like platform but filtering homes for noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution. (Also climate and flooding.) Most people wouldn't use it, because they've basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home. But it'd be very useful to me, personally, as someone who can do my job from anywhere. Also, I'd imagine it's impossible to get detailed enough data for some of this stuff. Noise being the toughest, I'd bet, though maybe you could approximate based on various factors (traffic, etc).

nitrogen 6y ago
I've thought about how one would design and market soundproofed apartments and houses. You'd need to condense full-spectrum measurements of ambient levels, indoor transmission, and outdoor transmission into just one or a few numbers or letter grades, and convince other apartment buildings and homebuilders to let you run measuring microphones and speakers for a week. Are there any standards for soundproofed construction like there are for energy-minimized construction?
- telchar 6y ago
  There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Cool! Though unfortunately it only goes down to 125Hz or so, so it won't cover water hammer pipe noise, flushing toilets, or footsteps on higher floors. > The STC is useful for evaluating annoyance due to speech sounds, but not music or machinery noise as these sources contain more low frequency energy than speech. There's also Room Criteria or Noise Criteria, which measures ambient noise from 16Hz to 4kHz, but not transmission. My dream is to have greater than 60dB of isolation across 20-20k, and preferably more like 80+. I'd like to be able to sleep inside if there's a marching band, a motorcycle tour, an airshow, and a hurricane all going on outside at the same time (and, in reverse, to be able to do all those things inside without bothering the neighbors).

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

Those who are living in the noisy environments, have you tried the recent noise cancelling earphones/headphones? Do you prefer noise cancelling or adding white noise over long period of use? Also I'm looking for noise cancellation algorithms which can add noise cancellation to any generic TWS earphones by processing through smartphone[1]. Google has added audio amplification for any TWS earphones through android as an accessibility feature, but not the noise cancellation; Is it because the latency matters for the latter more? [1]I've added the link to it on my profile.

ricardobayes 6y ago
Noise cancelling doesn't do much for impact noises which seem to annoy people more.
lukastr0 6y ago
Noise cancelling, in order to work really well, requires extremely fast processing and microphones that are directly on the ears. And then you need earphones with very well-defined frequency characteristics - which would make any approach with generic earphones very difficult. And not only that, the exact distance between earphones and ear matters a lot - that's why high-end ANC headphones like the Sony ones include a calibration routine.

pims 6y ago

I've been suffering from tinnitus and hyperacusis for over three years. It led me to read a bit about hearing in general, and more and more studies show that most of the hearing loss we experience as we grow old is nothing natural but the result of the years of abuse we inflict upon our ears in our everyday lives ( https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/33/6357 https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/33/6357 ). Even though my situation is specific, this article does not surprise me at all. I believe it has also been proven that loud noise reduces brain activity levels and cognitive performance. I wasn't a fan of loud noises before my hyperacusis appeared, but now I've grown to absolutely despise motorcycle drivers who seem to feel obligated to make as much noise as possible in dense areas, accelerating as strong as they can regardless of common sense and speed limits. I won't even mention those doing this late at night throughout the city, not worried about waking up hundreds if not thousands of people. I've moved out of a big city to be less exposed to traffic noise, unfortunately the area I'm now in is coastal and often has said drivers "enjoying" the coastline in their own unique way as soon as the sun is out. I hope that this major public health issue will be tackled in the upcoming years, and that strong limitations on engine noise will be put in place, enforced by sound radars, heavy fines, and incentives to go electric.

ricardobayes 6y ago
Some European countries like Austria have been doing this for many years. Roadside noise level measurements with harsh penalties. If you exceed the limits, they take the licence plate off.
- pims 6y ago
  Lucky them, here in France we're probably far from ever seeing such laws given the high percentage of bikers who simply don't care about making harmful levels of noise even right next to small kids. I've considered reaching out to my neighborhood council about it, but I'll probably have moved again due to motorcycles before it goes up to the city/county/department/region...
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago

garyclarke27 6y ago

Low frequency, wall penetrating, non-stop, droning noises like heat pumps (becoming pervasive with the green energy bandwagon) and a/c compressors are even worse than intermittent noise like planes or vehicles. They go all night and drive me crazy ruining my sleep and health.

solinent 6y ago

It's really more about signal-to-noise ratio I'd say, if there are often loud noises then your brain will have to attend to them, if there is constantly a fan noise, for example, then your brain will actually focus since there is no signal--but I've definitely found it's best to get rid of both in almost all domains.

jborichevskiy 6y ago

The Atlantic also wrote "Why is the World so Loud?" in 2019, a great read into the psychological effects of noise pollution and the legal means by which people try and fight back. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end...

thebigspacefuck 6y ago
I’m guessing the Atlantic office is not a quiet place
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: Everything Is Getting Louder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229540 - Oct 2019 (305 comments)

dgrcode 6y ago

I lived in NY for 3 months and the amount of noise pollution there was insane. The one that I really couldn't believe was the J train on Brooklyn's Broadway. You could be yelling at someone 3ft/1m apart and they couldn't hear you because of the train noise. I wonder if New Yorkers realise how absolutely crazy that is.

kiliantics 6y ago
As someone who lives in NY for 10 years, I don't know how I wasn't so aware before but I've lately become acutely conscious of how we are surrounded by near constant extreme noise pollution levels. Maybe most people just exist in this the way I used to, not thinking about it, it's so normalised that people can't imagine how it could be any different. The worst to me is that people have internalised this so far that they don't see any problem in contributing to this pollution themselves. Just a few weeks ago, someone on my block wanted to move their car at 4 am on like a Wednesday for whatever reason. Unfortunately for this person, someone else had double parked next to their car overnight (a chronically common issue in Brooklyn where I live for some reason). This neighbour somehow thought it would be perfectly reasonable to start honking constantly to alert the person who should move their car to let them out. At 4 am. When they would obviously be waking up many other people nearby that had nothing to do with the issue. In my 10 years here, that level of inconsideration was still pretty shocking to me.
- MetallicCloud 6y ago
  I lived in NY for about 4 years, and I'm still amazed by the similar things I saw. For example, one day my upstairs neighbour didn't feel like pulling up the drive way, so she just parked her car in the middle of our cramped, busy one way street so she could run upstairs and grab some things. Of course all the people stuck trying to drive down the street started honking and yelling. She got back to the car, yelled back at them and drove off. I wouldn't consider doing something like that in a million years, but for native New Yorkers, it's par for the course.

timdaub 6y ago

Here's some anecdotal evidence from my experience: I've lived close to a loud 4 lane road for 4 years. My windows were bad too. When trucks drove over a bump in the road, I sometimes was able to notice the vibrations. Given this radical experience and all the pain caused by sleep-deprevation and having to move away finally, I second the article's message whole-heartedly (lol). Though I was luckily to be able to move, I've stayed sensitive to noise. It's a major stressor in my life and I take it seriously. In fact, I think that particularly in cities, the German aurhorities should implement tighter rules when it comes to noise pollution, e.g.: - tone down ambulance's horns or fund technical approaches that work without the high pitch sound - stop building airports near neighborhoods and restrict air traffic heavily - enforce stricter rules when honking for stupid reasons - have cars comply to noise maximums

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I live just uphill of a minor state highway intersection that's near several industrial sites. I hear jake brakes going down the hill end engines going up the hill. And there's hourly-ish trains on the overlooking hill, one of the industrial sites sometimes smells a little. One of my neighbors parties. Another one has dogs that bark at everything. Yet a third has all manner of 2-stroke powered toys. I have never been more stress free because the kind of people who live here aren't the kind of people who care what I do. Sure it would be great if I lived on a bunch of acres in the country but putting up with some noise is a pretty good middle ground.
- timdaub 6y ago
  Fair enough. Actually, in the place I lived I could be as loud as I wanted too.

nothinggoesaway 6y ago

Folks with sensitivity to sound: consider supplementing chelated magnesium. When I tried magnesium glycinate to help with sleep, I happily discovered my daytime sensitivity to loud sounds improved too. Turns out this is common: https://psychcentral.com/blog/living-with-extreme-sound-sensitivity https://psychcentral.com/blog/living-with-extreme-sound-sens... > In my practice, 85 percent of my patients came to me with a severe magnesium deficiency. A deficiency in this mineral often leads to anxiety, mood swings, personality disorders, sound sensitivity, light sensitivity, and insomnia. Magnesium has been shown to mitigate the neurotransmitter glutamate while easing the anxiety and anger experienced by someone with most types of sound sensitivity. Chelated magnesium is one of the best types of mineral supplements as it is very small and easy for the body to absorb and make use of. Mg deficiency is widespread in industrialized populations, due in part to nutrient depleted soils. It’s heavily implicated in medical literature for anxiety, irritability, insomnia. The link to noise sensitivity seems more anecdotal so far.

graeme 6y ago
Why chelates specifically? As opposed to, say, magnesium citrate.
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  I often hear that Chelated magnesium has the highest bio-availability of all the different types of magnesium supplements. One might think they can just take more magnesium citrate to compensate but then it might be a full on laxative at that point.

AltruisticGapHN 6y ago

A reminder that noise cancel headphones are amazing. If you’re solo in the summer ypu can just watch tv with the headphones, the NC is really good a5 canceling the rumble from traffic, works great in trains too. Talking about a sony headphones above 300 eur though... but as someone healing trauma, it’s a life changer. Its not just less nouse, it gives you a bubble, an island of safety. You can get an hour of quiet before bed...

burntoutfire 6y ago
> Talking about a sony headphones above 300 eur though... Agree. Living in an appartment with inconsiderate neighbors, my Sony noise cancelling headphones are a lifesaver. (the bluetooth sucks btw, I mostly use them via minijack).
Jakobeha 6y ago
Personally I use ear plugs (silicone). If I want to listen to music or watch a movie I have AfterShokz bone-conducting headphones. You can get both for a bit over $100 and they work better than noise-cancelling headphones.

graeme 6y ago

Does anyone know what decibel thresholds are? I’ve been falling asleep with podcasts played quietly. It isn’t loud at all and feels comforting, but obviously is louder than no podcast. I’m wondering if that would be enough to trigger some of the hormonal cascade they discuss.

carapace 6y ago

Contrarywise, get up early before dawn and listen to the birds sing in the day. It can give you a wonderful sense of peace and fulfillment. I don't have any scientific basis for it, but I suspect birdsong is important somehow. Almost like it's a kind of nutrient.

thethethethe 6y ago

I spent a year living in a house on a load road and it was awful. The worst part was the inconsistency. Every ten minutes or so a really load motorcycle or truck would drive by and shake the entire house. It was a constant distraction and it would wake me up several times a night. I left as soon as my lease up. I could see this environment taking years off your life if you in it for many years. In addition to the noise, diesel fumes would waft into my room if left the window open on a hot day. I will never live on a load road ever again, no matter how “nice” the pace is.

kingnothing 6y ago

This is bringing several interesting questions to my mind. I wonder if the quality of noise has any bearing. For example, if you listen to pleasant music all day at work in an open plan office, does it have the same negative health effects as if it was road noise? Do the deaf suffer the same effects of being exposed to noise? As in, is it a physiological effect of being near something loud or does your brain have to process the sound?

wing-_-nuts 6y ago

This makes me wonder about 'white noise'? I finally caved and bought a non looping white noise machine after years of being woken up by car engines, ambulances, god forsaken LEAF BLOWERS cranking up at 7am every morning. Now, I notice I often sleep until my alarm. I would think that constant white noise would have a positive, or at least no negative impact but I have no evidence, and googling only pulls up intermittent noise studies.

mancerayder 6y ago

I've had noise issues from apartments in cities for decades, a mix of being easily bothered by music and noise from other people, and people loving to play loud music at home. Most of my friends seem a lot less bothered, to the point that they can mostly ignore it. Not sure if it's cultural, due to individual environmental conditions growing up, or biological. I'm starting to wonder if it's biological because I'm also a light sleeper.

Reason077 6y ago
Noise cancelling headphones are a godsend. Someone needs to design ones that can be comfortably worn while sleeping, though!

jtsuken 6y ago

Hey, here is a startup idea. I've been sitting on for a while and given my lack of engineering experience will probably never work on. Problem: Unnecessary/excessive noise from outdated/not properly maintained or purposefully broken devices (e.g. combustion engine powered leaf blowers, excessive and outdated reverse gear warning sounds on large vehicles, hollow motorbike ~mufflers~, garbage bins with metal wheels/lids) Solution: Create noise pollution maps, showing the areas with most frequent/most excessive noise pollution. Noise data will exercise economical and political pressure putting an actual market price on the noise levels and requiring the governments to enforce noise limits on vehicles and other registered devices. Approach 1: Mobile apps capturing and mapping noise levels in a privacy friendly way, while providing useful diagnostics and recommendations for the users. Approach 2: Low power GPS-enabled devices distributed across the city contributing real-time noise data to a central database system for evaluation.

ColFrancis 6y ago
The big trouble you'll have is incentives. Who has an incentive to put them up in a noisy place?

filistine 6y ago

I can hardly wait to bring this up with the local LA Fitness manager. Gyms seem to be a Petri dish for bad experimental music which, to my ears, is noise.

whiteboard18 6y ago

We’ve started working on some functionality like you are describing - to show noise levels for a given real estate location. If you have a sec, I’d love any constructive feedback. (The demo is just U.S. locations for now but the service is global)”. And then add the link: https://tether-data.com/noise-report/ https://tether-data.com/noise-report/