> If constant sound is harmful, I'd imagine we'd all have lost our hearing by now. I reckon any harm woulc come from volume, not just simple presence. That's a

> If constant sound is harmful, I'd imagine we'd all have lost our hearing by now. I reckon any harm woulc come from volume, not just simple presence. That's assuming it's physically harmful (to the ears). If it were instead mentally harmful, what you would expect is for the incidence of mental illness to increase as life got noisier and noisier (with a lag, of course, assuming this effect takes an appreciable amount of time).