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Noise is all around us
- june_twenty 3y agoThe Environmental Noise Directive (END) doesn't stop countries permitting houses to be built along motorways, next to fire stations or near airports/flight paths or trains. Once the houses are built people will live there. What we need is some good tech to make our homes and gardens more peaceful and quiet.
- brickfaced 3y ago>What we need is some good tech to make our homes and gardens more peaceful and quiet. Concrete or brick wall should do it. If you live in an apartment made of drywall and 2x4s, either commit to building a room-within-a-room or buy earplugs.
- bombcar 3y agoInterior insulation designed for sound deadening can do wonders, too like https://www.rockwool.com/north-america/ https://www.rockwool.com/north-america/ And you can get double pane windows even in temperate climates because they cut down on noise. In fact, the only time I’d use triple pane would be for sound reasons.
- jahewson 3y agoI’ve lived near two different fire stations, it wasn’t a big deal. They only leave with the sirens on in big emergencies, a couple of times a year. Far more disturbing was the sound of trucks and motorbikes with modified exhausts.
- adahl5 3y agoI currently live near a fire station and a railroad. The cars are almost always worse than both. Sometimes the fire station can be annoying with the sirens but at night, loud cars are much more frequent. I’m far enough from the railroad that it’s actually quite pleasant.
- fnord77 3y agodrywall on floating rails not connected to the studs is very effective soundproofing
- MichaelZuo 3y ago> “Telling people to be quiet is not a good thing,” he says. “Part of the charge to us as human beings in the world is to listen to other people, right? Especially if they are suffering. Especially if they are crying out to us for help. If our expectations are ‘I should not have to hear anything,’ and I can convince myself that the right way to live in the world is to live in this acoustically tailored environment, then I don’t have to hear all that stuff. . . . I think the writer here is confused, they very likely mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense not the literal sense, since it's obvious there are real world scenarios where it's physically damaging to actually listen. But if they mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense, as in perceiving another's mental thoughts through any medium, then the noise levels of everyday environments has little to nothing to do with it.
- hexis 3y agoMaybe they are "crying out to us for help" by being literally loud.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phaserphile 3y agoThe developed nations have known exactly how to build structures that ACTUALLY reduce noise for 70+ years, but they didn’t care enough to mandate such construction techniques into the building codes at our own peril.
- kibwen 3y agoImproved standards for thermal insulation (important for reducing energy consumption from heating and cooling) will have a side effect of improving the acoustic insulation of structures. Not quite to the same extent as dedicated acoustic insulation, but better than nothing.
- brickfaced 3y agoDitto fire safety. High-rise apartments where I live tend to have concrete floors and sturdy walls between units for this reason, and it helps greatly with noise reduction.
- phaserphile 3y agoYes, air tightness is part of the problem, but if that's the only tool used, sound is still going to get through. Double walls help dramatically.
- bm3719 3y agoI think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it'd cost you to get freedom from your neighbor's lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person's brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity. I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.
- Turskarama 3y agoWith modern (unmodified) cars a lot of the time tyre noise is actually more significant than engine noise, so a switch to electric by itself won't do it.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoOnly at speed.
- Turskarama 3y agoAt any speed you'd do on a road, even on suburban back roads tyre noise can match or exceed engine noise.
- eertami 3y agoYou didn't specify a speed, so I'm curious how fast are your suburban back roads? I've seen signs from the US that show 40mph speed limits on purely residential back streets which is already faster than I can drive on literally any street within my city. Residential roads here are max 30km/h (18mph) but also often 20km/h (12mph). Slow enough that the EVs should produce less noise, even though both produce tire noise.
- jmugan 3y agoI'm always surprised that we tolerate so much unnecessary noise. We let people fly helicopters around and run leaf blowers. We even allow trucks to go beep beep beep and alert everyone within a kilometer that they are backing up, even though we have rearview cameras, like it's everyone else's responsibility to scurry out of their way.
- lstamour 3y agoRe trucks beeping - that’s partly legal responsibility isn’t it? I mean, we have had the ability for trucks to beep as they back up for far longer than we have had the ability for them to realistically have functioning rear view cameras. And since the normal expectation is that vehicles go forward, it makes sense to alert when doing something unexpected, like backing up. And so the laws we have mandate and expect beeping noises from large vehicles because the idea that laws would mandate rear cameras hasn’t caught on yet.
- Turskarama 3y agoMore modern trucks use white noise instead of a beep anyway, it's both much easier to tell direction from a broad spectrum sound, and significantly less annoying at the same time.
- jmugan 3y agoI haven't heard any trucks around here do that, so maybe they work really well.
- kibwen 3y agoI've never heard of a truck using white noise instead of a beep, but that might just be working as intended. Here's a video of what it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwJ5NCf1Vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwJ5NCf1Vw
- bee_rider 3y agoInteresting. I think I may have heard that noise, and just not known what it was. It could easily be mistaken for some sort of mechanical bit of the truck (slipping belt, various bits and bobs going around in the engine).
- 22c 3y agoOf course this is completely anecdotal, but I was walking around a zoo in a city I'm visiting today and couldn't help but notice how much noisier the zoo was, both in terms of how much traffic and city noise breaches the walls, and how much noise the visitors make (yelling after each other across the zoo, talking loudly, just generally not attempting to keep their own noise down) when compared to visiting zoos in my home country. I also observed that the animals seemed to be a lot more likely to shy away, and (in my completely not zoological/biological opinion) perhaps even slightly more on edge or distressed in some cases. This also meant whenever an animal was doing something interesting, the visitors would all be interested in that one exhibit, which caused further noise and commotion. I couldn't help but think how much nicer the zoo could've been for both guests and the residents if more of a focus was placed on reducing the noise levels. It was also quite a culture shock to me that smoking was allowed throughout the zoo as it seems to me that a ban would be easily justified on the grounds of animal comfort/welfare (not to forget all the children walking around, too).
- bombcar 3y agoI prefer safari/wild animal parks partially for this - as the animals have enough room to get away if they want to. But then you’re not guaranteed to see them all up close.
- jmartrican 3y agoMy neighborhood has become too noisy because of cars with loud mufflers. They sound like Harley Davidson motorcycles. The motor cycles around here are loud too, I think they are modified also to be louder. I actually want to move to a quieter town. I think the cops and the local governments need to pay attention.
- UberFly 3y agoRight. Or the incredibly dumb and loud backfire packages they put on their exhaust. So many cars have them now around me. Thanks California. There should be regulation outlawing them. It sounds like gun fire all day.
- Simulacra 3y agoSilence is a privilege. Several colleagues live in Los Angeles and New York City. It is always noisy outside there, day and night, not just our zoom calls. It makes me very thankful that I live in a quiet neighborhood.
- presentation 3y agoCities don’t have to be noisy, Tokyo is delightfully quiet and I hear that many European cities are too.
- brickfaced 3y agoThe duality of man: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end-of-silence/598366/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end... - "Why Everything Is Getting Louder The tech industry is producing a rising din. Our bodies can't adapt." (2019) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-brooklyn-be-loud/670600/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-bro... - "Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? The sound of gentrification is silence." (2022)
- lukas099 3y agoIf you couldn't get good things (like quieter homes) by spending more money, what would be the point of money?
- sixstringtheory 3y agoI remember reading that second one. What a load of garbage. I simply have a hard time sleeping. If I seek out quiet, that's me trying to adapt my environment to meet my biophysical needs the best way I know how, not me punching down to the proles. Not everything has to be a normative classist struggle.
- cubefox 3y agoI was nodding along until I remembered a recent student party in Germany, interrupted by the police, as the neighbors in the next house complained. The party was then transformed into a talking party. At least the neighbors were satisfied.
- fwlr 3y agoBig fan of quiet. My home environment sits at about 30dB as measured by NIOSH’s sound level monitoring app, 32 during fridge cycle, 35dB when I have air conditioning running. In previous places I wasn’t able to control external noise as much and I had to use earplugs to focus; I tried half a dozen and found Etymotic’s earplugs to be by far the best (they claim to designed to reduce sound by approximately 20dB at all frequencies, which really feels miraculous compared to most ear plugs - they were at their best on long flights, where I could hear flight attendants and announcements just as easily with them in or out; if you are like me and more sensitive to noise than most people, these feel like a way to increase your threshold by 20dB, I can’t speak highly enough of them). Two things in the article do jump out at me, though. One is that it talks about active noise cancellation - people do find this helpful, but there’s also a smaller community who find it causes problems for them, including worsening tinnitus. All else equal I would say it’s probably safer to reduce incoming sound as much as possible before using noise cancellation -it fundamentally involves “detecting noise and making more noise in a specific way such that the noises cancels out”. The theory is very sound (heh), I’m not suggesting it doesn’t cancel out, but there may be some very weird edge cases or subtle effects we don’t understand there. The other thing is more of a nitpick, it mentions truck horns can be as loud as 150dB. That’s “standing 25 meters away from a jet engine at takeoff” level, like we’re talking “immediate rupture of eardrums” intensity here. I don’t doubt that you can buy truck horns that have “150dB” printed on their box, but I really doubt they’re actually that loud. And yes, looking at someone who’s done the research, only the very loudest of full size train horns that fill up a tank of compressed air get to just barely below 150dB - at 3ft away. At 100ft they all drop below 120dB. https://www.djdlabs.com/horns/ https://www.djdlabs.com/horns/
- bombcar 3y agoBadly measuring is a pastime of horn manufacturers but people do mount train horns on trucks. I had one in an old car, and it was certainly loud as blazes, but once you were some tens of feet it was dropping off. It does carry for miles in a way that’s hard to explain.
- fwlr 3y agoThey do get closer to their rated volume than I expected, that’s true - I honestly expected the best would top out at 120dB even close up, just because these things are necessarily mounted within a few feet of the truck cabin and that would be physically painful already. But at least some truck horn manufacturers are almost living up to their claims (sadly). “Super bright” flashlight manufacturers still take the trophy for bad measurement. It also seems like “train horn” doesn’t really mean “a horn mounted on a train”, it means a horn that uses compressed air, so you will see train horns on trucks and cars.
- throwaway892238 3y agoI don't know if you city people realize it, but birdsong in cities is freaking nuts. I can barely hear myself think in many cities now, from all the birds. I live out in the country, and I don't get anywhere near as much of a cacophany of birdsong as I hear in backyards in Philly and Baltimore inner-city neighborhoods. Take a hike some time and stand still and record the birdsong, and then go into a neighborhood with a few trees in a city and record, and compare.
- joseph_grobbles 3y ago[dead]
- Aungmore 3y ago[flagged]
- fnord77 3y agoI thought double-pane windows would block city sounds out when I bought my condo. nope. now I wear noise cancelling headphones when I'm home
- simonsquiff 3y agoI got special acoustic double glazing for my flat. Each pane is a different thickness so they vibrate at different frequencies. Seems to make a decent difference over standard double glazing.
- lettergram 3y agoI own a farm in the middle of no where. It’s amazing to be out there, you’ll hear just the breeze. Three generations ago (and all prior generations of humans) had mostly silence. I regularly go and camp, work out there, etc. it’s shocking how different it is. I question if we are really evolved to handle the world we built.
- alistairSH 3y agoSort of an odd pivot at the end of the essay… COVID brought silence, people enjoyed it, noise can be damaging, so let’s all keep an open ear to the cries of those in need? It’s all true, but it came across a bit jumbled. The level of ambient noise at my house was shocking. I knew the airplane noise was there - we’re only a few miles from Dulles. The road noise was what shocked me. When people got back to life again, it was almost painful. We’re not near an interstate or anything, just a busy 2-lane suburban road.
- blueridge 3y agoHans Magnus Enzensberger, The Future of Luxury (1998): Attention. This, too, is a scarce commodity, with all the media competing bitterly for a piece. Watching the melee of money and politics, sports and art, technology, and advertising, leaves little attention leftover. Only the person who turns his back on these overbearing claims on his attention and turns off the roar of the channels can decide for himself what is worth his attention and what is not. In the barrage of arbitrary information our perceptive and cognitive capabilities decline, they grow when we limit our attention to those things and only those things that we ourselves want to see, hear, feel and know. In this we can see an occasion for luxury. Quiet. This, too, is a basic requirement that has become harder and harder to satisfy. Anyone who wants to escape the everyday din must be very extravagant. In general, apartments cost more the quieter they are; restaurants that do not pour musical pollution into the ears of their guests demand higher prices of their discerning clientele. The raging traffic, the howling sirens, the clatter of helicopters, the neighbor's droning stereo, the month-long roar of the street fair—the person who can elude all of that enjoys luxury.
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- shrimp_emoji 3y agoWe need a Look Around You for noise
- sowbug 3y agoI didn't read the article. All I saw was a modal site ad asking "Do you have a moment?" Turns out I didn't.
- cableshaft 3y agoI'll probably never have proper quiet again, as since 2019 I've got permanent Tinnitus in one ear. I can ignore it sometimes, and I can sometimes cover it up a bit with ambient noise like waves or out in nature, but it's always there. Not sure what caused it. Predates Covid so it's not that. Might have been working in an open office that always had 4-6 conversations going and I had play music on headphones loud enough to block it out, or my previous car that had a small hole in the muffler I never ended up getting fixed, it got kind of loud at times. Or possibly an antibiotic I took a long time ago I had a bad reaction to that's also known to contribute to tinnitus, although that was quite a ways back that I took it now. Regardless of the cause, I'm stuck with it now. No hearing loss either, at least not yet (I've been tested). Just that stupid ringing.
- totetsu 3y agoI just think of that ringing as the sound of silence.
- retrac 3y agoOne interpretation is that nearly every person has some degree of tinnitus, but many are almost completely unaware of it - it's just perceived as silence under most circumstances. I hit my head once, and lost all hearing on one side; some of it returned after a week or so. When it did, I was extremely aware of my pulse thumping through my head, bones crunching in my neck, as well as minor fluid whooshing sounds when I moved. Quite disorienting! We are always hearing that, but it is normally almost completely filtered out, imperceptible because it's always present. It is my experience that absolute quiet is sometimes subjectively "louder" than very slight white noise, which can be perceived as true quiet. I also find I notice my tinnitus less under such conditions. This is analogous, in a rather deep way I suspect, to how most people perceive a perfectly dark visual field as grey noise [1], or amorphous slightly coloured blobs, or similar, but not a true black. A true, dark black can only be perceived in contrast to a lighter colour. Same with silence, perhaps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigengrau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigengrau
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- ta20211004_1 3y agoI see how it’s easy to agree with this article since everyone has experienced being annoyed by excessive noise, but I do question whether or not the jury is really out on excessive noise causing heart disease, anxiety, etc. As the article also mentioned, silence is a luxury that costs a lot. Since the amount of disruptive noise one experiences on a daily basis is probably exactly correlated with one’s wealth, it seems like this take is very likely inventing a causal link from noise to health when its equally plausible that noise is just another thing that less wealthy people have to put up with (along with worse health).
- wellthisisgreat 3y agoPandemic was an interesting moment re: noise. For the first time I started to call the cops on sociopathic neighbors who thought it’s ok to put stereo system into the window and blast their radio (literal radio, with ads) so that it was heard 2 blocks away. I was hesitant to do it; also doubted that cops would deal with this thing. Yet I was proven wrong. Never heard the stereo since. Noise pollution on that level should be enforced with fines, no reason not to. Same for cars with music blasting at window-rattling levels
- btbuildem 3y agoWhomever cracks the room- or dwelling-sized noise cancellation (think Bose headphones but a bubble for your house) would deserve the Nobel peace prize.
- mastercheif 3y agoIt pisses me off that NYC still allows through-wall PTAC units to be installed in new buildings. PTACs are the combined heat/AC units you will find in cheaper hotels/motels. They are installed through giant 4ft x 2ft holes that are left in the exterior wall during construction. Not only are they terrible for energy efficiency because they are impossible to seal correctly + result in a direct thermal coupling with the outdoors due to their sheet metal construction, they are also the #1 vector of outside noise getting into the apartment. You can hear whenever a truck drives by, even when your window is closed. Also worth mentioning they universally use the cheapest compressors available with awful damping so they’re 70db or more when they’re running. All in the name of saving a buck. People pay $5000 a month to be subjected to these things.
- enugu 3y agoThere is a yoga kriya I learnt called "Dura Shravana"(Far Hearing) which is meant to help one zone out of the surrounding sounds and maintain focus. What one does is to place attention on the farthest sound from one's self then successively move to closer sounds in order culminating in the sound of one's breathing. And then, mentally recall the sounds in order. (For example, ambient background subtle sounds, car on road, bird outside window, neighbours door, the fridge, the breath). With practice, surrounding sounds dont affect you. If someone is interested, I can send a link to a teaching video. It is meant to be practiced after doing the alternate nostril pranayama as it enhances the effects of the pranayama.
- toadi 3y agoI never live without noise. Not thanks to what is around me but due to tinnitus. It is just background noise for me. But have friends where they are more disturbed by it...
- jimmytidey 3y agoIn suburban London and the surrounding countryside, so much of the noise is caused by a handful of motorbikes that have been made deliberately, I think usually illegally, noisy. Stopping noisy vehicles would improve millions of people's lives and moderately upset a few thousand bikers. I have no idea why it isn't a more popular cause. One person doing laps of a built up area in their modified car is likely waking up tens of thousands of people. The police do nothing. If you had a party that caused equivalent nuisance it would be shut down instantly.
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoAnd police sirens at 3am. One of the reasons I left San Francisco, and now live in Venice, Italy.
- mise_en_place 3y agoEngine noise is due to fuel injection. Not sure how that’s illegal.
- RivieraKid 3y agoYou missed the point.
- mise_en_place 3y agoYou can call out hooliganism or whatever the bad behavior is without making ridiculous claims about how engine noise is somehow illegal. That not only detracts from the point, it makes the poster look sort of ridiculous.
- jimmytidey 3y agoThere are legal standards for both vehicle noise and vehicle emissions, at least in the UK. When owners modify their exhaust to make them noisier, they are likely breaching one or both standards. It is specifically illegal. https://www.gov.uk/noise-pollution-road-train-plane#:~:text=It's%20illegal%20to%20modify%20the,that%20creates%20too%20much%20noise https://www.gov.uk/noise-pollution-road-train-plane#:~:text=....
- waveywaves 3y agoAlways felt that with my ex around
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoI have a split view on this... on one hand, yes, quiet nights are nice to sleep, but on the other hand, busy city centers are meant to be busy... Some people buy an apartment above a restaurant/bar from early 1800s here, and then complain about the noise. If you (have a choice and) live in a city center, then it's usually because you like "stuff" to be around you, walking distance, stores, bars, restaurants, party places, outside performances, people, etc. Demanding that everything stops and gets quiet the second you come home from a loud party and want to sleep is selfish. On the other hand, we have people moving next to old farms and then complain about cow smell, cow noises, cows in general, cows having sex, cows looking at their windows, etc. Noise insulation, three-pane glass windows, etc., sure. Demanding quiet city centers, maybe not.
- bpbp-mango 3y agoGood article but where is the mention of the car? I don't mean cars with big engines and loud exhausts, just normal cars, doing normal things. Car noise from the tyres, wind and engines is deafening and always with us. You can barely talk to the person beside you on a moderately busy street and we just accept this. Imagine living on that street.
- nayuki 3y agoFrom the article: > Some of those things include enforcing speed limits, limiting traffic within neighbourhoods, and regulating modified exhausts, the orientation of bedrooms, pavement type, tires, and so on.