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The Noisy Middle Ages
- NeoTar 3y agoObviously this is not the intent of the article, but it would be interesting to compare actual decibel levels of the mediaeval world and today. I strongly suspect that despite all of the sources of noise noted, the world would on average have been much quieter.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI mean the population and therefore population density was a fraction of what it is today, so of course it would be quieter.
- dexwiz 3y agoThat logic doesn’t quite follow because even if overall population is higher, high density living situations are not new. I imagine the inside of a long house in the early evening would have been filled with animal, child, and work sounds. Definitely louder than my modern single family kitchen.
- randomdata 3y agoThe context specifies a world average, though. Back then cities were more dense and, as well, individual households were more dense. It is possible, maybe even likely, that those pockets would measure louder than anything we're accustomed to today. But, at the same time, you would also have more places completely free of human activity to balance that out and then some when computing an average.
- watwut 3y agoPeople had a lot more kids and those kids were around all the time. Just cry from babies and toddlers must have been around much more then today - today you barely ever hear it and many adults are unable to handle hearing it.
- mdp2021 3y ago> That logic doesn’t quite follow No, it is that you assumed "typical environment". 8 billion today vs one third of a billion one thousand years ago: the place has gotten crowded. Which also means, must have been much easier in the past to isolate oneself, within reasonable horse distance. Nowadays, many countries are simply clogged with presence and to find a "desert" is almost impossible (also considering air traffic).
- watwut 3y agoThe limit on isolation was your survival. As in, it was not easy to survive isolated. Pretty much any land you go to belonged to someone who has own opinions on land use. And also, horses were expensive.
- version_five 3y agoI wonder if there are better ways for comparing sounds levels in relation to human comfort. I think variety, pitch, information content, etc are often more important then sound power. Like the old thing about whispering being more disturbing than quiet talking. Or personally I'm way more annoyed by bass from my shitty neighbors playing music in the middle of the night than something like the air conditioner which is louder.
- version_five 3y agoIt feels a bit off to me. I'm sure all these sounds exist, but this makes it seem like the norm is the peak of a workday in an industrial area or market, which would be noisy now too. Country farms, even with animals, and horses pulling carts and whatnot are nothing like the 10,000s of cars a day going by in the background of a modern city, nonstop gas powered road construction and yard maintenance, etc. I'm sure there were loud times but the article doesn't convince me, I think it would have been way more peaceful, especially on a farm.
- nyokodo 3y ago> 10,000s of cars a day going by in the background of a modern city This is covered in the article, however for the sake of added color. Modern cities have a lot going on but are sprawled by comparison. Medieval cities were very compact for foot travel limitations and defense. Families were big and practically everyone went to church so there were many Churches in a small area. The bells would go off every few hours or more for the Angelus, the start of Mass, the consecration, and the end of Mass multiple times a day. You can still experience this in Malta and maybe parts of South America. The article goes into more detail about industry etc. It was noisy!
- Dalewyn 3y ago>The bells would go off every few hours or more for the Angelus, the start of Mass, the consecration, and the end of Mass multiple times a day. I'm fairly sure those had practical timekeeping concerns aside from their religious values. Nobody had clocks back then, so someone had to keep track of the time and announce it far and wide.
- mdp2021 3y ago> practical timekeeping concerns For that matter, we also used the bell towers - each different, village from village - to orient ourselves in travel... Massive signposts on the horizon. Of course if you have to do something, do it with reason and wits. Likewise in term of practicality, the bells could act like the "clock" on a motherboard: regulating collective activity.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI don't understand the thing about church bells, since that's still a thing. It's not obnoxious in modern life IMO. This article seems to try to make a point but... I don't see it. Where there's people there's noises, that's universal.
- cafard 3y agoChurch bells are still a thing, but churches are not nearly as thick on the ground. Someplace like Venice, which was never fought through or bombed, seems to have parishes about five American blocks square. I know in Washington where to go to hear church bells, but it's a lot farther between them. I suspect that four of five Roman Catholic parishes do not have bells to sound, or anyway don't sound them. Are the Baptists big on church bells? I have no idea.
- majoe 3y ago> I suspect that four of five Roman Catholic parishes do not have bells to sound, or anyway don't sound them. Why do you suspect that? At least here in Germany almost every church, Catholic or not, has bells, that are rung every hour (often times with short ringings in between every 15 min).
- cafard 3y agoNo doubt I should have specified "in the United States", but I thought that the mention of Washington covered that.
- randomdata 3y agoI was recently looking at an old map of the township that my family farm is located in from the mid-1800s. Quite interesting! Anyway, included in that map was location of all the churches that stood at the time. Around my family farm, at that time, there was a church every 100 chains (1.25 miles). This is out in the middle of nowhere farming country, then and still today. If they had enough people to fill a church every mile or so, imagine how many churches the densely populated urban areas must have had in close proximity. And then if they are all ringing bells...
- pbj1968 3y agoOne thing I’ve pondered occasionally is what we would notice that we hadn’t thought about if we warped back a few centuries. One that’s always stood out to me is the sheer number of birds. What exists today is a fraction of their population before industrialization. And one mockingbird or crow means you can have a bad time in your back yard now… imagine 20 of them.
- SoftTalker 3y agoMaybe in urban areas. I see huge flocks of crows and other birds all the time.
- ghaff 3y agoI'll see flocks of hundreds of grackles and smaller numbers of other birds on a regular basis.
- pbj1968 3y agoYes, and it used to be thousands. Even recently.
- kaycebasques 3y agoAccounts of San Francisco from the 1700s and 1800s describe flocks in the millions.
- cratermoon 3y agoPre-industrial flocks of birds would darken the sky at noon.
- cafard 3y agoBefore West Nile Virus hit, there were an awful lot of crows in the Washington, DC, area. I saw a statement in the newspaper that a stand of trees at Rockville Pike and Randolph/Montrose Road was home to half a million crows. That seemed improbable on its face; but it you were on that stretch of Rockville Pike about dusk, and saw the stream of crows, it gained probability. But West Nile Virus more than decimated the crows, and that stand of trees is gone. The crows are making something of a comeback now, after maybe 15 years of invisibility.
- andirk 3y agoSomewhat off topic but we have also moved noise into the ocean via commercial fleets which is very noisy ("which is louder even than a jet engine at take-off") for all the marine life who use sound to communicate [1] and I assume there was almost no human-caused noise in the ocean in the Noisy Middle ages. [1] https://www.nrdc.org/bio/regan-nelson/why-all-concern-about-underwater-ship-noise https://www.nrdc.org/bio/regan-nelson/why-all-concern-about-...
- ChatGTP 3y agoThis is where I wish humans would be a better species, we have absolutely no respect for other creatures IMO. From putting baby roosters into a grinder en masse to stuff like this...we should just slow down a bit and stop being legit assholes, we can't though because we're compulsive and anxious.
- demondemidi 3y agoPlus I doubt townhouses, inns, homes, whatever they were called back then, had air-tight windows to block out the sound in the cities. A friend of mine lived in a new-ish apartment in NYC upper-west side and it was 100% silent with the windows closed. Way quieter than my house in a suburb on a main street.
- cafard 3y agoH.L. Mencken said that Baltimore was a lot quieter in his maturity than it had been in his childhood. For one thing, the earlier Baltimore had been supplied by carts with steel tires rolling over cobblestones. Have a look at Babbage's quarrels with and over street musicians in London.
- kristopolous 3y agoWouldn't you be able to find literature from the era of people complaining about it? You can certainly find people complaining about noise today. Does that body of literature exist for that era?
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- yosito 3y agoI'm currently living in a town with church bells every hour and horses that clank by on cobblestone streets at every hour of the day or night. It's unbelievably noisy. But just like modern noise, at some point you stop consciously perceiving it.
- mdp2021 3y ago> But just like modern noise, at some point you stop consciously perceiving it No, "«you»" don't: /some/ people do. And even when they do, to forget about something does not remove it, nor its effect.
- stevekemp 3y agoThe house I grew up in was immediately adjacent to a convent. They would have bells ringing around the clock. After a while you just don't notice, though I did often wake up during the night when we moved away from there - I imagine I was expecting to hear the bells and getting confused when they didn't ring. I imagine its the same as living next to train-tracks, or similar. Regularly repeating noises start to get tuned out.
- ChatGTP 3y agoLiving right on a conrete road for a few weeks, never get used to it.
- southernplaces7 3y agoSome of the comments here mention the noisiness of modern sprawling western-style developed cities and speculate that it's probably worse than the noise of the middle ages would have been. I don't personally know the deep past, but i'd beg to differ. In many modern latin american towns and smaller cities, the sheer cacophony of people, animals, street hawkers, sellers, churches and social events is its own world of constant shifting sounds in a way that compares only to the most central, densely commercial parts of the largest North American cities. You'd think that some largish, say, American or Canadian city's traffic, construction and commercial activity would be louder than that of some small densely packed developing world towns, but you'd often be very wrong. It's not just the scope of it in these compact, crowded places, it's the sheer blazing variety too. I wouldn't at all be surprised if a medieval city of twisting lanes between jam-packed buildings surrounded by a great thick wall were the same, despite there being no cars or modern gas-powered and electronic machines of any kind..