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> Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties. T

• trgn 2y ago
  Given the obsequious near limitless tolerance we extend to operators of loud ICE engines in the public realm, I don't think this is nearly stressed enough.
  • sephamorr 2y ago
    I entirely agree that there is substantial tolerance for vehicle noise tolerance and this drives me crazy. Cities aren't loud, cars are! I just want to make clear though that replacing the ICE part with electric engines solves the problem for low speeds only -- once they're going at a reasonable speed, engine noise doesn't dominate (if you exclude the antisocial behaviors of deliberately loud vehicles, most motorbikes).
    • the__alchemist 2y ago
      Cars aren't loud; commercial vehicles are. (Relatively) So are motorcycles, and food truck generators.
      • dpe82 2y ago
        The Mustang that parks my street and operates 100% of the time in Sport Mode is the loudest vehicle I hear on a regular basis.
      • surfingdino 2y ago
        Some care are loud. Especially those modded exhausts.
      • geraldwhen 2y ago
        The illegal street racing near me says otherwise.
        • creer 2y ago
          You can't equate "illegal street racing" to "cars". I mean you can but how is that going to address anything?
      • blargey 2y ago
        Are pickup trucks "commercial vehicles"? Either way there's plenty of them in residential areas, revving up at 5am or rumbling home in the dead of night.
        • Mountain_Skies 2y ago
          They really don't need to be, but jerks sometimes do modify them to be loud even when idling. About five years ago I lived in a neighborhood where some jackass would idle his modified truck every morning at a quarter till 5am. He'd leave around 5am and you could hear the truck for at least a minute as he left the neighborhood and started accelerating hard on the highway. His house was across the street and four doors down and his truck still could be heard through my bedroom window which faced the backyard. I don't know how his next door neighbors tolerated it. This was an exurban area with lots of pickups and even a few commercial vehicles in the neighborhood but he was the only one whose vehicle was loud and it obviously was made that way intentionally.
        • the__alchemist 2y ago
          No; they do not have the loud engines I referred to.
          • genter 2y ago
            You've obviously never been passed by a straight piped Dodge Ram while riding a bike.
      • abdullahkhalids 2y ago
        If I am walking down the street, listening to something on my earphones, I inevitably have to pause/rewind if a non-commerical car is passing by. I could maybe get headphones, or some noise cancelling earphones, but I shouldn't have to.
        • the__alchemist 2y ago
          Valid; I should have clarified. This is a matter of degree, not kind. Commercial vehicles are much louder than cars. Especially at the lower speeds where engine noise dominates tire noise.
      • the__alchemist 2y ago
        I will update this: Y'all have valid points regarding cars making noise: Non-modified personal vehicles are significantly less loud than commercial vehicles, motorcycles, and food truck generators.
    • bpfrh 2y ago
      To add to that, public transport based on trains is and always will be a source of noise, even if they are purely electrical
      • LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
        That depends entirely on the tracks, and the wheel(sets) of the trains, though. No matter if streetcars/trams downtown, or so called 'light-rail'/fast-rapid-mass-transit reaching out into the periphery, or neighbouring towns. They can also be buried by applying that strange concept called 'subway'. Hrrm, what happened to all those hyped loops, btw?
      • trgn 2y ago
        i'd trade the predictable rumble of a train a couple of hours a day over the unpredictable roar and rumble of trucks and muscle cars.
        • Ylpertnodi 2y ago
          ...and Harley Fucking Davidson motorcycles.
    • adrianN 2y ago
      At low speeds new cars are required to make a sound for safety reasons.
    • ofalkaed 2y ago
      I sometimes miss the constant din of the city, I have heard nothing but wind and waves for the past week and those are louder than any densely populated area I have lived in. Now that they have settled down the crows can hear each other so they have been at it all day. When it actually gets quiet is when I miss the city the most, I like the quiet but every noise breaks that silence which demands your attention making it difficult to concentrate on anything. It is now below freezing and everything green is gone, everything is getting hard and that is when things really get loud here, nothing to absorb sound but plenty to reflect it. Nature is pretty noisy for the most part, while it seems quiet compared to the city it is actually just different. Sometimes when it is quiet here I wonder what the noises of nature must have been like to people a century or two or three ago when the wind was not just wind but something which could destroy your crops and make the next year very difficult for you. Or the extended lack of noise constantly reminding you that the drought continues and even the animals have had the sense to move on while you watch your fields slowly die. City or nature our relationship to the sounds around us have changed quite a bit, we can now choose to ignore the majority of sounds and write them off as meaningless or irritating if we can not manage to ignore them but those sounds are never meaningless, they all signify something more than our irritation. Right now I am missing the wind and the waves and feeling the constant low rumble, I really hate listening to the compressor on the fridge but if it stopped making noise I would probably be more irritated by the thought of spoiling food and the potential inconveniences which that would cause. Never could hear my fridge when I lived in the city, if it stopped working it would just be an issue to deal with when I discovered it was no longer cold, not something I had a constant reminder of.
      • abdullahkhalids 2y ago
        It's interesting that you didn't once mention the sound of humans. Background human noise, where you can't catch the words, is very nice to hear. I love the constant din of cities, but the din of people. Not the din of cars. If one is lucky enough to live in that sort of city.
        • ofalkaed 2y ago
          >It's interesting that you didn't once mention the sound of humans. I think they are implied by the din of the city which is the din of people even if it comes from a loud car, that loud car is loud because of a person. For the driver of that loud car being able to really hear the engine could mean the driver is the sort of person who wants to hear the engine and is the sort who can isolate each and every sound the engine makes telling them a great deal about how well it is or is not working. Or their engine might be about to fail and it is a constant reminder of another thing they need to figure out how to pay for and praying it holds out until next month when they get their Christmas bonus even if that means the kids will have not have much of a Christmas. Or it might just be that it is their way to block out the constant din of the city. Or they may just want the city know that they are there, that they exist. screaming to the heavens as it were. All those sounds which make up the din of the city have meanings and are personal, they connect to a person and a life. But I did make a conscious decision between natural and unnatural noise, nature vs city, people are sort of a grey area there and getting into that would complicate my point. The person living out in middle of nowhere miles from anyone is generally allowed to make as much noise as they please unless you happen to be camping near their property, then they are probably going to be considered rude for disturbing the tranquility and your vacation from the city even though you are the one encroaching on their life, not the other way around. As far as you know no one lives within 100 miles of your campsite and here are all these noises which do not belong 100 miles from civilization.
  • fullstop 2y ago
    I'm seriously considering moving because I live near an interstate. By near, I mean about a mile away, but the trucks with the straight pipe exhausts that engine brake drive me _bonkers_. On top of those, the sound just carries sometimes. I can't see the highway from my house, so it's not a line-of-sight thing, just acoustics. I've started recording the outdoor sound levels using a USB sound meter: https://i.imgur.com/IdYdhA8.png https://i.imgur.com/IdYdhA8.png When the quietest it gets is above 55 decibels, I don't like being outside. It's not just cars passing by, it is a pulsating drone which never ends.
    • ffsm8 2y ago
      Cars are extremely noisy, and it's so hard to predict how loud any given address is without actually living there for a while... Beyond the obvious reasons anyway. My current address would be perfectly fine if people drove according to the rules, but it turns out that people in this town don't adhere to speed limits whatsoever and there is literally no police control. Consequently, the 50km/h speed limit is ignored entirely with most cars driving around 70km/h. That shit gets loud!
      • fullstop 2y ago
        In my case the area has become a haven for warehouses, and large (18-wheel) truck traffic is up 90% in the last few years alone. I've lived here for over 20 years, and it's hard to see it change like this.
      • trgn 2y ago
        I have the same problem. The difference on a snowday e.g. is night and day. no speeders, so much more quiet. Two of my neighbors on our block bought electrical cars, and not exaggerating, it made such a difference to quality of life, no longer hearing them pull up or drive off. I lived in a "walkable city" for a number of years. The noise outside my window was all human. Footsteps, people talking, ... At night was dead quiet. Much more quiet than the suburban street I'm on now. City life is not inherently shitty, it's tolerance for antisocial behaviors that make it shitty. I really think americans can't always put their finger on it, and end up moving out at some point, thinking it has to do with the overall "busyness" of city life or something. But it really is just noisy cars.
• OJFord 2y ago
  From the way that paragraph continues: > The importance of sound is underscored by its dual nature, serving as both a vital tool for communication and a potential source of harm, exemplified by the pervasive issue of noise pollution.[1] Considered to be a public health issue by the World Health Organization, unwanted noise can have harmful health effects on people who are chronically exposed to it.[1-5] In the US alone, an estimated 145 million people are exposed to hazardous noise levels.[5] To suppress noise levels, both active and passive solutions are used. I suspect it may be angling to funding or a journal/conference purpose or something? Without that, the rest of the paper's not really going to care about noise pollution, even if it potentially indirectly offers a way to mitigate it.
• eyegor 2y ago
  For papers sometimes you need to hit a page count to make your sponsor/advisor/conference happy. I've been told "this is a great paper but can you pad it out to 12pgs?", maybe that happened here as well.
• lofaszvanitt 2y ago
  It shakes up people, reminding them how shallow their vocabulary really is.
• hammock 2y ago
  "Sound is everywhere, and fills our ears and minds" doesnt quite have the same PhD level ring to it (pun intended)
  • piyh 2y ago
    I enjoy having an LLM rewrite my shit posts as if it was a PhD research paper.
• rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  Welcome to academia.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Etheryte 2y ago
  Writing like this makes me sigh, exhaling air, the omnipresent chemical stimulator, which holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our biological and mental faculties.
  • bawolff 2y ago
    I think your sentence demonstrates the difference between trying to fake "sounding smart" and just writing in a complex way. Like seriously, "[exhaling air] continually engages our [...] mental faculties" is pretty nonsensical, since breathing is something autonomic. "Omnipresent chemical simulator" seems irrelavent in context. All in all, its a nonsense sentence Now compare with the original sentence. Its an introduction to the paper. They are trying to establish why they are doing the research they are doing and why you should care. And it tells you - we did research into sound dapening because sound is all around us and its constantly effecting us. Which is something as a human i find to be true - the modern (urban) world is quite noisy. When there is too much noise it can be mentally exhausting and can tax my ability to understand those around me. After reading that sentence I now know why they are researching this area, and agree it is a worthy thing to research. That introductory sentence did everything an introductory sentence to a paper is supposed to do. Sure, they use some fancy words, but they aren't even that fancy. It is a formal paper, i think high school level reading ability can be presumed.
    • PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      In this case they could have just said "hearing is trivially important to most humans" without any loss of value to the paper. The purple prose seems to add nothing at all.
    • supertofu 2y ago
      The opening sentence isn't "complex" or "fancy" writing. It's LLM writing. The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives. Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception. "Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts." This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings. I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.
• bawolff 2y ago
  Its low on informational content, but as an introductory sentence seems fine to me.
  • troyvit 2y ago
    Yeah I kinda liked it. It made me stop and listen where I was, realizing all the weird noises happening around me that I was mentally trying to cancel out.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    It's very motivational. IMO, my answer to it is a sound "hell, yeah! can you help with it?" But the way it's written is bad. The OP would have a point if the complaint was about the form, and not the contents. Whatever makes people believe they have to write papers this way (whether it's true or not) needs fixing.
• PrismCrystal 2y ago
  That first sentence has been a totally standard way to open a research paper for at least twenty years now. (As I have seen from both publishing myself, and as a side gig, doing editing of myriad papers by non-native English speakers working in many other branches of the sciences.) A writer has to start somewhere, and that has always been a matter of social convention.
• nyc_data_geek1 2y ago
  How do you do, fellow humans?
• kspacewalk2 2y ago
  My thesis supervisor used excessively flowery language like that in papers, and I had to have a few tugs with him over needless verbosity all while learning to write a paper for the first time. I think there's a subconscious "look at how wise I am" whiff that comes off this type of writing. And sure, yes, impressive, but let's leave creative writing to creative writers. As a scientist, you should instead be focusing on communicating a (probably complex enough) idea as clearly and as simply as you possibly can - just not any simpler. By the time I wrote my thesis, I was far more assertive in politely declining many of his edits.
  • bane 2y ago
    My English professors in college beat this kind of stuff out of the students. One went so far as to grade all papers that started with something like "since time immemorial, man has..." with an F.
  • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    The issue here is not so much that it’s flowery but that it’s completely unremarkable, bordering on a truism, in its content. The sentence literally means: sound is relevant because you constantly hear it.
    • abdullahkhalids 2y ago
      The sentence is badly written, which is why it feels like a truism. But there is content in it. > Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, ... Sounds are always being heard by your senses: ears + bass that you feel in your body. > Sound ... continually engages our auditory and mental faculties. The continuous usage of our senses then lets sounds force our brains to think in particular ways. This is distinct from above - brain vs ears. > Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience ... The continuous engagement results in sound being important to what being human means. Note that human experience is larger than what you think. So this is also distinct from above.
      • RandomThoughts3 2y ago
• visarga 2y ago
  It is just setting the problem space. It doesn't convey anything but a topic.