Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)
knowablemagazine.org
knowablemagazine.org
I skimmed the article but it seems to align with the literature back then. The thinking was during our evolution that high volume low frequency sounds would represent a precursor to mortal danger (avalanches, earthquakes, stampedes, thunder, wind) so we were attuned to secreting stress hormones in early response. Unfortunately, much of our urban built-environment is full of (human-made) constant low-frequency sources, although we appear to have adapted to a degree (HVAC systems in buildings, traffic, industrial process plants, airports and air traffic, explosions, concerts).
What isn't mentioned here, that I remember finding particularly concerning, was that while we seem to adapt, it's over our own time, as children we secrete more cortisol to low frequency noise than when we are adults... maybe some form of long term CBT I don't know.
I have no idea where my old paper is but I remember (and someone with more time might want to check/confirm this) one important study showed cortisol levels of children at schools close to Heathrow compared to out in the UK countryside and how this affected standardised testing. There were limitations, and of course you had to control for a range of factors, socio-economic, teaching staff etc, but there was some measurable negative effect (again no idea if this was repeated/corroborated).
The actual research I was doing was into our auditory perception of urban spaces. We took recordings of various urban settings and had participants listen and rate their emotional responses, if it felt "hot" or "cold" (and other adjective pairs), we also had them draw something to represent what they were listening too.
Our "findings" were pretty limited for a short undergrad project but it was interesting how we generally appreciate background chatter and live-music and generally fearful and cold from large flat surface reflected sound (empty city plazas).
Haines, M. M., Stansfeld, S. A., Job, R. F. S., Berglund, B., &Head, J. (2001a). Chronic aircraft noise exposure, stress responses, mental health and cognitive performance in school children. Psychological Medicine 31, 265-277.
And features in a brief meta analysis which some may find interesting:
Matheson, M., et al. "The effects of chronic aircraft noise exposure on children's cognition and health : 3 field studies." Noise and Health, vol. 5, no. 19, Apr.-June 2003. Gale OneFile: Health and Medicine, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A164796669/HRCA?u=googlescholar&sid=bookmark-HRCA&xid=afd7e60c. Accessed 11 Apr. 2022. [https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A...]
One of the few countries I've been to that takes noise pollution seriously is Switzerland. A beautifully peaceful and quiet country.
I think its to one side of your concern, but related: we truly don't socialize the needed guarding of our eardrums. It's a vicious cycle: unexpected mechanical noises stop us sleeping, leads to weight gain, diabetes, heart problems, high BP which in turn feeds tinnitus, hearing loss...
I wake early for other reasons. Sunrise birdsong is lovely. But dump-truck and recycling truck noises are pretty clashy.
After trying earplugs myself a few months ago, I decided it was too risky to sleep with them due to the pressure I felt in my ear (the one against the pillow) when I lay on my side.
I switched to active noise cancelling headphones and earbuds several years ago (2015-ish) primarily because they enable me to keep volume at like 20% and still get the benefits of sound isolation. It's been a huge revolution for me personally.
Running for 2 hours used to give me an ear-ache. Now it's perfect. The improvement in comfort from music-at-the-office is even bigger. 8 hours was a lot and sound isolation is really important to me. I can't focus if I can hear other humans and eating noises make me wanna punch people.
With regular earbuds they were cranked up to 80% to block out the wind so I couldn’t hear any of the acute sounds I can hear with noise canceling and volume at 20%.
Funfact: I ride my motorcycle with actual earplugs. The wind noise at 80mph causes permanent damage after 15min. You hear more of the important stuff with earplugs because they block the wind.
*/5 * * * * osascript -e 'set volume output volume (output volume of (get volume settings))-1'
This prevents me from accidentally listening to something that is too loud for too long. At the level I usually listen to music, it takes about 2 hours to fade to nothing; it's a linear fade, so after 30 minutes the volume is at 75% my preferred starting volume. If I get lost in my work, the music gradually fades and I avoid realizing many hours later that I've been blasting my ears the whole time.
I wish all devices had a mode like this. I haven't investigated how to do this on Linux, but it should be possible there as well I think.
Sometimes I'll try adjusting my volume down to half and notice everything still sounds fine. It's a sign that I was listening to something way too loud without even realizing it.
For linux there are a few solutions depending on the install:
*/5 * * * * pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -2%
*/5 * * * * amixer -D pulse sset Master 2%-
For windows you can use powershell to trigger the Volume Down Button
$obj = new-object -com wscript.shell
$obj.SendKeys([char]174)
Change audio level from powershell - https://stackoverflow.com/a/21362870 Run a task every x-minutes - https://stackoverflow.com/a/4250516
My theory is that audio engineers are mixing live venues after already having hearing loss, thus normalizing hearing damage for everyone else as well.
I strongly believe regulation is needed to combat these problems. Firstly, a venue should not be allowed to damage one’s hearing with loud speakers. I think it’d be reasonable to require nearly all of any auditory experience to be under 80db.
Secondly, city noise pollution is a huge health problem as well. Most of it comes from car tire noise or strangely loud engines (like Harleys), so preventing that should be a priority. Walk along the waterfront in any city, and the overwhelming audio source is the white noise of car tires on the uncovered freeways. It’s hard to imagine how wonderful these places could be if those sounds were much more muted.
I have no problem if you want to have fun with a loud thing, but do it out in the middle of nowhere! Like any kind of pollution, we have a right to live without others negatively affecting us. I think law has not really caught up in these areas of human rights.
It's understandable that a movie or song might WANT to get loud at a particular time, but squashing everything to max is not the way to go.
I agree about the lack of double glazing here, if we ever buy, that will be one of the first things I’d try to change.
I imagine Penny’s Bay is quiet!
Most source of noise pollution wouldnt be that hard to fix. Society just doesn't want to.
This way, motorcycle enthusiasts could have all of their "loud pipe" thrills while riding a clean, silent electric motorcycle and not disturbing their neighbors!
For even more realism, vibrators could be installed in the seat to mimic a combustion engine's "vroom".
People rely on cars for very valid, strong & un-substitute-able reasons in 1000s of cities on this planet ( even without counting the countries in the developing world which are just now getting a taste of vehicular freedom ). HN represents a tiny slice of of an already small slice of wishful thinkers whose pipe dreams get a dose of reality the moment you step outside your NIMBY bubble.
Even reduced car usage - in what is touted as the most bike-friendly city on earth at least here on HN - looks like this in the Baarsjes and Oud West neighborhoods of Amsterdam.
Een rondje door de Baarsjes en Oud West.
To share an anecdote, I went to order a sandwich at a fast food restaurant from the counter. After ordering I waited in the restaurant, watching the kitchen staff serve several cars in the drive through. After 10 minutes I just got frustrated, went back to the counter and asked for a refund. I got it and left.
Later I talked to friends about the experience. Apparently restaurants collect metrics for drive through wait times, but not for orders at the counter. So of course managers have a preference to serve drive through customers. The restaurant I went to made no attempt to hide that preference.
I feel like you need a car in the US to be treated normally.
I feel like this potentially illustrates several american social pathologies but probably best to stick to the car one for now.
The noise in my current apartment is endless, car alarms, screaming and crying kids along with their loud toys, idling cars, the loudest ice cream truck idles for hours for some reason here, rancheras and bass from cars, instruments being practiced, the leaf blowers are horrible. it really sucks. and it feels like no one cares, but it feels so stressful, like physically too.
and out doors is being ruined too. mostly by portable music.
What i really dont understand is people identifying with being loud. i spent a couple weeks in puerto rico and was surprised that some people seemed to be loud on purpose.
Whenever I’m in a Western city I’m grateful for how much more quiet it is (relatively anyways), even with greater density and size.
This is true and it is true all over the world.
Puerto Rico and much of Latin America is basically how the USA itself was in the 50s, so you get more of that.
Blues Brothers also has an example of the elevated rumbling by every second of the night.
I can go to bed every night knowing some random guy won't decide 3 AM on a Wednesday morning is the best day to crank up the bass to max and start a party. I can sleep knowing some old guy isn't going to compensate for his masculinity by revving up his modded motorcycle at 4:30 AM everyday. I can sleep knowing people aren't going to start screaming and fighting in the middle of the street at 11:30 PM and again at 7 AM, even in a nice neighborhood. I can relax and not have to hear someone blasting the action movies and advertisements from their TV from 6 AM to 10 PM every single day. I can take a bus and not be surrounded by people shouting at someone on speakerphone, and needing to repeat their every statement several times because 5 other people are doing the same thing.
And yeah. People who blast music while outside, especially in natural parks, are assholes without exception. I like that I can hike here and it's absolute silence, every single time.
Some people who are constantly 'on' are avoiding sitting with their own thoughts, in some cases due to treatable psychological conditions. The noise or the activity keeps them from being alone with themselves and sitting in a silent space, all of their intrusive thoughts hit like a ton of bricks and they can't even.
I wonder how much of the noise around us is invited rather than simply tolerated or excused.
As a musician... although I understand that, in the end, instrument practice is still noise, it hurts to see this listed among the rest of your items. Last year, I had to move out of an apartment complex because our neighbors would not tolerate even 30 minutes of practice a day (in spite of the ~2 daily hours of lawn care racket, but whatever) and complained to building management.
I get that listening to me repetitously work out a song or musical phrase for an hour might not be pleasant... but is it really as bad as noise from motorcycles, lawnmowers, and car alarms? For those who enjoy hearing their own music but still feel this way: how do you expect new musicians to come into existence, new music to be made? Is it not a racket worth its trouble? Is there any solace in knowing that the person making such noise is doing so with the specific goal of creating enjoyable noise in the future?
These are genuine questions. I want to practice a lot, but I hate noise pollution myself and don't want to be a nusiance to others.
I like to think I'm reasonable and I understand that compromises need to be made for people in our unfortunately crappy apartments. I don't think its fair for me to try to shut down someones practicing. I get people do what they want to do. It sounds like to me likely your neighbor was unreasonable.
It's very much a personal thing. My brother once lived above a pub, when I came over the pub was playing music and I asked him if the noise didn't bother him. He asked "what noise?" On the other hand he hates living next to a road, whereas I don't actually mind that so much.
Or another thing: some time ago X11 and Wayland were being discussed on HN and someone asked me if I didn't mind the tearing on X11. I had to find a YouTube video to find out what exactly it looks like. Now that I know what I looks like: yeah, X11 does tear a lot, I guess. But it doesn't bother me in the slightest, whereas other people are very bothered by it. I also watch 720p (and lower!) videos/movies and think it's just fine.
I guess my point is that different people are bothered by different things. Person A saying "it's not that bad" and person B saying "it's driving me up the walls" can both be true and genuine statements.
As for your instrument practice ... I don't have an answer. Details matter: are you practising 30 minutes or 2 hours every day? What instrument do you play? How well insulated is the building? Etc. As for "is it not a racket worth its trouble?", no, I don't think so, not if it's severely affecting your daily quality of life (and again, how much it affects people really depends on the person).
Yup. If the neighbor decides to play one of my favorite song ever, I'll still be pissed if I'm trying to watch a TV show.
Also, whatever instrument you're playing, I guarantee you the difference between everything else is that your neighbor can feel the music even with bulky headphones. There's a very unsettling feeling you get when you can't escape that, especially when you work from home. Maybe consider getting quiet equipmen -- you're a software developer, so you can surely afford it.
Like, I don't necessarily care that the toddlers stomping around above me are having fun, learning new things, etc etc.. they're still stomping around. Don't be that person.
For me, the absence of stress caused by someone playing unwanted music into my apartment would absolutely be worth no new music being made. Lack of stress is just more basic and immediate need.
No, it's incompatible with houses with poor sound insulation.
Here is what we did..i am learning an instrument too..so we sat down one day and figured out set timetables for practice. there is a way to soundproof a room..with foam panels. We got an electric sax which is brilliant because it can be practiced with headphones and has three instrument choices for clarinet, flute and sax. The controller can also be used with headphones.
Rent studio space with other friends or a friend's shed. Digital instruments are your friend. It is the future anyways. We have also vetoed drums as a family decision and that's mostly because we have pets. Tabla is ok and a lot of times i only need the metronome. I also use an app called iTabla for my sitar practice and I can control the volume.
The best solution is to find a friend who has space and tolerant neighbours.
Oh!! And curtains..there are scurtains that absorb sound. I don't know if its effective, but I found them at Costco and replaced all the nice curtains with ugly heavy sound absorbing curtains. Because. Music.
At equal volume, it's actually worse. Music is harder to tune out than mechanical noise.
> For those who enjoy hearing their own music but still feel this way: how do you expect new musicians to come into existence, new music to be made? Is it not a racket worth its trouble? Is there any solace in knowing that the person making such noise is doing so with the specific goal of creating enjoyable noise in the future?
No.
There's no difference between a lawnmower and a piano in that case. The later might even be worse because it's not constant "white" noise (gray noise maybe?).
I lived next door to a piano player, and even though the walls were well insulated and I only heard him play lightly, it drove me mad. Music meant to attract attention. Even with a white noise machine it was incredibly hard to ignore.
Most instruments have electronic versions that you can practice with headphones. Pianos, violin, drums, guitars. For the others you can install an insulated booth, or rent a studio. Some hobbies aren't fit to be done in an apartment building, too. I'd love to play DDR in my apartment, but the downstairs neighbor will kill me. So I don't. Choose your instrument wisely (I used to be into drumming. I just had an electronic one, it was close enough to practice. Not as cool, but hey, compromises have to be made).
The venn diagram of "people willing to lift a finger about noise pollution" and "people who think they know what car you should drive, how long your lawn should be, how much water your washing machine should use and what temperature you should set your thermostat" is only a sliver away from being a circle. It's not at all surprising that people take a mental shortcut and just skip straight to the belittling step.
I have reports from multiple neurodiverse people about how much better they can deal with (loud) social obligations. One person diagnosed with ADHD is practically a different person with their earplugs in.
Obviously not a cheap solution but doubling up is better than any earplugs I've ever used.
For sleeping, I used the Bose QuietComfort for a long time. I'm a side-sleeper, so large headphones were a challenge.
Is that sarcasm? Human society utterly failed at handling Covid.
Edit: With at all times of the night I mean when I walk or ride along there, which can be anything from 22:00 to 05:00.
Anytime there is birdsong, now matter how late or early. Even when no cars are there, in the extra silence between 02:00 and 03:30.
Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.
My previous home office had spray foam insulation with double layer sheet rock and bass traps on the walls, yet I still had to have a small homemade box around the microphone when I was doing any sort of voice work that wasn’t more informal.
Sure in a city a loud motorcycle may go by, but that's like 10 seconds of noise? Compared to a revving leaf blower for an hour (and usually there are a bunch of them going).
They're even banned in Palo Alto, but it's not enforced.
They only banned gas-powered blowers and they seem to rely on citizens to report use.
That's hugely hyperbolic.
But in the city there really are constant sirens, car horns, diesel trucks, construction noises, roadway noise etc...
The most comprehensive study done on this (admittedly a long time ago in 1970) shows a clear correlation between population density and noise pollution.
https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr_ne25/gtr_ne25_183.pdf
I think the most likely explanation is that you moved from a particularly noisy suburban neighborhood to a particularly quiet urban one.
Mostly because of lawn stuff and garbage pickup. Also probably a factor that I’ve been in new city buildings with good insulation and not on the ground floor.
Garbage pickup is once a week, and the truck is close enough for me to hear it for maybe 15 minutes. Double that for recycling pickup.
I live a few miles from the city center, in just about the densest area where people still have lawns. There are maybe 5 houses close enough to me that I could hear a leaf blower from if I’m inside the house (loud enough to notice). Even if each one runs a lawnmower and leaf blower for half an hour each week, that’s 2.5 hours per week tops (only 2 of them actually use leaf blowers, and most only cut the grass 1x every 2 weeks). Also in most of the country mowing only happens a little more than half the year.
Compare that with road noise, and sirens, which I hear far more often.
Around me, there are three different recycling pickups (one for the each kind of recyclable). Combined with regular trash pickup, it means that the garbage truck is here on most work days.
Down in San Diego the noises are much MORE noticeable because many houses have poor or no insulation at all, and the windows are single pane (or open).
# vehicle/person probably doubled since then.
I eventually moved because they ruined my peace and quiet, and because I was getting sick of the 5' snow drifts starting in October.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
Video discusses this thoroughly. There ARE quiet cities amazingly enough. And suburbs are a HUGE source of the noise IN the cities they surround because it's the car traffic from suburbs into the cities that makes much of the noise.
Cities ARE loud, but they don't HAVE to be.
On regular roads it's 50 km/h. There's one like 300 meters from my flat.
On a few big multilane roads it's 90 km/h or more but the closest such road is 700 meters from my flat, and it has these noise-cancelling panels around it.
I can't think of an exception to this in any city I've been in, honestly. Which cities have lots of clubs and bars with loud speakers out the front? Is that common in the states?
Half the problems with America seems to be lack of regulation and the assumption that it can't be changed :)
Like our party was able to carry a bazooka around openly in one state :)
A perfectly practical solution would be for the town to designate "outdoor power equipment times" such as "Saturday, 10-4" or "any day, 10-12, 3-4" or similar.
Electric is helping but even then there's noise created from just the action of the device, and you also reach a paradox where as things get quieter the remaining noise sources become more annoying.
In terms of decibels cars are indeed louder. But not all noise is created equal.
I have noise-cancelling headphones - they do a great job removing white noise(so traffic, among others), but aren't too effective against sounds with a more focused spectrum like people yelling in the middle of the night, bottles being broken or trash being collected in the middle of the night.
Paris is very densely populated - I'm surprised anyone attempts to drive there, because at these densities and distance between buildings it must be horrible.
My point is: it's not that clear cut. Removing cars is what makes places like Paris bearable, but the problem lies in the sheer population density that a truly walkable city over a certain scale requires.
I moved to a city that has 2/3 the population density of my previous location and even though it's just swamped with traffic, it's actually quieter on average.
I feel like population density is completely left out of the conversation. From my experience there's a middle ground between car-oriented suburbs and human pile-ups like Paris(or other cities approaching this density) which is rarely explored.
There is no magic, just legal regulation and it just works. Switzerland and Japan are good examples.
The Dutch city of Delft in particular is just intentionally designed to care about noise. Both design and regulations. Turns out that when you simply prioritize reducing noise, it's actually doable. And it's still a city, albeit a modest-sized small city, not a major regional hub or a global-level metropolis. But the lessons can be applied anywhere.
Everytime I get passed by an e-bike my brain has a little pleasure seizure from not having to suffer the expected rawkus.
But subjectively I don't mind the tire noise nearly as much as the sound of an accelerating petrol engine.
It would sound like something out of a William Gibson novel.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qe1wuDsXVk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvX7NnlhiOE
Bonus: Kia's sounds like an ambient synth track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZwVJPN0Ow
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu_1JM_UiuA
This is because the manufacturer is based in Quebec.
The first time you shouted my eye was twitching. By the third time I could almost feel a stroke coming from the increase in noise pollution.
Humans are so susceptible... pfff
Currently live in a dense city in Asia. Remove all the personal vehicles and it would still be noisy as hell. Just business vehicles delivering food, removing trash, etc. are a decent amount of noise. The high building density reflects and concentrates the noise.
Then add in construction, road work. Even the worker moving trash bins around by hand every evening is loud.
Pure fantasy to have dense city living an little noise.
Using car horns at cities is forbidden anyway, unless there's a crash or a dangerous situation you shouldn't hear them. I can't remember the last time I've heard a car horn in my city.
I've lived in countryside and in several places in 2 different big cities in Poland, and except for one time I lived near a big 4-lane road in the middle of the city (which is a disgrace of communist urban planning BTW) - cities were quieter than the countryside.
Cars are going faster in the countryside and dogs are constantly barking at night at anything that moves.
BTW another factor is windows quality. It significantly changes how quiet your home is.
Since all else isn’t equal, you could design cities that are quieter than the most suburbs. But you could also design suburbs that are quieter than most cities.
In the US at least I linked a study that showed cities are far louder on average.
Once you have density high enough you can't live in separate houses. People move to commieblocks or other kinds of multitenant buildings. This shifts everything closer together, makes public transport profitable and having a car becomes optional. These kinds of neighborhoods are quieter than the countryside usually. It looks like this: https://spoldzielnialsm.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Obecni... https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ud9-Z0UHVHg/W7-qUjfNT9I/AAAAAAAAi...
Or if you're insane you can mandate enough parking space that this doesn't happen and instead you have highrises in the sea of parking lots.
Now we live in a not-so-popular area built during a great housing programme in the 60s ("miljonprogrammet" in Swedish) and we love it. Lots of green areas, all parking is in the outer perimeter so we have almost no traffic. The modern areas built in town are nowhere near as well planned from a life quality perspective.
I am not anonymous (nor even pseudonymous) here, so I might as well mention that the area is Vilbergen in the city of Norrköping.
Its really annoying for WFH
Adding to that list: The poisoning of every downstream waterway for miles. The further south you go, the worse it is.
Driveways can, admittedly, be handy but you don't need a whole lawn for that. Just turn the driveway sideways and butt the whole thing up against the road. Boom, just as much parking and space for trailers or cleaning your boat or whatever, and you can cut out a few meters of lot depth with minimal loss of functionality. Of course, building codes mandate lawns, so that can't happen. Meanwhile I dream of a world where everything's ~10% closer just because we don't have suburban front lawns.
I also sometimes wonder how many amazing parks we could have if half the money everyone put into maintaining their front lawns went to that, instead. Put half the money and half the land into that and we could have an awesome park on every other suburban block, and still save money and space.
I live in the densest neighborhood in Austin (West Campus). Sirens are rare, and car horns are moderately uncommon. Construction noise is near-constant during the day, as are big trucks related to the construction. Car noise is ever-present, but more of a problem on the larger roads. (I'm currently sitting outside a coffee shop on Lamar and the traffic noise is indeed constant and terrible.)
The two biggest sources of noise pollution in my neighborhood are 1. the construction and 2. leaf blowers. Leaf blowers might be third if you split the construction-related trucks into their own category.
Insane suggestion: record the dump trucks every night (using good microphones - maybe even hire some), build up a compendium of recordings, get a really good speaker and amp setup (absolutely no buzzing/hissing/hum etc), then play the recordings in a loop progressively increasing the playback volume throughout the night so it's as loud or even louder than the actual dump truck when it arrives. In this way you may be able to acclimatize (exposure therapy). It's quite reasonable that you might need to raise the volume very slowly to begin with (maybe even have the playback volume effectively muted at the start of the night) such that it's still very quiet by 4am and you might still get woken up by the dump truck and then need to stop the playback for the night to get back to sleep; the idea/hope is that you would be(come) able to increase the volume to the necessary level by 4am and stay asleep, this may take a few goes. It's also possible that quality of sleep might not be absolutely 100% to begin with (perhaps turn down the volume/progression if this is the case). It might work though? (I wonder if this would fall within the 2-week habit-forming period, such that you'd acclimatize within a fortnight...)
Spending too much time in hardcore noise insulation can induce tinnitus, which is then pretty likely to stay around forever.
With good ones, the silence is deafening. Ambulances and super strong winds are one of the few things that break through.
And besides that you get better insulation for hot summer, cold winters, etc.
Do you have more information on that? A quick search did not yield any results.
> I’m about done with this nonsense and about to move out to the burbs so I can sleep through the night.
Trash trucks run at 4am in the suburbs too. The absolute best is when the truck sits in one spot, in reverse, for 5+ minutes - for no discernible reason at all.
There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them, but the city of LA reported that costs didn't significantly increase after banning them.[1]
[1] https://www.dailybreeze.com/2018/08/21/redondo-beach-bans-le...
A... myth? Have you ever used a rake, and a leaf blower? How about for many hours?
If there's no change in costs when switching between the two, it's getting hidden or absorbed somewhere. It takes substantially less time and effort to use a leaf blower than a rake for the vast majority of tasks that call for either.
Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance.
There's beauty in chaos.
Arguably there could be even more beauty in not even raking them! That doesn't mean leaf blowers and rakes are comparably cost effective, though (as implied by the claim I replied to).
In fact most of the times the city will provide a truck a few times a month that will vacuum the leaves from the road, provided you push them all to the curb.
Not every suburb is this desolate, cookie-cutter hellscape like you see in places like Texas. Many of the historic neighborhoods, especially in the northeast, have real reasons to manage foliage.
And if you think leaf blowers are bad, just remember, people just used to collect them into huge piles and just burn them (still do in very rural areas), or worse yet, just toss their bags of leaves into the trash can. Leaves and landfills are a bad combo. With yard waste collection, towns will compost them and turn them into compost or rich soil: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2017-12-18/you-asked-we-answere....
I fucking loathe chain saws...Get a damn axe!
I fucking loathe lawn mowers...Get a damn scythe!
I fucking loathe loud diesel trucks...Get a damn wagon train!
I fucking loathe cellphone ringers...Get a damn semaphore!
Seriously, until you've done a full day's landscape maintenance yourself, you're not qualified to talk about leaf blowers. Luckily battery powered leaf blowers are getting better, and will be up to most households' maintenance needs soon, hopefully. I believe we're still a ways off from battery blowers being good enough for commercial crews though.
Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil the temporary owner is trying to destroy by monocropping homogeneous “grass”, I’ll hope that generally makes collecting organic matter to waste wrapped in individual virgin plastic bags obsolete itself. Groundskeeping could do with a 21st century ecological update… we even had the native plants movement in the 80s
I dunno, what about mulching it in sítio?
Leaf blowers are also futile in wind.
You're doing your own reductionism. Not all leaf blowing is to collect leaves for disposal in plastic bags (and I'm 100% for using leaves as mulch where they fall on beds, and also with not having lawns). Leaves need to be blown out of gutters, drains, and ditches - otherwise the road will start being eroded. Leaves need to be removed from paths and patios, otherwise they will stain the concrete, let moss grow, and make the surface slippery. You try doing that by hand on 8-10 properties in a day, on minimum wage, without health insurance (the situation of most landscape maintenance workers in the US) - and then tell me that banning leaf blowers is a good idea.
Leaves on the lawn can easily be mulched in place and used to build up organic matter, as you point out - but that too requires a gasoline engine powered machine. The call should be for banning lawns, if that's the concern - not banning leaf blowers.
(I should also mention that if you don't live somewhere with a real winter or dry season that causes heavy leaf fall, your situation isn't representative.)
The standards to which we maintained things were far, far lower in the past because doing so was much more laborious and therefore expensive.
The areas of the garden with trees would be a different thing.
Neighbor here blows for 2-4 hours regularly, carefully hitting every sq in of the lawn. Most of that time is spent blowing clean grass, with the nearest leaf (there are only a few to begin with) being a doz yards away.
I am not morally opposed to leaf blowers, just the noise that is foisted on everyone else by their use. I couldn’t go down to my garage and rip the throttle on my two stroke motorcycle for two hours once a week without getting the police called on me, yet the leaf blowers have become normalized. It’s nuts.
I used one once. It was fairly useless. The bag was too small to collect any sensible amount of leaves and it choked on the small twigs and other stuff that is often mixed in with leaves if there are mature trees in the vicinity.
Every few months my old petrol leaf blower is used for about 30 mins to clear debris off a gravel path that has proven impossible to rake, and when this blower dies I'll get a battery one.
At the time John Howard was PM and was setting the controversial precedent of refusing to reside at The Lodge - he instead insisted on living at another government owned residence in Sydney (Kirribilli House).
So. The caretaker died when a tree fell on him while he was using a leaf blower during a storm to clean a property that was not even being used.
Madness.
The tradition of speaking in public using phone’s loudspeaker is the close second in terms of cultural inadequacy
To me it changes the mental end of the week cleanse. When the routine of nearly everyone gets changed it affects everyone. My generation going back to my father's and before kept Sundays quiet. Nothing to do with religion it was just a day everyone seemed to agree was the quiet day. Now in the past 10 or 15 years it's changed dramatically.
It really is, if you're on a block where a bunch of people use a maintenance service it's very possible to have 2-3 hours of commercial leaf blowers at least once a week for a few months. It could be twice a week if you happen to have a situation where let's say the east and west side of your block each have 4-5 houses who use a service but the middle doesn't. That usually means 2 different crews will independently do it at different times. The block itself might only be a few hundred feet (10x quarter acre properties on each side) so it's extremely noisy for everyone on the block.
Then factor in being kind of close to a fire house and there's a massively loud siren every day at noon and random sirens / fire trucks for emergencies. Oh you live 3 miles from a small airport? Ok, there's going to be planes flying in / out almost all the time. Oh yeah, did you know they do helicopter training every Monday and Thursday night from 8pm to 10pm, so now you get to have your house shaken every 10-15 minutes while a helicopter flies a few hundred feet over your block while doing laps.
And you have trees too where Blue Jays love to pretty consistently squawk. That sounds like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6P7k4np0Js, but it carries far. Once one of them starts, it's like a chain reaction for 15 minutes. Even with windows closed and headphones on it's easy to hear it. I've had to stop recording videos because even a dynamic mic (very directional) will pick it up.
Suburbs are really loud.
I suck up and chop the thicker drifts with an electric vacuum device, and mulch them. There is some noise, but no-one can hear it over the blowers.
Two sound sources that don't bother me at all are songbirds and kids playing.
With this one you're getting into the intersection with US cities' rabid opposition to actually building enough housing, so new units become labeled 'luxury' whether or not they're actually luxury, because zoning and permitting requirements push the prices of new units into the stratosphere.
The Long Island City neighborhood is ground zero for this. Studios going for $3k a month that are no bigger than a dorm room.
And then there’s the noise pollution. The proliferation of delivery apps has caused an explosion in the number of gas powered scooters on the streets. Many of the delivery scooter riders enjoy “souping up” their rides by removing/modifying the mufflers and driving as recklessly as possible. Due to the giant holes in the walls left by the PTAC units you can hear them wizzing by every few minutes from 2PM to 11PM.
And then there’s the “fart cars”, dirt bikes, and ATV gangs, but those have already been addressed by others.
He shouldn't have to IMO. Building codes should require buildings to be sound proof between units. Yea, I know that's dreaming but I've lived in such units. I once lived in an apartment in LA. It was the first apartment in my life that had an in-unit washer and dryer. I asked the guy showing me the apartment "I'll bet I shouldn't run that after 10pm". He responded "These apartments were built as condos and they have double concrete walls between units so your neighbors won't hear you. Feel free to run them anytime day or night". And, the 18 months I was there I never heard a noise from any other unit.
Conversely, I lived in a fairly typical SF place. Older and not designed for sound proofing. It was so bad that I mostly stayed out of my bedroom because the just being in it the guy downstairs would complain. Basically all I ever did was walk in, climb in bed. When I woke up, get out of the room. I felt for the guy, it must have been like a drum but at the same time I shouldn't have not been able to live in my apartment (oh, and I didn't wear shoes).
I had a guest room. Every single guest (friends, not AirBnB) would get yelled at their first night just trying to change out of their clothing into their pajamas.
The funniest one was a girl moved in downstairs. One night at 3am I moved my bed about 4 inches. A single move not making a sound for more than 1-2 seconds. The next morning she came up to bitch me out of waking her up. I told her I didn't complain about hearing her masturbate every night. I just put on my headphones and checked in 20 minutes. She moved out the next day.
I feel like the law should have made the landlord make that apartment more sound proof.
In my current place there's an industrial air conditioner running on the building next door. It runs 24/7 even though no one has been in the building during COVID. With any window open it's around 60db which is fine maybe when you're awake but it sucks when you're drying to go to sleep. With the windows closed it basically sounds like someone is running a vacuum cleaner in the room next door, all night.
Further, some, the city, or some company, comes by at 4am and empties trash cans. The pick them up and bang them. It takes them ~10 minutes to get them all. Everyone in the building has complained and AFAICT both of these are illegal.
https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/ehsdocs/ehsnoise/guidelinesn...
But so far it's been impossible to get anything enforced.
With modern buildings, where all windows and walls are completely airtight and there is no natural draft any more because of energy efficiency, the buildings would start to mold if you turned off the ventilation.
They could, yes, but that depends on how much money the constructors spent. Some will go for the really fancy stuff that the janitor can fully control from their office, with everything relevant (air inlet and outlet temperature, tenant-individual air consumption, CO2 levels, ...) being measured and every tiny little actor (valves, bypasses, flaps) controlled in a carefully balanced flow that achieves optimal efficiency, while others will go for extremely dumb systems that offer little more control than "here's the circuit breaker, if you want more control you gotta climb to the roof and fiddle with the valves".
> Or put some lube on the device?
I doubt the problem is lube (unless it's actively creaking, and at that point the building management would be well advised to have the system inspected because that's a fire risk). Usually the problem is inadequate dimensions, caused (again) by financial decisions... basically, similar to a PC, the larger the fan the less RPM it needs to haul the same amount of air, and the less RPM it runs the quieter it is. Larger fan systems need more space (obviously) and are more expensive to purchase.
Seriously though, people should understand that night is for sleeping and walls do not offer perfect sound insulation. Everything you do can be heard and can disturb someones sleep. I struggle with this all my life.
We should be protecting sleep quality like we protect water quality...which I guess considering how bad the water is in certain parts, may not be the best analogy.
Or on a Sunday... :) Although the washing machine/dryer are usually in a utility room in the basement, shared between everyone in the building, which makes it a bit harder to just turn on.
What stroke me the most during my trip to the US (Chicago) was:
- the constant police sirens
- the fact that cars come with a feature that allows you to find them with their key by making them honk. Here it is forbidden to honk in cities (though people do it all the time, sigh).
Equally awesome is a beepy, late-shift neighbor who's driveway is right by your bedroom window.
[1] Or maybe had been, seems they're on decline. Albeit when powerful BT speakers were all the rage (like JBL Flip), they were overused in public spaces as well.
If you have to "slap"¹ someone, and you will have to least you live in the desert, you will have to learn how to do it and to do it properly - effectively, proportionately, optimally. If you don't, then it's downfall in your quality of live and everyone else, and the environment and property value. It's the foundation of civilization to pull each other up towards civilized behaviour. Those areas in which reciprocal correction left way to "anything goes", I have seen, have decayed to rubble (and from heights).
(¹Yes, reference.)
To be honest, my hesitation is based on the number of local news articles that surface every so often. There's an alarmingly high number of Google results when you search for "zwrócił uwagę pobili" (he made a remark, they have beaten him) [0]
This may be in general a cultural factor. Even in non-violent contexts some people just do not want to be told what to do. I think Sarmatism [1] echoes to this day in many layers of the society in the form of ill-understood "freedom" [2]
Now, I may be selling Polish society short, most people are reasonably polite and the above are deviations, not the norm. But these deviations are still visible.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=zwr%C3%B3ci%C5%82+uwag%C4%99...
People from the US even speak louder :)
Concretely I suggest reaching out to your city council and trying to push for using more noise abating materials in code depending on the classification of residence (e.g. for dense residential.) My partner and I live in a condo run by an HOA and noise abatement material (underflooring, between walls, etc) up to certain spec is mandated by our HOA. We only hear our neighbors when they're having drywall work done in the home.
You may get better mileage hiring a contractor, if you own a home, or talking to your property manager if you rent for upgrades to your dwelling.
I've lived in San Francisco for awhile (and still come back to live there some of the time), and this is the thing that I notice increases my heart rate every time I come back. In SF, they're so loud! Even late in the evening! I didn't pay too much attention to it until my grandmother (living in a different and European country) was on the phone with me one day, and hearing the alarm from a fire truck comme ambulance, she asked – what is that highly disturbing noise?
I thought about it and realized she was right. The wail was very disturbing and did make my heart beat faster when I heard it.
I wish San Francisco lowered the noise of the ambulances later at night. The noise ricochets off the buildings so much that I wonder if we can't introduce legislation to make the vehicles automatically lower the volume of ambulance noise used when leaving the highway. I understand it needs to be that loud on a busy freeway or LA-esque (very wide) street, but in an alley in Chinatown? Can't we consider the heart palpitations of the residents subjected to it day in day out if they live near either a hospital or a fire department?
At this rate I'd rather lose the deposit than live here for a full year. Road noise a silent hum is fine, but constant "brrrr" is just ... ugh ...
A “tour” or walkthrough doesn't assist with this at all
I'm aware the internet and phones made noises before tiktok, but something about this app compels people to forget the sound-vironment is a shared space, it seems.
So true, still true.
I also struggle a lot with noise pollution. Shity neighbours, random building noises in the dead of night, Buses that accelerate right in front of my window at 6 in the morning, etc.
In the area around Frankfurt airport (FRA) there is ongoing noise monitoring[2] to make sure that the noise doesn't constantly exceed the agreed limits. The aircraft can only fly between 6am-11pm daily, in one of Europe's busiest airports. The local residents won a court case against the airport, so they are entitled to free triple-glazed windows, and a device installed into the wall to extract CO2-heavy air from the house interior (important for sealed off bedrooms).
There are restrictions on noisy activities you can do at certain hours[3], such as hoovering your place, blasting your Hi-Fi or car stereo. Initially, I thought it was overly restrictive, but it's the best way of ensuring people can live densely and not go insane from inconsiderate neighbours.
Finally, apartments are generally thick concrete walls with high-quality windows and doors, both interior and exterior. Interior doors are usually solid material, with a rubber-lined bezel creating an acoustic and thermal seal between the door and the frame. I wasn't used to that before moving to Germany, it's quite impressive and definitely improves your living quality in an apartment.
[1] https://laerm.hessen.de/mapapps/resources/apps/laerm/index.h...
[2] https://www.fraport.com/en/environment/noise-abatement.html
[3] https://www.german-way.com/many-kinds-of-noise-vielerlei-lae...
Some cities have intricately designed noise ordinances that account for this, but most just have some kind of blanket "After 11pm no more than 50db". Sometimes they'll add "or 5db above ambient".
At my previous place, the noise ordinance was the same if you lived in a residential neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, or in the bustling middle of a commercial district. In lieu of nuances, the city enforcers would just use their own opinions and discretion on enforcement, which generally left people unhappy on both side.
Just have "loud" parts of town and "quiet" parts of town. Then people can live where it suits them. Enforce it appropriately (so if someone live in the loud part and bitch about noise, tell them to move. If someone is loud in the quiet part, fine the shit out of them).
Though generally "quiet" areas get gentrified, and prices rise a lot, because they are far more in demand from people with more money (read: older and/or privileged), so I guess that wouldn't work so well.
It’s unfortunate for me that housing bubble has made it so expensive to buy and soundproof a place. I keep waiting for the market to deflate and it keeps not happening.
Dogs are the worst for me. I don’t know how other people can sleep through that. Drives me nuts.
I have thought seriously about moving to Switzerland.
I visited a research institute in Garmish, Southern Germany. The building was next to a cow pasture, and all cows had really loud cowbells, constant noise even with windows closed. Does this happen in Switzerland, too?
Who can afford to move every year with rent inflation at 25 yoy? Clearly you aren’t living in the gilded state with its luxurious rent control provisions.
At my last address I struggled with helicopters hovering overhead all day. I just moved into a new place and have building plumbing running 24/7 next to my flat. Over time I’ve accustomed to wearing either NC headphones or earplugs every hour of the day, but it just upsets me so much to have to do that.
Yet nobody takes it seriously and I’m considered ‘weird’, or told that I’ll ‘get used to it’. Well, I don’t.
I’ve taken to using float tanks for occasional hours of total silence and I’m once again looking for a new place to live, and considering leaving to go live in a cabin in the woods or something..
Something I've noticed about real estate agents and especially leasing agents is that they tend to try to keep the conversation up, and in an empty house that can be a couple decibels louder than normal conversation. If you have a partner, take them with you and collude so that the more sensitive person can escape to the other end of the space and just listen. If you are single, take a friend who is 'helping you' house/apartment hunt and use them as a meat shield.
Something I keep saying I'll do and never actually do is take a day off and just be in the neighborhood outside, because some places are quiet during business hours and a cacophony during rush hour or due to night life.
sorry, what is that?
Personally I can't imagine loving an animal and putting it in a cage at the same time.
I wish designated dog free neighborhoods was a thing.
Last night, after the kids got to sleep, I saw my friends stack of mail and right on the top was a weekly mailer. The very top advertisement on the flyer was for a weekly dog poop pick up service. They'll come by your place once a week to pick up Scruffy's poop and deodorize the yard.
My point here: There are so many dog owners who should not own dogs.
The one thing i noticed when visited Dubai, there were no random dogs barking even in dense condos.
For dogs in particular, the issue is almost always a lack of attention, a lack of discipline and/or a lack of awareness. People picking up needy family dogs then leaving them alone for 12 hours, anxiety, boredom, letting dogs decide when they are allowed to bark.
Worst, dogs are quickly taught that barking works as long as it is loud enough. So eventually these dogs start having a competition to bark loud enough it penetrates your walls. And those with separation anxiety will do it while the owners aren't home, leaving them out of the mess.
I really like dogs but the far majority of people just can't handle an easy-going breed, let alone something far needier in any sense.
I'm not sure exactly what sort of regularity you're talking about with barking, but I think this take can be counter-productive. Let's say your neighbor gets a puppy. The puppy at some point will begin barking (because e.g. they will overtire themselves and sometimes need to be confined in order for them to sleep, or they want something they cannot have). Interpreting this as "lack of attention" (and thus urging the neighbor to respond to (read: reward) the dog's barking) will teach the dog that barking gets them what they want.
Thus for a period it is likely that a new dog will go through phases of barking which simply have to be endured in order for the puppy to learn that they don't get rewarded in response to barking. Alas, this can take time and some dogs are naturally more vocal than others. There's no way around this issue except from living somewhere dogs are either not allowed or are far away enough to be of no concern, and educating people about dog training.
As a more concrete example: my neighbors have two adult dogs. Both are at least partially from a breed which requires a lot of attention from their owner(s) and a lot of space to move. They are known to get extremely rowdy if their needs aren't met. Just recently, the two were separated with one in what I presume to be a relatively dark area and almost no human contact. The one inside would bark very often, for hours on end, with the owners not responding at all. The barking was loud enough to penetrate the walls. They also aren't trained properly at all, barking at anything in sight even if it isn't remotely close to or interested in their territory.
Obviously there are multiple factors at play here. But it's not something you should be doing to a breed of dog which grows extremely attached, set in its ways and needy of its owner. Even if they would learn not to bark in such a neglected state, that's not good for the dog either.
As an aside, I've never had issues with puppies. They don't bark nearly as loud as most poorly trained adult dogs do, and most people are still in the honeymoon phase with their dog at that point.
"Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
"The Suburban Traffic Contradiction" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E
It was lovely and I remember being so surprised you could actually hear the birds like in the woods! Any other day it was so loud it could be difficult to even talk to each other (not to mention the stench)
And yet it was a major struggle to keep this happening every year with people and counselors fighting the event organizers every single year because how are we ever going to survive without our cars for 12h on a weekend once a year?
Same city where I couldn’t get anyone to do anything about the garbage trucks picking up and loudly banging metal trash containers at 3am. Fuck this noise (literally), I’m never living in a city again.
I currently use Mack’s ear plugs, but I imagine they are pretty much all the same. Just look for some foam ones. The first couple of times it feels strange, but you get used to it quickly.
https://www.happyearsearplugs.com
they advertise heavily but for me it's the only ones that dont bother me when im turning at night and they hold forever.
I have an unproven theory in my head that shutting off my hearing while I sleep, quiets my subconscious and even when I'm asleep, my ears are still working so this helps another part of my brain rest as well.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M6AI2HF/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XP28RWB/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
For the people advocating for high density housing to alleviate suburban sprawl and all of its environmental problems, I do appreciate the importance of that, but if I can avoid living in an apartment again I am willing to go to almost any amount of trouble to do that.
Counter, i dont want the noise from upstairs doing god knows what. I moved out to detached and the only noise is the leaf blowers and occassional traffic
It's hard to overstate how beneficial it is to have a little space.
Like subways in cities, it makes zero noise but it needs population density.
And more bikepaths, more walkable streets, less car lanes.
And that's not even considering the sound BELOW ground. They've improved it, but ride BART around the Fruitvale switch, or anywhere it turns underground really, and the screaming and screeching noise becomes your whole world for a minute or two – impossible to escape.
Need to move to North Beach or something away from the crowds... lol
If only a bit if thought had been put into the design of this, such as having a directed sound (a physical bell?) that is clearly audible in the immediate vicinity but does not radiate long distances.
What is most frustrating to me is that it seems there is no one you can complain to, no one you can point to and say please fix this, as it obviously is based on some regulatory requirement. If only those who design these type of noise-making devices would be required to also consider noise pollution.
And don't even get me started on car alarms...
Of course it'll probably be many years before old-school beepers are phased out.
Tom Scott video for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa28lIGuxq8
I love heavily wooded suburbs, but logically speaking it's not efficient and not sustainable compared to more centralized housing, for many reasons.
Just on the noise front, statistics dictate in a given block, every day at least one house will be doing loud yard maintenance.
They stretch this out and.. it's just horrible. I'm often away from the house, but my wife sometimes can't get away at home (they'll start in the middle of her cooking, for example). It bothers our pets - they'll be hiding under the beds for hours.
I get it - mow the grass. But... it really doesn't need to be 3+ hrs. One neighbor mowed for 2 hrs on Thursday. SUNDAY AFTERNOON he mowed for another hour. The grass was not longer. He just likes riding a mower. Next to our window. Then... edger/blowing. Another 30 minutes, and again... leave it propped up facing our window - running - to go in and get a drink. I'm not even sure how/why it's possible to have an edger running without a human holding it.
It’s an air pollution issue too. Emissions from the old ones aren’t really regulated and many of them really stink!
Just in the past few days: Roofers came on Saturday morning and spent the whole day banging and hammering... Pressure washer guy all day Sunday... 8am this morning, the lawn service guys are already out in full force... All of this literally across the street, ~100ft away
For some reason, being inside / covid lockdowns did something to my head and now I'm super sensitive to noise. Prior, I lived in Boston for six years generally in very loud (third to fifth floor) apartments with reasonable amounts of street / city noise. Oddly, for a time it actually calmed my ADHD and distracted me enough that I felt I could focus.
Initially I was lucky and had a great deal on a 26th floor apt in Hell's Kitchen with decent roommates - something clicked a few years later and I could no longer stand roommate noise (kitchen / dishes / gaming past midnight) and / or late night garbage collection / horns at all hours.
I had enough, moved to CO. Have my own space - it's quiet and I get measurably better sleep.
Does this make me feel old at 27 - yes. Do I care - no.
Something about being stuck in a place for however long lockdown lasted has changed what were minor annoyances into major stress inducers.
My pet theory is that we have a certain level of tolerance that is worn down and replenished in normal, free-movement circumstances. Forced subjection to annoyances simply wears down any tolerance that exists, and once that is gone it is hard to get it back.
That, or simply the mental categorization of the noises changed from something we voluntarily endure to a kind of punishment.
How is it fair to allow a single piece of shit to emit orders of magnitude more noise than hundreds of people combined.
I complain about it all the time but almost nobody else seems to care. I love motorcycles but I do loathe the majority of riders as they are well beyond inconsiderate. They will do almost anything to emit more noise.
I'm just trying to enjoy what's left of nature and it's like I'm at a race track.
If my neighbor is renovating at 10pm because she's a single mom trying to flip a house while also working 2 jobs, I turn on a noise generator in solidarity. If that same neighbor starts listening to music with too much bass, my initial reaction is more negative until I realize I may be creating noise too when I'm yelling at video games or sports and she may not appreciate hearing that.
I believe a strong sense of community is the missing link in a lot of these stories. Understanding is typically a necessary step before acceptance, and most of us don't have the time or take the time to establish that understanding. The world is so busy these days, and our time so filled by all forms of electronics, the only time we run into each other anymore is if we happen to be working on our gardens at similar times.
>take our soma
Nobody mentioned anything about using drugs.
>encase ourselves in silent solitude
Normal people call it "sleeping".
These are the prices we pay today in the US, but they don't have to be. Other countries like The Netherlands and Switzerland take noise pollution more seriously and show it's possible to have quieter cities. Even among huge cities it's possible: Tokyo is much quieter than NYC.
We don't need to make people choose between living in dense, efficient spaces vs calm and quiet. Making urban living more comfortable is a net benefit: the people that live there will be happier, people that wanted to live there but avoided due to noise will now have that option, and people outside of cities would be unaffected. Why accept this as just the way it is when plenty of other cities have shown it can be better?
This video shows what it's like when a city takes noise more seriously (in this case, the whole of The Netherlands). It focuses on cars, but apartment noises can be handled too with building codes. https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8
Personally I can't sleep in a quiet room, so I put on white noise generator plus usually music or podcasts. I find that subjectively I sleep better with some relaxing sounds. However, it could be possible that my brain isn't properly turning off and I'm just unaware of it.
Their possible explanation is that the brain is waking up to process whether a sound is dangerous, which makes sense for intermittent sounds, but you would imagine we're adapted to sleep properly in the presence of semi-intermittent/constant sounds which would be normal in nature.
For reference, I live on one of the busiest roads in London, so I'm not particularly noise sensitive. But in the USA, it was just constant sound everywhere I went. Cars honking when unlocked, multiple sirens within earshot most of the time I was in any large city, people leaving their cars to "warm up" on their driveway, leaf blowers, shouting. It's constant, all hours of the night.
In London, we still very much aren't a 24/7 city. At around 11pm the traffic really dies off and most people are on their way to bed. You still get the odd lorry or ambulance, but even ambulances don't run their siren unless necessary.
Obviously that isn't complete silence, but apparently complete silence (as in, an anechoic chamber) is a horrible experience.
Also, just wanted to point out this gem:
"Children in loud, loud places like East Oakland are the ones who grow up saying, ‘Can I ax you a question?’"
Which someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that that's how that word developed linguistically. It's my understanding that "ask" pronounced "ax" has been around and popped up from time-to-time in a lot of the English-speaking world. It was seen in England pretty far back, but I don't have an exact date or location off the top of my head. I don't think there's any evidence that it's caused by noisy environments.
The woman talking about her million dollar house and having to unplug her husband when he menaces their neighbors with his own leaf-blower seems like the sort of person that would be fun to chat with. Just my kind of sense of humor.
I realised the value of silence the first night in Netherlands. I could physically feel heart go down and mental peace. They take noise levels seriously and it shows!
Edit: Details.
It took me a month of CBT to break the back of it, and everything is (mostly) back to normal now, but it just blows my mind how insensitive people are to those around them. I just don't understand it.
I am talking about apps like Facebook, Instagram suddenly playing sound of a video at full blast when it scrolls into view in a feed.
God I hate these apps and this thing called smartphone that has taken over our lives.
Fuck all this modern shit. We should have never come out of the caves.
And its the first 4 or 8 bars of a song (usually a modern cover or remix of older song) on a loop.
It is waterboarding for the ears.
> This is why airpod pros or similar noise cancelling headphones are worth their weight in gold.
In case anyone else was wondering: the weight in gold is about 500$.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...
EU now require every large train, road and air traffic change to use this guide.
Short version: 1) Gather data from health records on the number of people that can be affected by noise by the change 2) Use this is the calculations for the new noise levels for the alternatives proposed 3) This calculations have to be made public, and you have to stay under certain noise levels
Seriously, where is the evidence of accidents avoided? Vs other measures?
side note: had to live next to a construction site for 2 years. The beeping started in the morning at sunrise and ran for 12 hours straight.
And I'm wondering what it is like for construction workers; for the noise to provide a safety measure, they would have to pay attention to it. But that means it can't be a constant. Which it is.
Anecdotally they tend to travel much less, and generally be less annoying too. I can hear a beeping truck from ages away in my flat, but not once have I thought “god I wish that kssh kssh would stop”.
see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/world/europe/france-stree...
and
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/paris-inaugurates-its-f...
Not in my experience. From my rented flat overlooking Geneva, when I was working there as a consultant, I used to get the (happy) screams of the kids in the school next door, the thump of heavy metal from the next flat, the whine of aircraft coming in to the airport and the clank of rubbish going down the waste disposal system.
All in all, I would rate it noisier than my flat in Wood Green, North London.
But yes car noise is a big problem here in my opinion, not to mention gas leaf blowers.
And cigarette smoke. Everywhere. That’s such a shame for a country where we think “mountain pure air” which has in reality an ashtray smell everywhere you go.
It is not a substitute for earplugs around dangerous sounds and you cannot hold it for hours to block out the sound of an airplane engine. The only time I ever had a practical use for this was when I heard someone leaving a movie theater start to discuss what was obviously about to be a major spoiler with their friend as I was entering. The utility there comes purely from it being socially unacceptable to interrupt a stranger or suddenly cover your ears, while nobody else can see if you're using your tensor tympani.
One that that's helped a lot for us is white noise, good earplugs, and eye cover. Since adopting this 4+ yrs ago I've not even thought about the neighborhood at night.
I do wonder if white noise can be considered a stressor, but personally I believe I've had a lot better sleep.
It definitely stresses me out and an important factor for where I'll live next.
We would then be able to separate the effect of noise vs. life stress. Surely, for any study about stress, socioeconomic status should also be a factor.
When I need to sleep near a road with traffic I can only with ear wax. The worst are motorcycles.
[try setting your TV to 100% volume, put on the news, and sit a foot away and think how loud the surrounding noise has to be for you not to be able to hear the TV at all]
That said, I have a "weekend home" in Vermont. It's dark. It's quiet. Guests, as well as myself, sleep extra well. Noticeably well.
The topic of noise pollution from wind turbines also seems similar.
One square inch of silence : one man's search for natural silence in a noisy world, by Gordon Hempton
https://www.worldcat.org/title/one-square-inch-of-silence-on...
https://thallukrish.medium.com/noise-and-well-being-a9f0b30d...
Find the noise. Smash it. Dash.
Masked batmans on bikes.
All it needs is to become popular. A cool name and logo. A marketing campaign.
That would silence cities quick
Use the social media. Encrypted text...
Cities aren't loud, cars are loud.
My understanding is that the vast majority of road noise is caused by vehicles outfitted with non-standard tires. Where I live, 90% of the road noise is caused by lifted trucks using massive off-road tires on local roads and highways. It isn’t clear if this against the law all over the country, but in various US states, the police will issue tickets. There are several employees of local businesses who commute nearby and wake up the neighborhood when they go to work and when they return with the sound of their huge off-road tires getting on and off the highway. I’ve driven next to them on the highway several times and the noise is deafening. I can’t see how this is allowed. Next time I drive past them, I will run the NIOSH SLM app and record the decibels.
Is it the same crowd with modified exhaust? Are they increasing the noise on purpose?
They look for loopholes in the “social contract” of what behavior they can get away with without facing serious consequence.
If loud car exhausts were aggressively policed they wouldn’t bother. As it stands, police departments view it as a “we have better things to do” offense and these trolls take advantage of it.
I don't recall ever hearing such system in my country, so I expect this is a US-only thing (I'm from Europe). I don't think this kind of system would even be legal in my country, nor would it be socially accepted.
Semi-trucks work just fine with regular silent brakes in the rest of the world, so is there any legit reason to equip a truck with such system, apart from the driver thinking it is cool?
Noise pollution will kill me a hell of a lot slower than living near people care about these sorts of things. The people who give a fuck about the obsessive lawn guy and his leaf blower or the teenager with his obnoxious exhaust tend to also give a lot of fucks about a lot of other "niceness" things that would cost me a lot of money and frustration to conform to.