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Comment by drstewart | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things I struggle with the most in life. I feel like most people don't seem to care about noise pollution and zero care is put into designing living spaces or cities to minimize it. I've moved into apartments and nearly cried because I realized that there was some noise pollution that wasn't apparent when I visited it (e.g. a water boiler that ran constantly at night, road noise during the day, etc) and would have to deal with it for a year.

One of the few countries I've been to that takes noise pollution seriously is Switzerland. A beautifully peaceful and quiet country.

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Not only do people not care, they actively push down and belittle people who do. They'll say it's just something that's notmaly and anyone trying to change it should move.

Most source of noise pollution wouldnt be that hard to fix. Society just doesn't want to.

It's because almost all the noise in the modern world is caused by cars and motorcycles, and in the United States are prioritized over all other life forms.

Imo it should become regulation that all cars have to have some audio transparency tech like headphones have. Then we would be able to lower the volume of emergency sirens which are obscenely loud to penetrate cars.

Massively reducing car usage is a much better solution with much more wide-spread benefits.

That as well. But it does feel very wrong that combustion engine users can emit huge amounts of noise and pollution while sitting in sound proof, HEPA filtered boxes.

The horn on automobiles should be mounted inside the cabin. They can make it as loud as they need to make it, but the person who hears it the loudest should be the driver.

I've often thought this should apply to motorcycles too. Motorcycle helmets would have speakers installed inside, wirelessly connected to the bike so that it produces realistic motorcycle sound effects when you operate the throttle.

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".

You joke, but they do this in cars.

https://motorandwheels.com/cars-with-active-sound-design/

These kinds of all-or-nothing approaches are not feasible - even in high-walkability scoring cities. Just look beyond your city's micro-core and see how reliant people are on cars - I'm talking places as diverse Oslo, Norway, Rome, Italy or Amsterdam, NL ( the HN bicyclist collective's favorite city ) [1]

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN7ox6bxBlI

this would also help stop people hooting unnecessarily, if they had to hear it themselves

The US preference for cars cuts DEEP, it’s at a cellular level.

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.

Opposing anecdata: the not-so-secret secret to beating the lines at In-N-Out is to park and order inside or at the window. That's just because the drive thru lines there are always insane.

In-n-out intentionally doesn't prioritize; the only thing that can get you "delayed" out of the order the order was received is if you have something special like cheese fries or a shake that can take extra processing.

Burger King Manager confirmed the same to myself.

During that period last year when the vaccine started to be widely available but still a little tricky to schedule the city shut down my nearest free testing location. The next nearest was "in-car" and wouldn't test me on foot or bike, citing liability. The next next nearest was a 40 minute bus ride away, obviously a very reasonable choice when you suspect you have covid.

I feel like this potentially illustrates several american social pathologies but probably best to stick to the car one for now.

And this is one of the major reasons I’m hopeful for electric cars.

People will still be hobbyists with loud cars and motorcycles, though (at least in the US). We literally just need to legislate a package of laws that says people can't make loud noise with their vehicle, repeated offenses result in the vehicle being taken away, and anyone that modifies vehicles to make loud noise will be fined heavily.

I’m all for it it but unfortunately our local law enforcement in the bay couldn’t care less about enforcing existing noise violations for modded cars and motorcycles. So we can fill the books with laws but if they aren’t enforced it’s as if they don’t exist.

I had this "conversation" with my neighbor (it was more like me being yelled at) It kind of blew my mind they didnt care about noise interruptions at all hours and told me its my problem. Like maybe if you got a full night of sleep you wouldn't be so angry? I guess this study supports that.

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.

I can’t speak about puerto rico, but in another latin american country i’ve spent a lot of time in it’s very common for every small store to have a loudspeaker and blast (imo shitty) music from 10 to 5. That isn’t even bad compared to the many discos right next to each other than play music as loud as possible to not be dwarfed by their neighbor.

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.

Hesitate to say it, but I think a lot of my current noise issues are because I moved into an immigrant Mexican community without realizing it. While I'm posting things that might sound bad, I think I've noticed a correlation with more noise and lower economic class people

How’s the honking? I’ve moved around quite a bit and shared some of your experience from the sound of it.

>>> I think I've noticed a correlation with more noise and lower economic class people

This is true and it is true all over the world.

One thing I remember from living in Puerto Rico for a few years was the vans with huge loudspeakers on top that would go around blaring political messages. This was 30 years ago, so maybe it is different now. I’m so thankful that kind of thing doesn’t fly on the mainland.

This used to be a more common thing, including on the mainland. It's still depicted in TV and film, sometimes. There's a (probably intentionally goofily anachronistic) political ad van featured in Steven Universe, for instance. There's also one (in the "present day", that is, 1985) in Back to the Future.

There's the scene from Blues Brothers where they promote their final concert; that's true to life from the time.

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.

The absolute best thing about leaving the US several years ago is the silence.

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.

Sounds blissful. Where did you move, if you don’t mind me asking?

Can you say where you relocated to that provides this?

During my flirtation with buddhism it came up quite often how inured some people are to constant noise. Everyone had stories of people who simply could not cope with a silent retreat.

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.

Yes. Shut your music speaker off in the park and on the trail or wear headphones. That should be banned

there's lots of places in the US where this doesn't happen. majority of the country, in fact

> instruments being practiced

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 was a trumpet player for years in high school and college, practiced all the time at home and so did my brother so I experienced the situation from both sides. My opinion now is that it is irresponsible to make playing an instrument your hobby or profession (an instrument that can't avoid making noise that will bother others) unless you have access to an appropriate practice space. There are churches, music schools, music stores that will rent out space. Yes it sucks but that's the breaks. Either make sure you have access or don't pick up that trumpet/violin/tuba. Or switch it out for a keyboard (which can be electronic and practiced with earphones in) or guitar. This is what I did in my young adult years after I had put down the trumpet and was playing piano as a hobby while living on my own in an apartment.

Trumpet fortunately is one of the few instruments that you can reasonably practice with a practice mute. I have the Up Mute and it works amazingly with only a little backpressure, no complaints from any neighbors. Woodwinds are much more difficult to keep quiet though.

I once had a violin player as neighbor. It's bad enough when played well but violin mistakes are really painful to listen to.

My issue with my current neighbor (which is why i listed it) is mostly being woken up by the playing. I sleep late on weekends, I guess he wants to practice at 9am on a saturday for a few hours. Its the first thing I hear, he wakes me up, then im stuck listening as i try to get up and out of the apartment. Its also random playing in duration and time. Sometimes I think hes finally done then i get shocked by some loud scales or a random burst. Ideally I would just know how much he wants to practice and when. I'm sure we could figure out a schedule or something. I also offered to split the cost of some sound dampening thing for his saxaphone.

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 absolutely reasonable to not want to be harassed by noise in ones home. Even if that means a musician has to find another place to practice. Living stress free takes precedence over learning an instrument.

I think having control has a lot to do with it; even the most beautiful music is "noise" if you can't control when it starts and stops. Unpredictability also plays a part: it suddenly starts at a random time and okay, so your neighbour is playing loud music (or practising their instrument); is this going to be for 5 minutes? 30 minutes? 2 hours? All night?

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).

> I think having control has a lot to do with it;

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 a musician, but also noise sensitive. To a degree I think the difference is that practice noise is completely different from playing a song from start to end. It's kind of like someone on the train talking on the phone -- you only hear their perspective and it really messes with your head since you naturally want to make sense of what's going on. Practice is scattered, filled with experimentation, and repetitious as hell. But it's difficult to fill those patterns in because practice playing is inherently unpredictable, ie frustrating.

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.

One thing I really liked about university was catching faint snippets of music being played as I walked around. But maybe this is due to not being bothered by people practicing scales in dedicated insulated basement music practice rooms, so I would only infrequently hear ~full pieces being practised.

I loved walking by musical school every now and then when they had windows open. Sorta added to summery feeling. But I hated every minute of my upstairs neighbour having their go at piano.

> how do you expect new musicians to come into existence, new music to be made? Is it not a racket worth its trouble?

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.

As someone who grew up playing piano, I'm sad that it's incompatible with urban living. I know some cultures are more likely to tolerate it than others, but overall I see it as on the way out.

There are electric pianos that are really-really good with feedback and feel and whatnot you piano players value, just plug in the headphones and practice away. Of all the compromises musicians have to make in apartment buildings this is one of the best and easiest.

Those still produce noise when you press the keys. Source: a friend can't practice after 8 because it bothers his downstairs neighbours.

Yeah the acoustics of just hitting a key on a good mechanical electrical keyboard is very surprisingly loud and propagates downwards through floors quite well. I used one for years but one still has to be considerate. It's indeed not the worst of compromises, but for me I don't see it as being enough to sustain a (classical) piano playing culture - it's life-support at best without the acoustic element.

Whoa. That building must be paper thin then. I know they produce sound (we had one), but that's still worlds apart from having someone practice a piece way over their heads days on end.

No, it's a german building, so brick walls, etc.

The irony is better materials cut out more higher frequencies, so without bass baffling, that's all that comes through. It ends up being more annoying. See also: TVs at reasonable volumes annoying people in the next room because it's all fwoom boom grrrscreeecrshhhhh with no context to piece together what's actually happening, and all down in frequencies that are hard to tune out.

Yeah, that building must be absolutely terrible. I have a shared wall with a neighbor who has a baby grand piano and can only barely hear it from right next to the wall.

> it's incompatible with urban living

No, it's incompatible with houses with poor sound insulation.

You need a LOT of concrete, dry wall, green glue and mass loaded vinyl to block out a standard piano...

I'm a musician too, and yes, it is absolutely awful to hear someone practicing next door. I'm fortunate to play mostly electric instruments so I always practice with headphones because I understand how painful it is for others.

Its torturous. I threatened to walk out..i can tolerate the alto but it was either me or the tenor sax. At one point, my teeth started hurting every time sax practice began. The pandemic had brought in seven musical instruments into our home and sometimes extended practice sessions. And voice lessons for the last two months. I wear headphones all the time now..but the downside is that I can't hear myself.

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.

I would suggest sound proofing your studio. I love music but not the sound of music practice through the walls

> 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?

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.

This is such a solved problem - I grew up in an urban area that was mostly apartments, so nobody's house was suitable for music practice. Everyone I know who played music rented nonresidental space to practice, usually a wearhouse space.

The problem is that our hears are hard to shut. Earplugs don't block vibrations, and we need our ears for other things. If you're a parent you need to keep track of your kids, for one. If someone is trying to watch a 1 hour TV show, all of a sudden there's a large window of the day where they might get interrupted and unable to do it. If they work night, they'll be a wreck because they can no longer sleep.

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).

>Not only do people not care, they actively push down and belittle people who do.

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.

There is a whole cottage industry now of in-canal earplugs made of clear or nearly clear material. The better ones have a relatively flat response curve. Etymotic sells some they bill as meant for concert goers (though theirs are not as covert as newer brands).

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.

Leaf blowers. I hate those things with a passion

I wish we would take car caused health impacts as serious as we did covid. We have a never ending stream of research and yet no one cares. We can’t even take action against modded motorbikes and cars which damage peoples health for zero functional gain.

I wish we'd turn into something positve the data learned when the world shut down for a few weeks in 2020 to see how clear the air got, how quiet the neighborhoods got, how still the ground got all from the massive amounts of cars not being used.

Humans fear novelty more than actual danger itself. This is also why nuclear consistently fails to gain traction while fossil fuels continue the status quo of killing millions.

Maybe we should have a system which looks at human needs first and tries to address them, rather than as a side effect of making profit.

> as serious as we did covid

Is that sarcasm? Human society utterly failed at handling Covid.

And there have been proposals to make electric cars produce engine noises for safety. It makes sense to consider this, but making loud warning noises seems like a huge problem. This also comes up with back up beepers and garage exit activity warning buzzers.

God that shit infuriates me. I used to live downtown in a city and only realized after moving into my apartment that I was close enough to hear a crosswalk beeper nearby. Now, I know that it needs to be there for blind accessibility, but I'll never understand why it needed to beep EVERY cycle (basically every minute it would beep for 30 seconds) instead of just when someone pushed the button. It's like, how did no one who set this thing up think about all the people living nearby who'd have to listen to this incessant beeping from 6am to 10pm???

Imagine a crossing, where you have 8 of them. Always clacking, slow or fast, and slightly drifting apart in tempo, to meet into synchronicity again after a few minutes. I'd go insane. The birds are going insane too! Since years I hear them at all times of the night, never sleeping. Interestingly near that crossing.

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.

I had a Nissan Leaf a few years ago and hated that it had to beep when in reverse. Leaving early in the morning felt extremely rude for my neighbors and given the context of use, the beeping had little to no value for safety.

Germany too. You can find noise maps[1] with measurements for all kinds of noise, including car noise, aircraft noise, industrial noise, etc. This allows you to make a more informed decision when renting or buying a new home.

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...

Central Europe rocks. They are the best places for quality housing with tons of insulation and people are generally pretty respectful of each other.

Yep. A big road near us (2-3 lanes in each direction; also a major route into a large city) recently dropped from an 80km/h limit to 60km/h - and I understand the reason is noise pollution for nearby residents.

Did the speed limit drop actually coincide with people slowing down or was it a paper change only?

No matter how the parent answers, on HN somebody else will come along and say "is that just your opinion, or did you conduct a study and publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal?"

I’d guesstimate that in both cases, people drive between n and n+~20km/h - so while not everyone respects it, the average had probably dropped by a similar amount to the limit change.

When earbuds came on the market, Audiologists said "this is going to be a disaster in 20 years time" and guess what: tinnitus and high frequency hearing loss levels are through the roof.

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.

Yep, I joined the tinnitus bandwagon in the beginning of the pandemic. I was locked up at home and neighbouring dogs wouldn't shut up all day, so I resorted to earplugs and here I am now. Surprisingly I met at least 5 other people with the same problem recently, and they were all told by doctors that it was due to stress and not earplugs/headphones. I call it BS.

Earplugs gave you tinnitus? Do you mean earbuds? Earplugs are typically hearing PPE.

I've done pretty much everything I could imagine to try to identify the root cause, no doctor could give a reasonable diagnosis. My tinnitus started after a night with earplugs, but it could have been a coincidence since I also used noise-cancelled Sony headphones. Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not to be rude but you ascribing an equal likelihood of causing tinnitus to one night of using earplugs(which BLOCK sound from your ears) vs presumably regular/sustained use of noise cancelling headphones(which BLAST sound into your ears) borders on ridiculousness and make me think you're just trolling..

Earplugs go into the ear similar to earbuds, but are squishy and meant to be rolled thin so you can get them in a bit further (then they decompress halfway inside your ear and fill in the gaps). If you push them in too far I imagine they can damage the eardrum, which could cause tinnitus.

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.

You would have to push your ear plugs in so far that you couldn't take them out to get anywhere near the eardrum though.

My tinnitus started after a night out with earplugs. Basically the earplugs pushed wax buildup deep into my eardrum. It took quite a while to remove that wax, and while that improved things a lot, the tinnitus stayed after that.

Noise cancelling headphones definitively promote tinnitus

Interesting, I've seen the claim of NC induced tinnitus a few other times. In terms of noise induced hearing loss it the canceling should not be an issue (since in the worst case of a complete misprediction you get only a doubling in intensity which), but since no canceling is perfect maybe the residual ends up adversely affecting the auditory pathways at a neurological level somehow.

Maybe you first noticed it while using earplugs (since they’d block out basically everything else) and now it’s become difficult to ignore? I had something similar happen with noticing floaters in my eyes constantly over the pandemic

Anecdata, but another case here. I wear them approx. 6 months per year because of knocking heating sounds. Anyway, doctor recommended to do ear cleansing once a year and it helped, maybe 80% of the ringing sound is gone. Earplugs caused all the grease to end up compressed and deep in the ear canal. After a while it blocked signal transmission through the auditory nerve enough so that my brain thinks there's no audio input and it starts compensating with these imaginary ringing sounds.

Earplugs can give you tinnitus because they provide almost complete silence, in which your brain can latch on to the tinniest pre-existing tinnitus sound that was already there (which is pretty common in the current era of hearing-damaging equipment and environments), but you didn't notice it before. Once the brain notices it, it's basically impossible to unhear it. That's my theory at least.

I got pretty bad tinnitus due to stress induced bruxism. Identifying the source of the stress that caused it was difficult, but it turned out it was video games! So I stopped playing them so much, and the tinnitus went away

Of all of the years as a DJ using headphones in loud settings, all of the concerts, all of the events with loud amplified sound systems, etc, I was able to avoid tinnitus. It wasn't until I was driving and was t-boned in my side of the car with a side impact airbag going off. I walked away from the car with nothing more than a few scratches from flying glass, this lovely ringing in the ear, and this lousy t-shirt.

As a concert attender I probably recall the event that was the most likely cause which gave me tinnitus. It was an EDM concert where the front speakers sounded very 'rough' and also the stupid decision on my (& my friends) part to stay as close in the front as possible, for more than 1 hour. I think close impacts from airwaves (crashes, staying close to speakers, etc) are the most popular cause, as listening 'responsibly' on headphones did not gave me tinnitus before, nor did my usual edm concert attendance (excepting obviously the following couple of days). The eardrum can recover but once it's been 'cracked' remedies are very rare (if they exist at all, haven't researched).

> When earbuds came on the market

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.

I hope you aren't running with ear plugs and noise cancelling headphones or have some dedicated safe place to run.

I’ve tested and thanks to the low volume I can hear more than I did with normal earbuds. Noise cancelling is great at blocking out constant sounds like wind and background traffic, but it doesn’t do much for acute noises like horns, nearby cars, bicycle bells, or people talking/shouting.

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.

What headphones are you using? I’m training for a marathon and it’d probably be wise for me to turn down the volume a bit but running with my bose closed backs sounds miserable

AirPods Pro have worked best of everything I’ve tried

Keep it to a reasonable volume, keep your head on a swivel, wear your PT belt and you’ll be fine. Deaf and hard of hearing folks aren’t getting mowed down in droves.

    */5 * * * * osascript -e 'set volume output volume (output volume of (get volume settings))-1'

Speaking of tinnitus, and since this is Hacker News: I've entered the above in crontab (crontab -e) on my mac. It lowers the volume a small amount every 5 minutes. I have to press the volume up button once every 30 minutes to keep a roughly equal volume level.

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.

Thanks for this. Really great idea! I normally don't set my headphones that loud but it's happened that I raised the volume during a meeting because someone was talking too quietly and forgot to lower it.

Another nice bonus is that if you're listening to a song at room filling volume during the day, and then later at night you want to quietly watch a video, by then the volume will have decayed to zero so you wont be surprised with a really loud video.

seems like it'd be better served to have some sort of limit on how loud the volume on a device can be set. maybe in the system preferences set MAX = 75%, but in Finder allow the volume to be set at 100% in the UI but the system keeping it limited. make this a per Output setting so when you switch back to Built-in or other external device it is not limited to anything but your buds.

The issue is while your system volume can be the same, media volume varies immensely. Listening to one album, it could be all relatively low and gentle. The next one could be noise that blasts your ears but you don't really think about it due to focusing on something else.

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.

Thought this was interesting so had a quick search and here is what I found

For linux there are a few solutions depending on the install:

    */5 * * * * pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -2%

or with amixer

    */5 * * * * amixer -D pulse sset Master 2%-

Terminal command to set audio volume? - https://askubuntu.com/a/97945

For windows you can use powershell to trigger the Volume Down Button

    $obj = new-object -com wscript.shell
    $obj.SendKeys([char]174)

Simply add the script to a Task scheduler task (create as a daily task then go into advanced and trigger every x minutes)

Change audio level from powershell - https://stackoverflow.com/a/21362870 Run a task every x-minutes - https://stackoverflow.com/a/4250516

Super true. Go to any modern concert, or even most movie theaters, and much of the experience will be well over 80, and even 90db. This is frankly unacceptable. Even the supposedly good standards for audio engineering (Dolby atoms and IMAX) — which specifically make sure theaters are following the spec — are over 90db. A wedding DJ had the music at over 90db in a small venue recently. The last concert I went to, which had good audio engineers, was over 90db for nearly the whole thing.

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.

OSHA requires mitigation above 85 db, and yet there aren't anything mentioning it on venues.

https://www.osha.gov/noise

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.

It's absolutely wild how loud modern sound systems get, even relatively small ones. I even bring earplugs to weddings at this point because the band is so incredibly loud (out of the amplified speakers).

People are so unbelievably disrespectful with noise in the US. Peaceful hike? Here's Katy Perry crackling out of my iPhone at full blast! Luxury apartment at $4k a month? No insulation between units, and the guy above you comes home at 2am and never takes his shoes off. Small country street? Here comes Chad with his straight-piped civic with the muffler removed!

Want to go to the beach? Well here's Toby Keith on your left, Christian Radio on your right, Mariachi in front of you, and Ye behind you. I want all beaches to be public, but then I hate public beaches. meirl.

I find by far the biggest disruption in US suburbs is lawn equipment. Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. Often for hours.

Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.

It drives me absolutely insane. I can’t record audio virtually anywhere unless I treat the hell out of the room. I shouldn’t have to turn my room into a soundproof bunker to be able to record some voiceovers. It’s ridiculous.

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.

Yeah - the joke is people say they move to suburbs to get 'peace and quiet' compared to a loud city, but city life is so much quieter (at least where I live). I'm sure that's not always the case, but I really hated the lawn equipment.

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'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.

>Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you.

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.

It does sound ridiculous but I’ve lived in DC, London, and SF now and all were quieter than the suburbs I’ve lived in.

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.

If the insulation isn’t the same, you can’t really compare the 2. I could take a nap in an active construction site with good enough earplugs.

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.

> 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.

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.

That's definitely not the norm in the US. A quick google search shows that less than 1/3 of US houses have access to curb side recycling at all, much less weekly recycling for extra items like glass.

Insulation is a huge factor - up north the sounds are as present but much less noticeable because the houses have to be insulated, and have double-pane windows.

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).

IMO it's more that the city sounds all blend together into one harmonious cacophony, whereas in the suburbs, it's mostly quite except for that one incredibly loud, obnoxious sound. Always Sunny has a great episode about this.

I don’t doubt that people are more likely to notice sounds in the suburbs because they aren’t habituated to them. But saying the suburbs are louder is like saying it’s actually quieter to live next to a gun range than it is to live next to the woods, because when the occasional hunter fires his gun you are more likely to notice it.

There’s really not that much road noise in a lot of cities unless you live near a couple of particularly busy streets.

The study I linked showed that on average there is.

Yeah, 50 years ago when there was 120 million less people in the United States and households were bigger yet had smaller houses/lots and owned a single vehicle. Power lawn equipment was more expensive back then too - most of my family used push mowers up until the 90s.

# vehicle/person probably doubled since then.

I lived on a 10 acre plot in the US northeast for a while, in a cozy cabin. I had the best neighbor, and old guy who owned the 200 acres mostly around me and let me hike around on it. He eventually died and some dipshit CEO of a healthcare company bought the place, logged most of it, and then gave it to his kids, a teenager and 20-something, both boys. The kids would come up all the damn time and drive their lifted trucks, quads and unmuffled motorbikes with their friends all night long, and then shoot all afternoon and night. It was way outside city limits so anything goes. Of course I tried talking to them, and they just thought I was some loser old guy trying to stop their fun, and their dad simply didn't give a fuck. There was no way the tiny police department that we shared with a neighboring town would even care.

I eventually moved because they ruined my peace and quiet, and because I was getting sick of the 5' snow drifts starting in October.

Cities aren't loud, cars (and trucks) are loud

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.

Sure, but neither do suburbs. You could mandate everyone drive electric vehicles with tires optimized for low road noise.

Tesla going 90 km/h is almost as noisy as regular car going 90 km/h. Engine noise only dominates at low speeds.

And what is the speed limit right outside your house/apartment?

On small roads between the blocks ("strefa zamieszkania") it's 20 km/h. Also pedestrians have right of way over cars on these roads everywhere, no matter the crossings. Usually these roads are made of bricks and have these "bumps" so you won't go much faster even if you wanted to. That's the closest road to me (like 50 meters from my flat).

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.

It's worth adding that 90%+ of Polish drivers ignore speed limits...There's hardly any police or speeding cameras (apart from a few selected areas which everyone knows about, and does not speed there), so the speed limits really work on sort of "opt-in" basis.

Eh, sure, but on the local "strefa zamieszkania" nobody goes over 30 km/h. You hardly can go faster there.

1. Notice I said tires optimized for road noise. 2. Most suburban homes in the US are far enough from roads with 55 mph speed limits that high speed road noise isn’t penetrating the home.

And most residential areas in cities have a 25-30mpg speed limit

Well, given that the whole suburban sprawl style is also financially reckless and unsustainable, the answer is to get rid of car-dependent style of development and life entirely, not just tweak it by going for electric cars.

How about the non-stop construction and non-stop road work? How about clubs and bars with outdoor speakers? Helicopters, industrial cooling/HVAC. I could go on. It's far more than just cars. What are these quiet cities that magically have none of these things?

I never noticed, walking around the nicer European cities, that any of those things made nearly the same level of noise as the cars. Seriously, walk through Paris or something and tell me that clubs and bars and helicopters and AC are even nearly as loud as the cars when you walk next to a busy road.

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?

Miami, NYC, LA to name a few. And it's far more prevalent now since covid as most places have some outdoor seating now and they've seemingly all installed speakers.

It's banned in all Polish cities I've been to. And for a good reason.

Half the problems with America seems to be lack of regulation and the assumption that it can't be changed :)

America fascinates me because half of the time things are functionally unregulated, and the other half of the time there's a law about Kinder Eggs and the exact height your lawn must be.

We're playing Call of Cthulhu pen&paper RPG campaign set in modern USA. Our DM has to check the laws in each state often, and usually it derails the session by how completely absurd it is.

Like our party was able to carry a bazooka around openly in one state :)

Was that Old Man Henderson? https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/comments/2hpuvq/old_ma...

I'd be careful extrapolating too much from a literal reading of state laws.

The HN demographics would regulate things to the point of absurdity if left to their own devices. In the US they only reach critical mass to do so in affluent suburbs, so you get stupid local laws about lawn height and other attempts at legislating conformity. Occasionally they get thrown a bone by the federal bureaucracies or legislators on some meaningless issue that nobody will care enough to oppose. This is how you get lawn darts and random food products effectively banned (not that lobbying doesn't also result in odd small things being banned too).

I don't know what the demographics of HN are, but while reading this I had similar sentiment. I don't like having to hear leaf blowers, but I really don't like other ppl telling me I can't use one. All regulations have a cost; I think I just weigh the cost more heavily in principle than many folks here.

Things like leaf blowers have solutions between "Wild West v8 supercharged beasts" and "every leaf must be hand picked up by your current cadre of indentured servants".

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.

There's a very simple solution. Include externalities in the prices. Most people won't be able to pay for gas, problem fixed.

Pretty hard to price negative effects of noise pollution into fuel prices though, since it includes long term health, as well as property values and other things with massive confounders.

You can measure it. Find N pairs of regions where all factors except for noise pollution are similar, measure price of land differences, average them. You have the cost of noise pollution.

That's unfortunate, and definitely sounds like a problem that should be dealt with. For whatever reason the same thing didn't happen in Australian cities which are structurally quite similar to North American cities so it's not inevitable.

Try the less nice ones then.

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.

I...have walked around the less nice parts of Paris? I'm not sure what your point is. In the less nice parts of Paris, the noisy areas are still mostly the areas with busy roads. It's simply the biggest source of noise pollution in cities and I haven't found anything that comes close. Maybe in specific areas you can find people playing obnoxiously loud music with helicopters buzzing over constantly but that's certainly a very specific and hopefully rare set of circumstances. The same with yelling and crime and so on. If that's the default in your city I'd agree you have vastly greater problems than the sound of cars.

Not much a problem in my city, but those which I've been to that are seen as "walkable" and with a "vibrant city life". Essentially all places with considerable tourist traffic.

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.

I certainly would agree that Paris isn't an ideal city. My experience has been that cities with 1-2 million inhabitants with reasonable, but not extreme, density (i.e. much denser than suburbia but less dense than Paris) have been the most pleasant.

Some of Paris is nice, quiet, leafy arrondissements. Quite a lot is not.

That's not my point. My point is that the noisy parts are the parts with cars, and the areas without many cars do not have anything approaching the noise levels of busy roads. I am aware that not all of Paris is quiet and leafy...

> What are these quiet cities that magically have none of these things?

There is no magic, just legal regulation and it just works. Switzerland and Japan are good examples.

As the video I posted mentions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

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.

And electric vehicles are a lot less so.

Everytime I get passed by an e-bike my brain has a little pleasure seizure from not having to suffer the expected rawkus.

vehicles are make noise with the engine and wheels, so light electric vehicles are super quiet, but heavy vehicles tend to be loud regardless when moving fast

Fair point

Electric cars are certainly far from silent, and somewhere at the high end of city speeds they are hard to distinguish from other cars because most of the sound comes from the tires.

But subjectively I don't mind the tire noise nearly as much as the sound of an accelerating petrol engine.

It all sucks. High pitched tire wine, unbalanced thumps. Diesel engines are the worst.

When I’m walking next to a busy road (which the only two multiuse pathways near me are next to), it’s quite loud and most of the noise is tire noise. (To the point where you have to shout to have a conversation with someone walking with you.) Those trails would be much more pleasant without the cars there, electric or not.

True, but tire noise is sort of proportional to both weight and speed and electric vehicles are on average heavier due to huge batteries. So a fully electrified city would have a very different noise profile but not necessarily quieter or louder.

I am dreading an EV dystopia where all vehicles are going slow enough to create a cacophony from the mandated low-speed sounds.

It would sound like something out of a William Gibson novel.

it's worth testing indeed, that said these car sounds are under control, not impossible that in slow dense urban spot you can lower them

I apologize if this is a silly question but is that currently mandated or is this something that will likely be mandated when the EVs become dominant? My impression was that they are currently relatively silent but that might just because they are always in proximity to a combustion engine idling next to them.

Currently mandated - newer electric cars make this noise that I would put somewhere between "future theremin"[1] and "terrifying alien chorus."[2]

[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

There are electric school buses in my area that emit the sound of the Montreal Metro when driving at low speeds:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu_1JM_UiuA

This is because the manufacturer is based in Quebec.

It's funny how my brain reacts to all caps very similarly as if someone is literally shouting in front of me during a conversation. Must be the decades of internet forums and emails.

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

Not true at all.

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.

Cities aren't inherently louder than countryside. Car traffic is noisy, but the volume is proportional to the speed. Cars going 30 km/h aren't THAT noisy. You don't hear them through the windows. Cars going 90 km/h are VERY noisy and at that point it doesn't matter if they are electric or not - you mostly hear the tires and the aerodynamics.

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.

All else being equal, more people = more noise.

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.

You cannot have significantly more people/square meter with everything else remaining equal. Cities are like stars - quantitative change in density causes qualitative change in behavior.

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.

We moved to a townhouse 2km from the city centre after living 15km outside the city and the difference in noise is staggering. We had a mildly trafficked 70km/h road about 150m from our house (with a property in between) and the noise from that road was more or less constant. We could hear cars from almost a kilometre away over the open fields, so one car per minute meant almost constant noise.

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.

That sounds great. I hate cars and traffic and trains.

round me its just leaf blowers for ~4 hours everyday a few months a year

Its really annoying for WFH

Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US, when you think about it. Noise pollution, excessive water use, more driving (all those barely-used front lawns take up a ton of space, which pushes everything farther apart by a significant distance). Fuel use and air pollution (mowing, trimming, those damn leaf blowers—though at least some of this is going electric).

> Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US

Adding to that list: The poisoning of every downstream waterway for miles. The further south you go, the worse it is.

Oh yeah, good point. And since they're manicured and sprayed with all kinds of pesticides (and lots of fertilizer, which contributes to the downstream poisoning you note) they're not even helpful for any kind of preservation of natural life. They'd like some kind of taxidermied version of a healthy natural environment.

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.

So, I'll agree that suburbs are likely quieter than the city, but those particular items definitely vary by city and neighborhood.

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.

I've always found cars to be much more disruptive in the suburbs because they drive so much faster in the suburbs. Cars drive by a suburban sandwich shop that I like to go to so fast that they shake windows. The speed limit on the road is 25.

They may be louder but do you have a dump truck waking you up at 4am several times a week? I really don’t know what to do anymore. Obviously they need to pick up trash that early to beat the traffic and save a few bucks /s. But the city doesn’t care and I’m constantly told that condos/apartments are a more sustainable way of living. Thats great but I’m about done with this nonsense and about to move out to the burbs so I can sleep through the night.

Do yourself a favor and get some earplugs

Earplugs do essentially nothing to stop low frequency sounds. I can block out a lot of noise with white/pink/brown noise, but the only thing that will stop sounds you can feel, whether it’s an idling truck or a sound system cranked up, is substantial mass and/or decoupling from the source.

i got these Bose QuietComfort noise cancelling earbuds, and they are like magic, cancelling out bass noise from nearby outdoor stereos. i can't believe how well they work. I live by the beach where people play loud music---the concrete walls do OK for the midrange and treble noises, but not the bass.

The person you're replying to is talking about feeling in their body, not hearing in their ears.

I see what you're saying, but I think that's too narrow of a reading of his comment, but it doesn't really matter.

You say that, but it helped my sleep tremendously

I'm not saying earplugs don't help at all, just that it depends on what the source of the noise is. For me, the noises that are most stress-inducing are extreme low frequencies that vibrate the building, and earplugs don't seem to help much with that.

"Normal" suggestions: earmuffs or earplugs; soundproof your bedroom (IIUC certain types of window roller shutters can mitigate noise); move :/

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...)

From what I’ve read and experienced, exposure therapy to bothersome noises can have the opposite effect. Be careful trying that!

sounds like literal torture. i don't think you are joking, but it's hard to be sure.

> earmuffs or earplugs

Spending too much time in hardcore noise insulation can induce tinnitus, which is then pretty likely to stay around forever.

If you can control your environment i.e. you own your home, get triple glazed windows.

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.

> Spending too much time in hardcore noise insulation can induce tinnitus, which is then pretty likely to stay around forever.

Do you have more information on that? A quick search did not yield any results.

Sounds like the expensive sound setup should be used to do active noise cancelling around the head part of the bed.

Move to the suburbs?

> They may be louder but do you have a dump truck waking you up at 4am several times a week?

> 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.

Relevant New Yorker article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/25/blowback

I fucking loathe leaf blowers. I can tell what day of the week it is by which neighbor is going for an hour or two straight with the leaf blower. Get a damn rake!

Ah, leaf blowers. The planet is warming and still, the little hooman burns oil to move leafs forward, waking up the entire neighborhood. Those things should be banned worldly.

I can't find it, but I remember the story of an individual who lead a crusade against leaf blowers and was somewhat successful.

Leaf blowers are the worst. Several cities in CA have banned them. I don't know why more haven't followed suit.

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...

I’m in Folsom, Ca. I wish they were banned here.

I live just north of NYC in suburbs and leaf blower bans are never enforced. Not worth the time of the town or the city to bother dealing with the rules they create. It stinks.

> There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them

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.

Maybe you don't need to track down and collect every single leaf?

Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance.

There's beauty in chaos.

Yep. That falls under costs being "hidden or absorbed somewhere."

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).

Lots of HOA's will be right up your ass if you don't take care of the leaves on the lawn. That's one of the reasons I won't buy anywhere that has one, but a leaf free lawn requirement with a leafblower ban seems punitive.

The crowning jewel of the cognitive dissonance is that places where people who complain about noise live and places the HOA would be up your ass over petty stuff are mostly the same places.

Perhaps you have never experienced mold issues due to excessive fallen foliage then? Or a copperhead nesting in a pile and biting one of your children? These things happen frequently. Or perhaps your neighborhood has a nice tree canopy, but the excess foliage causes a safety concern to motorists and cyclists alike. There are good reasons to clear excessive leaves that don't involve only looks.

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....

Indeed! Leaf blowers are a complete menace to any semblance of peace and quiet.

> I fucking loathe leaf blowers...Get a damn rake!

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.

Reductio ad absurdum

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.

> Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil

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.)

How did landscape maintenance workers perform that task before leaf blowers?

How did people cope before cellphones existed? It's the same as my original point - it's a nonsense question. If you want to create additional work for people by doing it in a less technological manner, focus on the served in the society rather than underserved, who are trying to get a leg up in the economy.

They didn't.

The standards to which we maintained things were far, far lower in the past because doing so was much more laborious and therefore expensive.

It works seem that those lower standards have no significant adverse effect. They only impact trivial stuff like aesthetics.

You couldn't slip on wet leaves and expect to sue the property owner back then.

You didn't have trees in lawns, basically. Look at the pictures of old English manors - there would be hedges next to grass lawns but the trees were few and far between in the lawns.

The areas of the garden with trees would be a different thing.

I don't know about England, but trees were common in American lawns since long before leaf blowers existed.

50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery (not exaggerating). They'd save themselves time if they just bent down and picked up the damn leaves with their hands. Or -- novel idea -- left the last couple leaves anyway, because just as many more will accumulate 30 minutes after they leave.

Fully agree. Leaves happen. I'm just pointing out (apparently in a too sarcastic manner) that the technology is the best we have right now for clearing a lot of leaves within a ton of manual labor (raking leaves over a large area is a decent workout). Banning a technology when its overuse is due to poor landscape planning is a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't address the underlying thing that's really causing the frustration. I.e. we'd all be better off if houses had gardens designed with lower maintenance requirements in mind.

> 50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery

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.

The point is exactly that leafblowers do not represent a technological improvement: they have too many downsides, and accomplish too little. No one is arguing that all technological progress is bad. Rather, in the specific case of leafblowers they represent a detriment, and should be used infrequently-to-never.

I was a landscaper for several years before college. We mostly serviced estates in the country or with very large lots. I used both a backpack blower and handheld. I understand the efficiencies gained by their use in some instances. I also know that on the smaller residential lots that a big backpack blower was overkill. A rake could have sufficed more often than not. In the case of other equipment; a lawnmower can’t reasonably be replaced with a scythe, it will not produce adequate results, a weed eater can’t be replaced for the same reason. A rake can produce adequate results with only a bit more work. And in cases where a blower is “necessary”, it doesn’t need to be used to chase every damn leaf for two hours on a residential property.

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 don't even understand the point of them. They don't clear up the leaves. A leaf vacuum cleaner would make more sense.

> A leaf vacuum cleaner would make more sense.

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.

(UK here) I have a large lawn (longest diagonal is 40m) and many mature trees and I also hate leaf blowers with a passion. I now have some proper rakes designed for leaf sweeping - approx 75cm wide. I can clear the whole area in about 90 minutes (approx once per week). I have a tall collection sack and a set of the large plastic grabs that let me pick up huge amounts in a single go. The speed trick is to avoid pickups for as long as possible, working a 'wave' of leaves across the lawn. I pick up piles from the leaf-side of the front line and don't ever try for a complete pick-up, so the ones left behind simply get raked a bit later. The collected leaves are dumped, unbagged, in a massive pile that grows throughout the collection season. In the summer I mix my grass cuttings in and in autumn (a year after the first leaves were added) I have some superb weed-free mulch. The raking also helps keep the lawn in good condition.

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.

Maybe I'm really weird but I don't even bother raking leaves, I just run over them with the lawn mower and let em decompose on the ground. I do sometimes have to remove some of them from the driveway but I do that with my hands and takes like 5 minutes.

Years ago there was an unfortunate incident involving the caretaker of the official Australian Prime Minister's residence in Canberra (The Lodge).

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.

This is a joke right? I should keep a diary. Someone did a study and apparently the 'city that never sleeps' (NYC) has better sound quality than my city (PHL). Between inept and behind by 115 years and counting on gas line repairs and ATV squads... not to mention the broken exhaust fan of the corner pizza joint, one cannot exist in Philadelphia and expect a modicum of peaceful bliss.

Nevermind giant pickup trucks rumbling down the streets.

Leaf blowing to the other side and then another leaf blower needed to blow it back.

Madness.

It baffles me that cars with ultra-loud stereos that trigger car alarms are legal and people who drive them aren’t fined regularly.

The tradition of speaking in public using phone’s loudspeaker is the close second in terms of cultural inadequacy

In my small town pop. 50,000 Sundays were super quiet no stores open, no lawnmowers. But the lawnmowers not running wasn't a law it was an unwritten rule agreed upon by all. Now everything is open on Sundays and Sundays are noisy with lawnmowers.

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.

> Often for hours.

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 feel the average leaf in our neighborhood gets blown off a lawn four or five times before it decays or gets bagged. It's a great business model!

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.

Don't forget circular saws, nail guns, and your neighbor's project car that hasn't had a muffler in 3 years.

and the dogs. Don't forget about the fucking barking dogs that get left alone outside all day long and sometimes into the night as well.

That and hours of bass. It's really hard to tell which one is worse.

Over time, I've found that the most expensive real estate feature is silence.

Been looking at property in London recently due to a horrible renting situation, and can confirm: properties that are reasonably quiet are priced considerably higher for the same floor area/spec

I've seriously thought about going hiking with a raspi running something that really wants to get friendly with any Bluetooth devices in range.

Pumping gas? Have some meaningless commercials blaring at you. Wait at the doctors? Have some hospital commercials blaring at you. A/C systems are often brutally loud.

Pro tip: one of the grey unlabeled buttons next to the screens on gas pumps mutes the audio. Muting those ads every time I pump gas feels like a subversive act in a dystopian Bladerunner-esqe society where ads are inescapable unless you know the hacks.

Yes, it is usually the 2nd button from the top. I've usually found it on the right side.

> Luxury apartment at $4k a month? No insulation between units, and the guy above you comes home at 2am and never takes his shoes off.

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.

New construction apartments in NYC are horrid places to call a home. They’ve shrunk the average unit size by 100-200 sq/ft (10-20 sq/m), switched to “luxury vinyl plank” flooring, use PTAC HVAC units (the type that you would find at a motel), have paper thin walls between adjacent units, and to top it all off are shoddily constructed due to the rampant use of non-union labor which is working under unreasonable timelines to build out the apartments so the developer can start making money ASAP.

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.

Hiking is what gets me the most. I go outside to be in nature, not hear music. Not to mention that everyone owns earbuds these days...

As someone who had to travel to the bay area for years I'll add: Caltrain honking its way through all suburbs, even at night.

Oh my word the caltrain! I had no idea before I moved here. I live miles away from the track now, and I can still hear it.

This can be remedied with proper grade separation - when there are no crossings, no honking is necessary.

> guy above you comes home at 2am and never takes his shoes off

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.

> It runs 24/7 even though no one has been in the building during COVID.

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.

Could they maybe turn it down from 10pm to 7am? Or put some lube on the device?

> Could they maybe turn it down from 10pm to 7am?

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.

Well, regardless, AFAIK it's illegally loud according to the document linked above. So, if I'm correct, regardless of what they have to do and how much it costs they should be required to fix it.

Conversely, if you turn on your tumble dryer after 11pm in Switzerland and your neighbours hear, expect them to call the police.

That's the country of my dreams!

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.

The problem is that lack of sleep is almost a badge of honor these days. Saying you need sleep makes you sound fussy/weak, when it's virtually as important as needing to drink or breath.

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.

>tumble dryer after 11pm

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.

> People are so unbelievably disrespectful with noise in the US

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).

> the fact that cars come with a feature that allows you to find them with their key by making them honk.

Equally awesome is a beepy, late-shift neighbor who's driveway is right by your bedroom window.

Moving from a mid-sized city in the Northeast to a mid-sized city in Norway (relatively big one for Norway) has really made me realize how loud cities are in the US!

heh.. wait to you live anywhere in south america

We call them "DJs without headphones" in Poland. They're [1] obnoxious in public transport. Now, I often considered speaking up, but figured out that if they're such a retard to do this, they probably won't listen and it could end up badly.

[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.

> I often considered speaking up, but

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.)

I don't get the "slap" 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...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmatism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty#Proverb

A lot of folks inexplicably defend these "DJs without headphones." I've seen some go so far as to claim being against them is an act of, yes, racism.

Lots of people don't have any respect for others. A major sign of this is drawing loud attention to yourself in a public place.

Glad to know I'm not alone: noise affects me disproportionately (both positive and negative -- good music is bliss to me) and the US definitely feels like the wild west when it comes to noise control

> People are so unbelievably disrespectful with noise in the US.

People from the US even speak louder :)

It was strange the article focused so much on airport noise when there is another kind of noise pollution for city residents so much more widespread – ambulances/emergency vehicles.

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?

I wonder why they don't exclusively use the alternate low-band siren at night. I've heard it a few times in the Bay Area, but it was always in conjunction with the standard siren tone.

I hate how loud the sirens are in SF. Absolutely obnoxious for how dense of a city it is and there is a complete lack of noise insulation in any housing there. It’s barbaric. However, I have to thank the fire department in my old neighborhood for waiting until they were blocks away from the station before turning on their sirens. So some people are mindful at least.

It all comes back to code. Noise abatement materials are not part of most residential building codes in the US because most residential buildings are expected to be single family homes with detached lots. If you don't live in that situation then tough luck. Very little effort is spent politically trying to improve quality of life in any other form of domicile.

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.

Calling city council sounds simple. I will say that if you want to get anywhere with local policy, you either need to have money, or lots of people asking for your policy. Both of those things come from organizing, which is a months to years long effort. That’s what you’re signing up for when you want to change laws.

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.

After months of being effectively homeless I moved in to a new place 3 weeks ago. There's this stupid air ventilation system making noise 24/7 and it's already driving me up the walls, and that's with the windows closed. It's like having a car idle outside your house all day and night. Because it's newly built I couldn't have a viewing; normally I would have just passed, but I was kinda desperate. Been trying to contact them about it for 3 weeks too.

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 ...

With you there buddy. Moved into a place at short notice because I was desperate and squeezed, only to find it is next to the plumbing for the whole building’s heating system. 24/7 noise of radiator pipes and boiler running filling the apartment. And I have the same equation: fuck this shit, not worth it, they can keep my deposit

It's almost €4000 though, so quite a lot :-/ Not the kind of money I can miss at the moment, but we'll see how things are in a few months, and/or if I can convince them to do some sort of deal (although usually these type of real estate types operate according to the Rules Of Acquisition; e.g. "one you have their money, don't give it back").

I feel like the proliferation of cheap and loud bluetooth speakers has contributed to the scourge of noise pollution significantly in the last two years. The parks are filled with them. People also seem to walk and bike around cities confident that everyone around them really wants to hear their music above all else. It's a truly bizarre and recent-ish phenomenon, and it's full-grown adults. I'm guessing the prices maybe hit a tipping point or the personal public soundtrack is now a statement? I'm at a loss for how to explain it.

Years ago when boom boxes were popular i remember someone saying "It doesn't matter how cool your music is, someone thinks you're a cunt".

So true, still true.

My dream is to build some kind of app to actually give a resonable noise estimate of a place and warn against potential problems.

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.

This isn't exactly what you mean, but as someone who also has not a great reaction to that type of thing, i can't believe how accepted it's become to just fire up tiktok _anywhere_.

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.

I see you're not a connoisseur of socially-inept subway phone DJ's

I lived in Switzerland, Zurich for over 6 years and I hardly experienced the peace and quiet in this city. We had people (not a single person but entire packs of skaters) skating down our street at 2 am and that made a ton of noise. Stay away from Rigistrasse :)

Some people are more noise intolerant than others so normal people may not be as bothered by noise. I have a genetic mutation, a form of hEDS, which has a high degree of noise intolerance.

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.

Sometimes out of a similar desire I will wear noise cancelling earbuds inside of noise cancelling over the ear headphones. No music no sound, pure silence.

Obviously not a cheap solution but doubling up is better than any earplugs I've ever used.

I’ve thought about this, does it actually work? I worried there would be weird feedback issues.

Works great for me, also see wearing ear plugs inside of noise cancelling head phones

That's my airplane remedy!

The first time I tried my friend's hearing protection for shooting I was absolutely amazed. I've always gone to headphones built for listening, with the noise cancellation a secondary consideration. Professional grade heading protection is really good. (MPOW HP102A is the only brand/model I personally know, but I suspect if you ask people who hunt, they'll have good recs. A quick Google search finds things with higher "Noise Reduction Rating" ratings.)

For sleeping, I used the Bose QuietComfort for a long time. I'm a side-sleeper, so large headphones were a challenge.

For a cheap (and zero maintenance) solution, double up plugs inside a pair of hardware store "leaf blower" headphones. Very effective, no dead-battery surprises.

It's also possible to surface roads such that cars on them are significantly quieter. This is more expensive, but you'd think it'd be done in at least some places in North American style cities. To my knowledge it really is not, although I'd be curious if anyone could tell me if it's used anywhere.

Noise is also a big part of certain cultures/contexts though. Blanket rules around noise levels could be unfair if they don't provide a venue for noisey folks somewhere. In Brooklyn, for example, there are neighborhoods and entire buildings that revolve around loudness, inhabited by musicians, artists, and boisterous young people who stay up all hours. For example, in the McKibbin lofts in Bushwick, Brooklyn, like many buildings in the area, people are implicitly party to a social contract of accepting noise levels unacceptable to most people. If noise becomes more regulated, room must be kept for the nuances and exceptions that are culturally significant to smaller communities within larger cities. A lot of important cultural production comes out of these spaces.

Noise should be zoned like construction is (ok, probably better).

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.

For what it’s worth I empathise so deeply with you here. I have what I believe is referred to as sensory processing disorder, or hypersensitivity, but I would call normal and reasonable noise-caused stress.

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..

On a somewhat related note, I've been living in NYC for the past 7 years or so. I noticed that whenever I go to visit my parents house in Canada, the lack of noise kind of stresses me out. The first few nights when I try to sleep, it's just too quiet and something feels weird.

I think you'll be very interested in the "Not Just Bikes" channel as he talks a lot about urban planing. There's a lot of political will and momentum for making living spaces ... livable in Europe. Places like The Netherlands and Denmark in particular. A video specifically about noise pollution and how European cities are trying to solve it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

I don't know if it helps you, but as someone who's very annoyed by road noise, one thing I've found makes a huge difference is replacing the window stripping with as much and as thick foam as you can fit. Most apartments are built with thin stripping in the first place and routine maintenance almost never replaces it. The first time I did it, my apartment bedroom at the time went from the loudest I've ever had to the quietest I've ever had.

One of my favorite privileges is renting in coveted neighborhoods or propertied for 10-30 days just to see what its really like

A “tour” or walkthrough doesn't assist with this at all

We occasionally talk here about when it's appropriate to abort an interview cycle early, and the most recent anecdote I have is walking into a place with a ridiculously loud ventilation system that was bad enough that I could feel it affecting my ability to think. I ended up phoning in about half of that interview and felt guilty for wasting their time.

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.

I have the same problem. I have recently moved to Switzerland and I am so grateful for the culture here. Noise is not tolerated, as it should be.

If only, it really depends where you live. We have an alarm going on any times during the day and night, police is not interested and agency doesn't care much. Same problem with skaters when it's sunny. No really, people just don't care. Swiss german might be different tho.

I've learned the hard way to be very careful about noise when visiting apartments, so I'll try to ask other residents of the building I'm interested in and will do multiple visits at different time of the day to better understand how the noise situation is. Especially important now that I live in Hong Kong where a lot of apartments don't even use double pane windows.

That'd be ideal, but in some markets that's not possible. One of the apartments in question was in SF and I literally had to put my application in <10 minutes into the showing to get the place, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten it. There's no way to do any kind of actual inspection of a unit in those circumstances.

It's a bit similar in HK, what we do though is research the different buildings a few months before our lease is over. That allows us to visit units in those buildings without being pressured to make an offer and once we're seriously looking we have a much better idea of the market.

In HK, the further south you go the better it seems to be… bar TST of course!

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!

Yes, we moved to Tai Hang which is quite nice in terms of noise (much much better than Kennedy Town where we used to live). We actually get bird chirping at night and early mornings and barely any traffic noise.

> Switzerland. A beautifully peaceful and quiet country.

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?

“would have to deal with it for a year.”

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.

I found Iceland to be very quiet as well. Likely since there's so few people to make noise in the first place.

Lithuania is also spectacularly quiet

hearing decreases or changes with age (see story on children and handdryer)

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