Noise is all around us | Hacker News Reader

Noise is all around us

thewalrus.ca

217 pointsakeck163 comments

I think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it'd cost you to get freedom from your neighbor's lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person's brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity.

I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.

With modern (unmodified) cars a lot of the time tyre noise is actually more significant than engine noise, so a switch to electric by itself won't do it.

Only at speed.

At any speed you'd do on a road, even on suburban back roads tyre noise can match or exceed engine noise.

You didn't specify a speed, so I'm curious how fast are your suburban back roads? I've seen signs from the US that show 40mph speed limits on purely residential back streets which is already faster than I can drive on literally any street within my city.

Residential roads here are max 30km/h (18mph) but also often 20km/h (12mph). Slow enough that the EVs should produce less noise, even though both produce tire noise.

Out of curiosity, where are you driving that 20km/h is a common speed limit? Is it actually respected?

40km/h where I am. Below that is only seen in shared traffic areas (basically pedestrian areas where cars are allowed to pass through).

It depends, rolling noise is more important at high speed, but engine noise is more important at slow speeds. If you are next to a highway, it probably won't make a difference, but if you live in a city with a lot of slow traffic, it will.

Also, mopeds, even unmodified ones are way too loud, especially for the speed they are going.

For sufficiently low speeds, yes. The crossover point is not high. Something like 30km/h .

Edit: Source https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Propulsion-noise-the-tyr...

30 km/h is the maximum speed allowed in many cities (and a growing number of them) and even in cities where 50 km/h is allowed, the average speed is apparently around 30 km/h when traffic is minimal (in France, according to [0]) and 15 km/h otherwise. I think it's safe to say that electric cars reduce noise in cities, in fact I can observe it every day myself from my house.

[0] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-faux/une...

That's why electric cars are required to emit an artificial noise when driving under 30 km/h to alert the visually impaired pedestrians. The Renault Zoe car makes a very strange noise, almost like an alien flying saucer from a 60s movie.

I understand the need for these noisemakers, having been startled a few times by electric cars moving at walking speeds as without a noisemaker, they are effectively silent.

But these weird spaceship noises, I hate them, and for some reason, dogs seem the hate them too. So unnatural. I much prefer more typical noise like white noise, like a fan running. I think that studies have shown that white noise is particularly good for that purpose as the source can be located easily.

The fan on the engine is often louder than they engine at low speeds.

Anecdotally, I live in a large apartment building in car-centric Southern California, and individual cars driving into the parking garage outside my window don’t disturb me (I like to sleep with the windows open). It’s the larger work vehicles that are the problem. The engines in big trucks (moving vans, trash trucks, construction equipment) are not tuned how personal autos are, for a variety of reasons.

For sure it's different with trucks. Sometimes that works in your favour, like when it's bin day and you forgot to take the bins out last night.

In general though I don't really know enough to know why they can't make commercial vehicles quieter. In my experience at least city buses manage to be relatively quiet.

I'm impressed that your buses are quiet. In SF, the city buses rattle my entire house when they pass by a half-block away. It's more "vibration" than "noise", but the whole house shakes and I hear clattering of little unbalanced objects in the cabinets and so on. In the last 5 years I've never experienced an earthquake that shook my house any more than the buses that pass by every 10 minutes.

By far the most annoyance is caused by illegally modified cars and bikes.

I live in the southern US and these things with modified exhausts are everywhere. There's no car inspection and no regulations are enforced. You can hear them at all hours of the day even if you live several blocks from a major road.

It honestly makes living here really annoying.

I live in Toronto and modified exhausts on motorcycles and cars are quite common and annoying. I don't see any enforcement action whatsoever.

This is often repeated here, but from where I’m sitting it self evidently isn’t true. I wonder if it could be because in the US there are so many automatic transmissions, and hearing high revs is relatively rare.. but most cars here are manual and high revs (in traffic) is common place

We already have noise ordinances but police don’t enforce them.

It is really hard to prove a person was making a noise I guess. Maybe with the right motivation they could just make certain vehicle modifications entirely illegal. Loud cars and leaf blowers are the bane of my existence.

For vehicles, at least in France, the law says how the noise should be measured, and it doesn't seem that complicated. But, in practice, it's basically never enforced.

Recently, they've started deploying a few "noise radars". I don't know how well they work, since I haven't seen much talk about those since the initial announcement.

I moved to the Irish countryside for the quiet.

On the other hand, I found my former situation with the Swiss regulations around noise, including mandated, legally-backed, police-enforced quiet from 12:00-13:00, 22:00-07:00 M-Sa and the entirety of Sunday a source of continual angst. (Of course, the church bells which bang every 15 minutes 7x24 are exempted from these strictures.)

On balance, I think I'd rather take the risk of having a neighbor running a chainsaw any time he wants over getting a knock from the cops because some busybody decided hoovering up broken glass on a Sunday afternoon was sufficiently verboten to necessitate involving the authorities.

But was it quiet in Switzerland? I read a lot about the poor quality of their apartment blocks, to the extent that one could hear their neighbours just talking.

The old buildings have the usual old building problems, including hearing when your upstairs neighbor has gas or is feeling amorous. The newer concrete ones are much better, but entirely devoid of character. If you have millions, you can buy 49% of a house and get away from it all.

On balance, my experience of Switzerland was not particularly quiet, but then I mostly worked in urbia and lived in suburbia. The mountains are lovely and still, but there's not much tech work going in the forest.

I've lived in both the city and the sticks and I can tell you that out in the sticks, you don't hear your neighbor's tractor. In general the ambient noise is far, far less and on many days idyllic. In my case the most egregious sound was the morning braying of the neighbor's donkey, which never lasted long.

In my case, I live in the sticks and I heard my neighbor's tractor all day today. It's not all that often I do, but believe me when he's working the fields the machine is very audible. I don't mind it much- he's being productive and that's great (and as I write this, he's wrapped up for the day and I'm listening to a wood thrush and the sound of the creek as it runs over the rocks, both of which are very soothing). The one noise that's deeply annoying here carries much further than any tractor- it's the yokels and their seemingly unlimited supply of ammo.

Maybe you can't hear the tractor but that doesn't stop you from hearing cars on the racetrack well over 20 miles away. There are plenty of noises to be heard

It's possible to hear cars driving 20 miles away?

Two summers ago I spent some time at the Grand Canyon in the middle of the night, and you could hear a pin drop a hundred miles away. It was so silent I felt like I was in a vacuum, like sound was being sucked out of me. We could hear any car in the area for miles and miles.

The insane part was when my friend looked up and noticed a vanishingly small red sliver in the sky, and the moment he said "Is that the moon?" just about every coyote in the state of Arizona lit up at once in a cacophony of lunar worship. You could hear each single coyote, each pack (similar vocalizations among group members) and even some random guy's dog joining in the fun. It was electrifying, my hair stood straight up.

Rural living can be noisier than the suburbs. It depends on density, agriculture type, presence of commercial activity, etc. Where noise ordinances exist, they are generally more lenient outside city limits. In the USA, getting action against a noise nuisance is extremely difficult.

The quietest living experience I've had over the past decade has been a modern high-rise apartment in Korea. Between-unit noise insulation is good. If you are in a low-traffic area and high enough to be away from incidental street noise, you can have true silence most of the time. The only real threat to your peace is if you get clog dancers living above you.

Yeah, newer build city building in SF is much quieter than Palo Alto.

The constant lawn equipment in suburbia make them incredibly loud. Gas leaf blowers are banned but it doesn’t matter, they’re used anyway along with hedge trimmers. They are basically going at all daylight hours, it was one of the surprising perks of moving to the city - much quieter.

You need to move to a suburb where your neighbors let the lawn grow a foot high. No problems with mower noise. :)

Better for the bees as well!

Yep. The country seems nice and quiet until your neighbor decides to have a drunken ATV party with music. (This is, unfortunately, not a theoretical occurrence for me).

Yeah I had a level 17 inner city apartment and I’d hear literally nothing from my bedroom. It was often too quiet

The quietest place I've ever experienced is out on the ocean, after a calm, anchored on the great Bahamas bank. A stillness came over us as we shut the engine off and listened to the vast nothing.

I live on a boat in a river next to the botanic gardens. Such a quiet place. I am not sure I can move back on land. Cars. Lawn mowers. Ugh.

My dad's house is next to a lake, I could never live there. Bass boats are constantly passing at full throttle, even before dawn.

> recreational gunfire

For someone living in Europe this is such a bizarre source of noise.

If there are still lawns to mow you aren't rural yet. No one is mowing out here https://files.catbox.moe/f8tqeh.webp

I recently moved to a more rural place (which in my coutry means: The neighbours are at least 20 meters away in separated houses instead of 5 and the houses are attached to each other), I though it would be more quiet but indeed: No.

In the city people listened to music in their yard, but here, people have leaf blowers, big lawnmowers, large dogs, large heat pumps (for home and pool), roasters, complete bars in their yard, there are festivals in summer that push sound for kilometers over the acres.

Strange thing is, I hate the music and the leaf blowers, don’t mind the dogs or screaming kids at all. Also, when busy I don’t notice the sounds, but then the moment comes where I listen intently and get very annoyed. So I feel the answer to my peaceful life must be in me. I must be like Seneca, accept how it is. I won’t move yet again and my wife does not want to live in the middle of nowhere, just so that all I hear is birds.

I wish I was more like the people that just blow leaves for 5 hours a day and don’t care. I guess for some, noise really is no problem.

Ditch the fossil-powered lawn mower. Get a robotic electric one. And reduce your trimmed lawn area so that there is more wild meadow-like area for insects.

In Switzerland it's forbidden to make noise on a Sunday. Mowing lawns and such has to be done some other day.

True also of conspicuous work that isn't noisy like hanging washing to dry outdoors.

Surely that can't include manual mowers? I like the idea though.

This has happened to two friends of mine (in the UK).

One moved out to somewhere on the country and of suburban, only to find out that his neighbour was running a firewood selling business on the side. So saws going for at least several hours each day.

Another moved somewhere very much in the country. Then the owner of the field next door decided to rent it out to dirtbike racers. So every weekend they have to deal with tons of noise and clouds of dust for ~6-8 hours.

In suburban London and the surrounding countryside, so much of the noise is caused by a handful of motorbikes that have been made deliberately, I think usually illegally, noisy.

Stopping noisy vehicles would improve millions of people's lives and moderately upset a few thousand bikers.

I have no idea why it isn't a more popular cause.

One person doing laps of a built up area in their modified car is likely waking up tens of thousands of people. The police do nothing. If you had a party that caused equivalent nuisance it would be shut down instantly.

Engine noise is due to fuel injection. Not sure how that’s illegal.

You missed the point.

You can call out hooliganism or whatever the bad behavior is without making ridiculous claims about how engine noise is somehow illegal. That not only detracts from the point, it makes the poster look sort of ridiculous.

There are legal standards for both vehicle noise and vehicle emissions, at least in the UK. When owners modify their exhaust to make them noisier, they are likely breaching one or both standards. It is specifically illegal. https://www.gov.uk/noise-pollution-road-train-plane#:~:text=....

People like you are the real destroyers of communities. You're doing nothing against the guidelines, but arguing "just because" and trolling. Your comments have added nothing of value to the discussion.

We have been able to make very quiet engines for decades, noisy ones only exist to please people who need to feel the power of their car

I'd bet these sort of people derive their pleasure almost exclusively by knowingly annoying others. Power and speed are just bonuses. The main thing is annoying everyone else.

He’s not talking about engine noise. He’s talking about illegally modified exhaust mufflers etc. that are much louder than they should be.

No doubt engine noise is caused by lots of factors. You can modify they exhaust to make it louder or quieter. I understand a lot of bikers modify their exhaust to make it louder.

As I understand it, there is a legal limit on noise emissions some for vehicles. To get round this bikes are supplied with a quiet exhaust and a second loud exhaust. They tell customers the loud exhaust is for use on private race tracks but obviously this is widely ignored.

why would fuel injection cause noise?

Sure but weren't mufflers invented specifically to address this? I think the OP is trying to talk about people who modify or remove mufflers in order to actively make their car louder.

Pretty much every car for the last thirty years has had fuel injection, but most of them aren't very loud.

I think there’s often a belief that louder motorcycles are safer because cars will be more likely to notice them.

Though I think the small cheap engines in scoters or small bikes are loud because making them quieter would be more expensive.

This would hold more ground if the people who say that wore full gear and full face helmets. They tend not to.

I've heard the safety argument before and I find it astonishing. If you can't drive safely without making a noise audible from miles away, your vehicle isn't fit for the road. However this argument does hint at what bikers are often doing, which is racing on public roads and massively breaking speed limits.

I think modern scooters are also held to strict noise standards, the noisy ones have been made noisy deliberately.

I think if you talk to responsible motorbike riders, you’ll easily find people who have had near or actual collisions because because a car didn’t see them and the driver wasn’t trying hard enough to check for the places a motorbike might be. It’s easy for a motorbike to be hidden behind the A-pillar of a car if that car is entering a roundabout and the bike is going round, for example, so if a driver isn’t paying enough attention and moving their head to see round blind spots, they can hit a bike. Similarly for any manoeuvre that involves crossing lanes: drivers often don’t notice smaller motorcycles or scooters (or cyclists).

This happens regardless of the noise the motorcycle is emitting though. In slow traffic, the advantages of noise are low. At speed, you can't hear the engine of the bike before its too late. Cars are way too well isolated nowadays for the noise to be a major factor in collisions with bikes in my experience.

I’m not trying to claim that the loudness theory is correct. If I try to imagine what it’s like to be a biker who has had one or several near-misses/accidents due to careless drivers, whose biker friends espouse the loudness theory, it’s pretty easy for me to see that person feeling a louder bike would be better.

And yet cyclists don't install loudspeakers so cars would notice them. A motorbike is more visible than a bicycle and can go with the flow speed so unless one drives dangerously it should be safer than cycling even without loud engine.

Cyclists are slower and plenty of cyclists will have had actual collisions or near-misses with eg car doors being suddenly opened into the bike line, cars cutting across the bike lane without looking, and so on.

Both riding a bicycle and driving a motorbike is less safe than driving a car because they are harder to notice and less protected but there should be some compromise between safety for a biker and noise pollution or a large are around the road.

As to cyclists to be slower: 1. a motorbike driver can choose to go below speed limit is the situation / road configuration makes it unsafe to go fast. 2. low speed is not always safer - on a straight road outside intersections speed of the flow (or just below) is safer.

I ride a pushbike a lot and I only hear those stupid motorbikes right as they go past me. Even the headwind from cycling at a moderate speed like 30 km/h is enough to completely drown the motorbikes out. Usually all they do is scare the shit out of me as they come flying past.

I imagine inside modern cars that completely seal you off from the outside you wouldn't be able to hear them at all.

In practice, even a loud engine is practically silent until it passes in front of you.

Been in the Cotswolds for a week and the arseholes revving their modified shitty old cars as they ride through these small towns is quite horrible.

Many "grown-up" countries do care about this. This problem is non-existant in Austria, or Germany for the most part. Roadside police checks consist of decibel metering, which they are trained to use. They will impound the vehicle on the spot if its over the legal limit. Even race tracks have strict sound limits, the scrutineering process has a sound measurement part.

This makes so much sense. I wish the UK would take the same approach.

I can tell you this problem does exist(and is getting worse) in germany, and it's terrible. Calling the cops doesn't help, because they really don't care, I mean they even don't care anymore if cars are parking on the sidewalk. I live in a small "town" of around 10.000 people, I really can't imagine how bad it must be in bigger citys.

> This problem is non-existant in Austria, or Germany for the most part.

This is highly dependent on where in Germany you are talking about. In some parts the police don't care at all.

can imagine that in Berlin, but a city with 10.000 people?

Living in Berlin, I disagree with you. Noisy motorbikes and cars with techno full volume is the bread and butter in my hood.

Not just London. I've written about this on here before. Last time I was in the Peaks all I could hear were revving engines coming from somewhere miles away. It's getting really hard to get away from these bastards now.

The worst part of cars and motorbikes is they can't hear it. Motorbikes helmets are ear defenders too. The cabins of cars protect users from the engine noise. It's just everyone else that has to put up with it.

A lot of cities already have a communication channel in place to notify authorities about noise (like sending them an email about the culprit).

But its difficult to gather evidence of noisy vehicles, and could be a nuisance to notify authorities.

I wonder if a "NoisyVehicleRecorder" app/device would be able to capture the evidence from the comfort of our apartments or yard?

The device and app should be able to - Take accurate(ish?) noise levels, and start recording above a certain decibel - Store the recording somewhere -- AI_Vision can then spot if there is a car in the video, if not then delete the video -- AI_Vision can then extract the number plate from the video, if no number plate then delete the video - At the end of the week the app should send yourself a report of the culprits in descending order of most infringements per license plate - The user then decides to forward these to the authorities (this email address could be pre-stored in the app somewhere as well per city) - Would be great if this app could be open source so it can be tweaked per country according to their laws

Possible issues: * Recording cars without permission might be an issue * The device might be too expensive, as it might need to be waterproof / burglarproof

And police sirens at 3am. One of the reasons I left San Francisco, and now live in Venice, Italy.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Future of Luxury (1998):

Attention. This, too, is a scarce commodity, with all the media competing bitterly for a piece. Watching the melee of money and politics, sports and art, technology, and advertising, leaves little attention leftover. Only the person who turns his back on these overbearing claims on his attention and turns off the roar of the channels can decide for himself what is worth his attention and what is not. In the barrage of arbitrary information our perceptive and cognitive capabilities decline, they grow when we limit our attention to those things and only those things that we ourselves want to see, hear, feel and know. In this we can see an occasion for luxury.

Quiet. This, too, is a basic requirement that has become harder and harder to satisfy. Anyone who wants to escape the everyday din must be very extravagant. In general, apartments cost more the quieter they are; restaurants that do not pour musical pollution into the ears of their guests demand higher prices of their discerning clientele. The raging traffic, the howling sirens, the clatter of helicopters, the neighbor's droning stereo, the month-long roar of the street fair—the person who can elude all of that enjoys luxury.

I'm always surprised that we tolerate so much unnecessary noise. We let people fly helicopters around and run leaf blowers. We even allow trucks to go beep beep beep and alert everyone within a kilometer that they are backing up, even though we have rearview cameras, like it's everyone else's responsibility to scurry out of their way.

Re trucks beeping - that’s partly legal responsibility isn’t it? I mean, we have had the ability for trucks to beep as they back up for far longer than we have had the ability for them to realistically have functioning rear view cameras. And since the normal expectation is that vehicles go forward, it makes sense to alert when doing something unexpected, like backing up. And so the laws we have mandate and expect beeping noises from large vehicles because the idea that laws would mandate rear cameras hasn’t caught on yet.

More modern trucks use white noise instead of a beep anyway, it's both much easier to tell direction from a broad spectrum sound, and significantly less annoying at the same time.

I haven't heard any trucks around here do that, so maybe they work really well.

I've never heard of a truck using white noise instead of a beep, but that might just be working as intended. Here's a video of what it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwJ5NCf1Vw

Interesting.

I think I may have heard that noise, and just not known what it was. It could easily be mistaken for some sort of mechanical bit of the truck (slipping belt, various bits and bobs going around in the engine).

The Amazon vans where I am all are white noise rather than beeping. It's still not great but it's better than the beep.

That's interesting. After watching the video I realized that yes the white noise style of backup sound is fairly common on trucks here in the US but never thought about why. Actually, now that I think about it the local garbage trucks use it. You definitely know where the sound is coming from, and it's loud and it gets your attention.

For the last several years I've been living in Mexico, after living in Seattle for many years, and I'm still struck by how much quieter it is here. Playing of loud music is actually far more common here, especially at night, and jake braking is a thing too but none of it's annoying. There's no noise ordinances that I know of. Even still the noise level is generally far lower than even a quiet day back in the States. Right now it's Sunday afternoon and man it feels like a quiet Sunday afternoon. No complaints.

I'm not sure about that. I used to live in an apartment building in front of a cement factory where trucks would back up all day long. They mostly had that white-noise thing instead of the beeping. Yet, I could still hear them from the 11th floor through double-paned windows, even though my building was in front of the trucks as they were backing up.

It looks like it is required in the US only when the view is obstructed, which I interpret to mean only when there isn't a camera. I would guess people keep using them because there is no perceived downside, and if they hit anyone they can say, "Hey, we told them we were coming." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-up_beeper

It's also simpler technologically to have it switched by the vehicle's gear control, same as the lights. Additionally if it was manually controlled by the driver, some of them wouldn't bother activating it some portion of the time, and then that would have to be policed. Personally I'd probably go for that but it does present its own problems.

It might make sense for older larger vehicles that primarily move forward to have backup beepers. But every commercial oriented vehicle seems to have them now, including the smallest of dock loaders. These smaller vehicles have clear visibility in all directions but still put the burden of avoiding danger on everyone else instead of the vehicle operator. This is unreasonable and disturbs and annoys people at a large radius away. There is no excuse in this day and age to not build and retrofit commercial vehicles with obstacle avoidance systems and proximity sensors to replace backup beepers.

The more money you have, the less you hear. Why is it homes are the cheapest next to airports? Because planes on their flight path will drive you crazy.

People don’t tolerate noise. It’s the poor people that do, the ones that can’t control their environment.

Not necessarily - there are a lot of factors into house prices, and in Sydney some of the most trendy and pricey areas are on the flight path. It is only once the plane noise becomes so loud you can't talk (500-1000ft?) do I think it hits on the home values. A 3000ft high commercial jet every 4 minutes doesn't touch the house prices.

As someone with tinnitus and hyperacusis I think about this often. A bus or truck dumping its air brakes right next to you, incredibly loud sirens, squeaky breaks that pierce the soul. I feel fairly certain you could make the case that many sounds we have grown to just accept in society are in fact at dangerous decibel levels.

There are ordinary household activities that reach dangerous decibel levels too. Stacking ceramic dishes, slamming the toilet seat, vacuuming in a tight space, etc.

You will actually find that doing every day chores is much more pleasurable with hearing protection.

I now often put the dishes away with my noise cancelling headphones on, after accidentally doing it one day with them on and finding out how much less jarring it is. I wonder what the affect of this on age related hearing loss is - i.e how much of age related hearing loss is actually cumulative minor environmental toll.

Only problem with applying this strategy outside of domestic environments is safety.

We have no glass, ceramic, steel, or marble-topped tables or furniture for this reason. Putting things down on them is super noisy, people tend to drop things on accident and the sound of a metal water bottle hitting a thick glass table is the worst. Even simple things: keys, phone, coffee mugs, your laptop. I feel silly typing this out, but the general noise level of day-to-day living went way down when we swapped the glass furniture for wood furniture throughout the whole house.

+1 to earplugs when vacuuming the car.

Agreed, dish stacking physically hurts! There is a fine balance though, as with hyperacusis wearing hearing protection can make the problem worse as your sensitivity to sound can increase. Also makes the tinnitus seem worse. I will admit to putting in my custom earplugs when I unload the dish washer, however.

I live about 2 miles from a regional airport. Normal flight patterns mean I rarely hear planes flying in or out. Occasionally, when the winds require a different pattern I’ll hear a 20 seater jet.

Air shows. Ugh. Nothing but the loudest, most obnoxious airplanes ever made circling over my house for 4 days straight. At least we’re done for 2023. Time to figure out when next year’s show is so I can be out of town.

At least this type of noise is more of a side effect and not the purported goal of the device. Contrast that with subwoofers which over 12in should just be illegal in apartments...

Just wait until the Amazon drone delivery service starts to roll out. You'll have drones humming along all day long. It'll be advertised as a "benefit" in your new neighborhood—buy the house, your address is eligible for drone deliveries! Or you have to pay a little extra in your HOA for the "luxury" of having your Amazon orders delivered in 30 minutes.

Good use of AI: detect delivery drone, fire Nerf sentry guns to eliminate noise.

Anything and everything is permissible in the name of safety.

> “Telling people to be quiet is not a good thing,” he says. “Part of the charge to us as human beings in the world is to listen to other people, right? Especially if they are suffering. Especially if they are crying out to us for help. If our expectations are ‘I should not have to hear anything,’ and I can convince myself that the right way to live in the world is to live in this acoustically tailored environment, then I don’t have to hear all that stuff. . . .

I think the writer here is confused, they very likely mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense not the literal sense, since it's obvious there are real world scenarios where it's physically damaging to actually listen.

But if they mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense, as in perceiving another's mental thoughts through any medium, then the noise levels of everyday environments has little to nothing to do with it.

Maybe they are "crying out to us for help" by being literally loud.

Big fan of quiet. My home environment sits at about 30dB as measured by NIOSH’s sound level monitoring app, 32 during fridge cycle, 35dB when I have air conditioning running. In previous places I wasn’t able to control external noise as much and I had to use earplugs to focus; I tried half a dozen and found Etymotic’s earplugs to be by far the best (they claim to designed to reduce sound by approximately 20dB at all frequencies, which really feels miraculous compared to most ear plugs - they were at their best on long flights, where I could hear flight attendants and announcements just as easily with them in or out; if you are like me and more sensitive to noise than most people, these feel like a way to increase your threshold by 20dB, I can’t speak highly enough of them).

Two things in the article do jump out at me, though. One is that it talks about active noise cancellation - people do find this helpful, but there’s also a smaller community who find it causes problems for them, including worsening tinnitus. All else equal I would say it’s probably safer to reduce incoming sound as much as possible before using noise cancellation -it fundamentally involves “detecting noise and making more noise in a specific way such that the noises cancels out”. The theory is very sound (heh), I’m not suggesting it doesn’t cancel out, but there may be some very weird edge cases or subtle effects we don’t understand there.

The other thing is more of a nitpick, it mentions truck horns can be as loud as 150dB. That’s “standing 25 meters away from a jet engine at takeoff” level, like we’re talking “immediate rupture of eardrums” intensity here. I don’t doubt that you can buy truck horns that have “150dB” printed on their box, but I really doubt they’re actually that loud. And yes, looking at someone who’s done the research, only the very loudest of full size train horns that fill up a tank of compressed air get to just barely below 150dB - at 3ft away. At 100ft they all drop below 120dB. https://www.djdlabs.com/horns/

Badly measuring is a pastime of horn manufacturers but people do mount train horns on trucks. I had one in an old car, and it was certainly loud as blazes, but once you were some tens of feet it was dropping off.

It does carry for miles in a way that’s hard to explain.

They do get closer to their rated volume than I expected, that’s true - I honestly expected the best would top out at 120dB even close up, just because these things are necessarily mounted within a few feet of the truck cabin and that would be physically painful already. But at least some truck horn manufacturers are almost living up to their claims (sadly). “Super bright” flashlight manufacturers still take the trophy for bad measurement. It also seems like “train horn” doesn’t really mean “a horn mounted on a train”, it means a horn that uses compressed air, so you will see train horns on trucks and cars.

Most semi horns are compressed air also, it’s just the train ones are bigger.

Of course, if you are a Real Big Boy you get a horn off of an aircraft carrier.

Or a fog horn: https://www.sumburghhead.com/assets/images/enlargeable/Fogho...

https://youtu.be/RYN8F4D_lUo?t=271

Thanks for the earplug recommendation—just purchased! I have to bring earplugs to the movies now. Maybe it's me, but the audio in some movies is so absurdly loud that I want to just get up and walk out.

I just bought some earplugs for that same reason (In the DnD movie I was like "That's it, I need to get earplugs"). The ones I'm trying are not supposed to block noise necessarily, just dampen and take the harshness out of the sound. Going to take them to the next movie or bar I go to and see if it makes it more manageable, because my ears can't really take the noise anymore.

I second the Etymotic's earplugs suggestion. They are really great to have and pretty inexpensive. For around $20 you can get hearing protection that is great for cutting the grass, going to concerts, or just getting some peace and quiet around the house. Plus they're not the cheap disposable kind, so it's not a recurring purchase. You can just toss them in the carrying case and take them where you need them.

Of course this is completely anecdotal, but I was walking around a zoo in a city I'm visiting today and couldn't help but notice how much noisier the zoo was, both in terms of how much traffic and city noise breaches the walls, and how much noise the visitors make (yelling after each other across the zoo, talking loudly, just generally not attempting to keep their own noise down) when compared to visiting zoos in my home country.

I also observed that the animals seemed to be a lot more likely to shy away, and (in my completely not zoological/biological opinion) perhaps even slightly more on edge or distressed in some cases. This also meant whenever an animal was doing something interesting, the visitors would all be interested in that one exhibit, which caused further noise and commotion.

I couldn't help but think how much nicer the zoo could've been for both guests and the residents if more of a focus was placed on reducing the noise levels.

It was also quite a culture shock to me that smoking was allowed throughout the zoo as it seems to me that a ban would be easily justified on the grounds of animal comfort/welfare (not to forget all the children walking around, too).

I prefer safari/wild animal parks partially for this - as the animals have enough room to get away if they want to.

But then you’re not guaranteed to see them all up close.

It pisses me off that NYC still allows through-wall PTAC units to be installed in new buildings.

PTACs are the combined heat/AC units you will find in cheaper hotels/motels. They are installed through giant 4ft x 2ft holes that are left in the exterior wall during construction.

Not only are they terrible for energy efficiency because they are impossible to seal correctly + result in a direct thermal coupling with the outdoors due to their sheet metal construction, they are also the #1 vector of outside noise getting into the apartment. You can hear whenever a truck drives by, even when your window is closed.

Also worth mentioning they universally use the cheapest compressors available with awful damping so they’re 70db or more when they’re running.

All in the name of saving a buck. People pay $5000 a month to be subjected to these things.

The duality of man:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/the-end... - "Why Everything Is Getting Louder The tech industry is producing a rising din. Our bodies can't adapt." (2019)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-bro... - "Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? The sound of gentrification is silence." (2022)

I remember reading that second one. What a load of garbage. I simply have a hard time sleeping. If I seek out quiet, that's me trying to adapt my environment to meet my biophysical needs the best way I know how, not me punching down to the proles.

Not everything has to be a normative classist struggle.

I was nodding along until I remembered a recent student party in Germany, interrupted by the police, as the neighbors in the next house complained. The party was then transformed into a talking party. At least the neighbors were satisfied.

If you couldn't get good things (like quieter homes) by spending more money, what would be the point of money?

I'll probably never have proper quiet again, as since 2019 I've got permanent Tinnitus in one ear. I can ignore it sometimes, and I can sometimes cover it up a bit with ambient noise like waves or out in nature, but it's always there.

Not sure what caused it. Predates Covid so it's not that. Might have been working in an open office that always had 4-6 conversations going and I had play music on headphones loud enough to block it out, or my previous car that had a small hole in the muffler I never ended up getting fixed, it got kind of loud at times. Or possibly an antibiotic I took a long time ago I had a bad reaction to that's also known to contribute to tinnitus, although that was quite a ways back that I took it now.

Regardless of the cause, I'm stuck with it now. No hearing loss either, at least not yet (I've been tested). Just that stupid ringing.

I just think of that ringing as the sound of silence.

One interpretation is that nearly every person has some degree of tinnitus, but many are almost completely unaware of it - it's just perceived as silence under most circumstances.

I hit my head once, and lost all hearing on one side; some of it returned after a week or so. When it did, I was extremely aware of my pulse thumping through my head, bones crunching in my neck, as well as minor fluid whooshing sounds when I moved. Quite disorienting! We are always hearing that, but it is normally almost completely filtered out, imperceptible because it's always present.

It is my experience that absolute quiet is sometimes subjectively "louder" than very slight white noise, which can be perceived as true quiet. I also find I notice my tinnitus less under such conditions. This is analogous, in a rather deep way I suspect, to how most people perceive a perfectly dark visual field as grey noise [1], or amorphous slightly coloured blobs, or similar, but not a true black. A true, dark black can only be perceived in contrast to a lighter colour. Same with silence, perhaps.

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

I'm not entirely sure I didn't have tinnitus before, just that it was usually so quiet I didn't notice (I did have brief moments where I had the same ringing I had as I do now, it just only lasted like 20 seconds and then I couldn't hear it again).

And I think I remember a few times in the past that I noticed a very, very mild ringing when I was concentrating hard trying to hear it, but maybe that's a false memory I'm inserting after the fact that I know I've got it now? I don't know.

But in mid 2019 I started noticing that it was loud enough and persistent enough I couldn't ignore it easily anymore (I can for periods of time, but I have to actively distract myself now, whereas before I didn't need to).

I drove over a mountain pass at 6,000 feet yesterday twice. Last night, after getting home, I say down to read and there was a noise in my right ear. It sounded digital in nature and was repeating. It was unnerving, I couldn't concentrate at all once I perceived it. My kids have a white noise device that they sleep with, so I commandeered it so that I could read a bit longer. That helped, but it was still there when I went to bed. It took me 30+ minutes to fall asleep, again it was very distracting.

Today, I woke up with a lot of pressure in my right ear and nothing I did helped. The sound was gone, however, so I was thankful for that much. The pressure lasted until dinner.

Tinnitus frightens me a bit. I'm sure that I'll be dealing with it eventually and I don't know how people can get along with it for years or decades without going completely mad.

> It sounded digital in nature and was repeating.

My tinnitus is somewhere between a sustained chorus that slowly changes its primary note, and yes, a low-speed multi-tone frequency-shift modem. [1] Closest description I can come up with. Seemingly discrete, constantly changing, warbling notes. First time I realized that, I thought it might be a sign of mental illness - misinterpreting sensory information as coded messages is never a good sign! But apparently not. Just how I perceive my tinnitus. I've heard others describe it in similar ways. Obviously, cultural priming is a factor here; if we had never heard digital modems before, maybe we'd describe it as bird song (as many with tinnitus do).

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/OLIVIA_5...

There is a yoga kriya I learnt called "Dura Shravana"(Far Hearing) which is meant to help one zone out of the surrounding sounds and maintain focus. What one does is to place attention on the farthest sound from one's self then successively move to closer sounds in order culminating in the sound of one's breathing. And then, mentally recall the sounds in order. (For example, ambient background subtle sounds, car on road, bird outside window, neighbours door, the fridge, the breath). With practice, surrounding sounds dont affect you. If someone is interested, I can send a link to a teaching video. It is meant to be practiced after doing the alternate nostril pranayama as it enhances the effects of the pranayama.

I'd love to see the teaching video!

Here's the video, https://www.facebook.com/DattaKriyaYogaPage/videos/541068743... There is a Kriya Yoga app also for DKY.

I don't know if you city people realize it, but birdsong in cities is freaking nuts. I can barely hear myself think in many cities now, from all the birds. I live out in the country, and I don't get anywhere near as much of a cacophany of birdsong as I hear in backyards in Philly and Baltimore inner-city neighborhoods. Take a hike some time and stand still and record the birdsong, and then go into a neighborhood with a few trees in a city and record, and compare.

Are they trying to out-chirp the cars?

I think there are just a lot more birds in cities than in the country because cities are where all the easy food is.

My neighborhood has become too noisy because of cars with loud mufflers. They sound like Harley Davidson motorcycles. The motor cycles around here are loud too, I think they are modified also to be louder. I actually want to move to a quieter town. I think the cops and the local governments need to pay attention.

Right. Or the incredibly dumb and loud backfire packages they put on their exhaust. So many cars have them now around me. Thanks California. There should be regulation outlawing them. It sounds like gun fire all day.

The developed nations have known exactly how to build structures that ACTUALLY reduce noise for 70+ years, but they didn’t care enough to mandate such construction techniques into the building codes at our own peril.

Improved standards for thermal insulation (important for reducing energy consumption from heating and cooling) will have a side effect of improving the acoustic insulation of structures. Not quite to the same extent as dedicated acoustic insulation, but better than nothing.

Ditto fire safety. High-rise apartments where I live tend to have concrete floors and sturdy walls between units for this reason, and it helps greatly with noise reduction.

Yes, air tightness is part of the problem, but if that's the only tool used, sound is still going to get through. Double walls help dramatically.

Sort of an odd pivot at the end of the essay…

COVID brought silence, people enjoyed it, noise can be damaging, so let’s all keep an open ear to the cries of those in need? It’s all true, but it came across a bit jumbled.

The level of ambient noise at my house was shocking. I knew the airplane noise was there - we’re only a few miles from Dulles. The road noise was what shocked me. When people got back to life again, it was almost painful. We’re not near an interstate or anything, just a busy 2-lane suburban road.

Good article but where is the mention of the car? I don't mean cars with big engines and loud exhausts, just normal cars, doing normal things. Car noise from the tyres, wind and engines is deafening and always with us. You can barely talk to the person beside you on a moderately busy street and we just accept this. Imagine living on that street.

From the article:

> Some of those things include enforcing speed limits, limiting traffic within neighbourhoods, and regulating modified exhausts, the orientation of bedrooms, pavement type, tires, and so on.

The Environmental Noise Directive (END) doesn't stop countries permitting houses to be built along motorways, next to fire stations or near airports/flight paths or trains. Once the houses are built people will live there.

What we need is some good tech to make our homes and gardens more peaceful and quiet.

>What we need is some good tech to make our homes and gardens more peaceful and quiet.

Concrete or brick wall should do it. If you live in an apartment made of drywall and 2x4s, either commit to building a room-within-a-room or buy earplugs.

Interior insulation designed for sound deadening can do wonders, too like https://www.rockwool.com/north-america/

And you can get double pane windows even in temperate climates because they cut down on noise.

In fact, the only time I’d use triple pane would be for sound reasons.

I’ve lived near two different fire stations, it wasn’t a big deal. They only leave with the sirens on in big emergencies, a couple of times a year. Far more disturbing was the sound of trucks and motorbikes with modified exhausts.

I currently live near a fire station and a railroad. The cars are almost always worse than both. Sometimes the fire station can be annoying with the sirens but at night, loud cars are much more frequent. I’m far enough from the railroad that it’s actually quite pleasant.

drywall on floating rails not connected to the studs is very effective soundproofing

I see how it’s easy to agree with this article since everyone has experienced being annoyed by excessive noise, but I do question whether or not the jury is really out on excessive noise causing heart disease, anxiety, etc. As the article also mentioned, silence is a luxury that costs a lot. Since the amount of disruptive noise one experiences on a daily basis is probably exactly correlated with one’s wealth, it seems like this take is very likely inventing a causal link from noise to health when its equally plausible that noise is just another thing that less wealthy people have to put up with (along with worse health).

Silence is a privilege. Several colleagues live in Los Angeles and New York City. It is always noisy outside there, day and night, not just our zoom calls. It makes me very thankful that I live in a quiet neighborhood.

Cities don’t have to be noisy, Tokyo is delightfully quiet and I hear that many European cities are too.

I own a farm in the middle of no where. It’s amazing to be out there, you’ll hear just the breeze.

Three generations ago (and all prior generations of humans) had mostly silence. I regularly go and camp, work out there, etc. it’s shocking how different it is.

I question if we are really evolved to handle the world we built.

Pandemic was an interesting moment re: noise. For the first time I started to call the cops on sociopathic neighbors who thought it’s ok to put stereo system into the window and blast their radio (literal radio, with ads) so that it was heard 2 blocks away.

I was hesitant to do it; also doubted that cops would deal with this thing. Yet I was proven wrong. Never heard the stereo since.

Noise pollution on that level should be enforced with fines, no reason not to.

Same for cars with music blasting at window-rattling levels

I thought double-pane windows would block city sounds out when I bought my condo.

nope.

now I wear noise cancelling headphones when I'm home

I got special acoustic double glazing for my flat. Each pane is a different thickness so they vibrate at different frequencies. Seems to make a decent difference over standard double glazing.

I have a split view on this... on one hand, yes, quiet nights are nice to sleep, but on the other hand, busy city centers are meant to be busy... Some people buy an apartment above a restaurant/bar from early 1800s here, and then complain about the noise. If you (have a choice and) live in a city center, then it's usually because you like "stuff" to be around you, walking distance, stores, bars, restaurants, party places, outside performances, people, etc. Demanding that everything stops and gets quiet the second you come home from a loud party and want to sleep is selfish.

On the other hand, we have people moving next to old farms and then complain about cow smell, cow noises, cows in general, cows having sex, cows looking at their windows, etc.

Noise insulation, three-pane glass windows, etc., sure. Demanding quiet city centers, maybe not.

I never live without noise. Not thanks to what is around me but due to tinnitus.

It is just background noise for me. But have friends where they are more disturbed by it...

Whomever cracks the room- or dwelling-sized noise cancellation (think Bose headphones but a bubble for your house) would deserve the Nobel peace prize.

How would that work?

thats easy- just take whats on the outside of one of those silent black helicopters and put it inside your house

Always felt that with my ex around

We need a Look Around You for noise

I didn't read the article. All I saw was a modal site ad asking "Do you have a moment?"

Turns out I didn't.

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