The Noisy Middle Ages
medievalists.net
medievalists.net
Country farms, even with animals, and horses pulling carts and whatnot are nothing like the 10,000s of cars a day going by in the background of a modern city, nonstop gas powered road construction and yard maintenance, etc. I'm sure there were loud times but the article doesn't convince me, I think it would have been way more peaceful, especially on a farm.
This is covered in the article, however for the sake of added color. Modern cities have a lot going on but are sprawled by comparison. Medieval cities were very compact for foot travel limitations and defense. Families were big and practically everyone went to church so there were many Churches in a small area. The bells would go off every few hours or more for the Angelus, the start of Mass, the consecration, and the end of Mass multiple times a day. You can still experience this in Malta and maybe parts of South America. The article goes into more detail about industry etc. It was noisy!
I'm fairly sure those had practical timekeeping concerns aside from their religious values. Nobody had clocks back then, so someone had to keep track of the time and announce it far and wide.
For that matter, we also used the bell towers - each different, village from village - to orient ourselves in travel... Massive signposts on the horizon. Of course if you have to do something, do it with reason and wits.
Likewise in term of practicality, the bells could act like the "clock" on a motherboard: regulating collective activity.
I live rurally, rn. A single car, a half mile away is loud enough that I can hear it while a rooster crows.
That same car is close to as loud as a gunshot from same distance--likely bc it's continuous.
I can easily hear a train thunder from 5 miles away.
If simply hearing a sound is an indication of noise then yes, but not hearing it because it's drowned out by other noise doesn't equal quiet.
Completely different noise. Those combustion and pistons engines create a texture¹, while the animal voices have been naturally developed to call for attention. A thousand motors create a background; one or a thousand dogs or deers are one or a thousand "Hey!"s, impacting sounds made to pierce the background. Like a thousand hums vs a thousand snares.
¹(Assuming, as the poster suggested, we are speaking of the continuous flow and not of single reverse-muffler-from-hell that pass nearby in their trail of havoc and Doppler)
That depends on the distance.
> A pre-industrial farm background of wind, animal calls, bird songs, water flow sounds like paradise in comparison
No. It just "«sounds»". I am typing in real time a couple dozen yards from a stream, it is much more annoying than a motorway at reasonable distance (which, as others have noted, means "kilometers" - as people who got unused to the outdoors lost the idea of how easily sound propagates without barriers). It includes even more annoying parts like the rumble that falls create through the landscape acoustic. Animal calls here are the typical obtuse racial slurs barked from villas (occasionally cries of terror from the woods). Wild boars are fortunately very polite sound wise. But birds, with their shrieks, up to cuckoos deejaying around, can be the most annoying - even more when you suspect that they are advertising for mating, the fixated things. But speaking of texture: oh the insects. Go into the right woods in the right season, and see if your thought can be louder than the buzz. Speaking of natural background can be as "innocent" as dreaming of that fashion model unaware of her halitosis.
> paradise ... most pleasant place conceivable
The idea of the "garden" was coined by people who lived surrounded by sand, burned their feet on sand, ate sand and drank sand juice. And thought "If only I had the luxury to live through picking fruits and enjoy a bit of shade".
> No one ever thought
Just generalization and evident pitfalls, there was a guy who loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
I won't pick your comment apart as you did mine since in my opinion it comes off as rude. But it's weird imagining 'gardens' are pleasant only from the point of view of some weird caricature of Arrakis fremen when paradeiso was a Persian word. I.e., from nomadic peoples traveling the highlands and mountain valleys of central Asia.
I hope you can escape from the nature sounds you find so unpleasant. I won't dispute the fact that soundscape preferences are subjective. We obviously disagree on that.
I am just analytic.
> paradeiso was a Persian word [...] nature sounds you find so unpleasant
Do not miss that that that word meant "enclosure", "a walled thing" - your garden, something you manage: they probably wanted to leave out moles, shrieking bellbirds, drumkits an possibly even clamouring carts.
So, it is not a matter of choosing "a hit in the head or a poke in the eye", it is that sounds can be annoying, you have to be proportionally thick skinned to bear them, whatever they are, it does not matter if artificial or natural, it matters if the pattern rhythm insistence frequencies and loudness are more disturbing than not.
> It's 75 dB+ inside my home if I open the windows. Roadside it can breach 100 dB
You are strongly suggesting that your diet overly rich in salt makes you crave for sugar... But it remains like in Bertrand Blier's Buffet Froid: "It's the cement everywhere, the city, the alienation, that is making me insane! I want to hear the birds...". Next scene: all laying in the countryside. "It's humid!..."
I could even identify the different types of jets from the weird reverberations around the house.
«Cars», the original poster spoke of ___cars___, not planes...
I wrote «Those combustion and pistons engines», ___those___...
Back then cities were more dense and, as well, individual households were more dense. It is possible, maybe even likely, that those pockets would measure louder than anything we're accustomed to today. But, at the same time, you would also have more places completely free of human activity to balance that out and then some when computing an average.
No, it is that you assumed "typical environment".
8 billion today vs one third of a billion one thousand years ago: the place has gotten crowded.
Which also means, must have been much easier in the past to isolate oneself, within reasonable horse distance. Nowadays, many countries are simply clogged with presence and to find a "desert" is almost impossible (also considering air traffic).
And also, horses were expensive.
Why do you suspect that? At least here in Germany almost every church, Catholic or not, has bells, that are rung every hour (often times with short ringings in between every 15 min).
Around my family farm, at that time, there was a church every 100 chains (1.25 miles). This is out in the middle of nowhere farming country, then and still today.
If they had enough people to fill a church every mile or so, imagine how many churches the densely populated urban areas must have had in close proximity. And then if they are all ringing bells...
Have a look at Babbage's quarrels with and over street musicians in London.
You'd think that some largish, say, American or Canadian city's traffic, construction and commercial activity would be louder than that of some small densely packed developing world towns, but you'd often be very wrong. It's not just the scope of it in these compact, crowded places, it's the sheer blazing variety too. I wouldn't at all be surprised if a medieval city of twisting lanes between jam-packed buildings surrounded by a great thick wall were the same, despite there being no cars or modern gas-powered and electronic machines of any kind..
The first-ever comprehensive assessment of net population changes in the U.S. and Canada reveals across-the-board declines that scientists call “staggering.” All told, the North American bird population is down by 2.9 billion breeding adults, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by 53%, or another 720 million birds.
No, "«you»" don't: /some/ people do.
And even when they do, to forget about something does not remove it, nor its effect.
After a while you just don't notice, though I did often wake up during the night when we moved away from there - I imagine I was expecting to hear the bells and getting confused when they didn't ring.
I imagine its the same as living next to train-tracks, or similar. Regularly repeating noises start to get tuned out.
[1] https://www.nrdc.org/bio/regan-nelson/why-all-concern-about-...
From putting baby roosters into a grinder en masse to stuff like this...we should just slow down a bit and stop being legit assholes, we can't though because we're compulsive and anxious.
You can certainly find people complaining about noise today. Does that body of literature exist for that era?