This first sentence makes it seem as if the paper was written by aliens. Not even deaf people would gain anything from that sentence.
I think LLMs have caused me to be more perceptive to and annoyed by stuff like this.
By the time I wrote my thesis, I was far more assertive in politely declining many of his edits.
After he changed something I'd revised per his instructions back to my original copy I decided I'd had enough: I revised only where I thought it improved the papers and ignored the rest.
He never said a thing.
It was exhausting and stupid and I stuck to blogging after that. Who knows, I might have written books. But not dealing with shit like that. I can torture myself much more efficiently, TYVM.
There are many stories of savvy workers engaging proactively including a flaw in their work being reviewed, something small but obvious and easy to fix, so that their managers can feel involved. One that often comes up in software is an apocryphal "duck" in an unreleased attack animation for the queen-unit in Interplay's Battle Chess game.
Closely related are the appearance of changes, such as a tale that Michelangelo was pressured to "fix" the nose of his David statue, so he climbed up and knocked off a little bit of material and the superior down below was satisfied without being able to verify anything had really changed.
> Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, ...
Sounds are always being heard by your senses: ears + bass that you feel in your body.
> Sound ... continually engages our auditory and mental faculties.
The continuous usage of our senses then lets sounds force our brains to think in particular ways. This is distinct from above - brain vs ears.
> Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience ...
The continuous engagement results in sound being important to what being human means. Note that human experience is larger than what you think. So this is also distinct from above.
Special mention to “ Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience” which is itself a truism in the truism. Yes, sound is an experience and experiencing is a significant part of being alive. You are welcome for this insanely new and deep nugget of information.
Honestly, you can remove the first paragraph of the introduction with no loss of information involved and end up with a better article.
I could maybe get headphones, or some noise cancelling earphones, but I shouldn't have to.
Commercial vehicles are much louder than cars. Especially at the lower speeds where engine noise dominates tire noise.
Non-modified personal vehicles are significantly less loud than commercial vehicles, motorcycles, and food truck generators.
No matter if streetcars/trams downtown, or so called 'light-rail'/fast-rapid-mass-transit reaching out into the periphery, or neighbouring towns.
They can also be buried by applying that strange concept called 'subway'.
Hrrm, what happened to all those hyped loops, btw?
Sometimes when it is quiet here I wonder what the noises of nature must have been like to people a century or two or three ago when the wind was not just wind but something which could destroy your crops and make the next year very difficult for you. Or the extended lack of noise constantly reminding you that the drought continues and even the animals have had the sense to move on while you watch your fields slowly die. City or nature our relationship to the sounds around us have changed quite a bit, we can now choose to ignore the majority of sounds and write them off as meaningless or irritating if we can not manage to ignore them but those sounds are never meaningless, they all signify something more than our irritation.
Right now I am missing the wind and the waves and feeling the constant low rumble, I really hate listening to the compressor on the fridge but if it stopped making noise I would probably be more irritated by the thought of spoiling food and the potential inconveniences which that would cause. Never could hear my fridge when I lived in the city, if it stopped working it would just be an issue to deal with when I discovered it was no longer cold, not something I had a constant reminder of.
I love the constant din of cities, but the din of people. Not the din of cars. If one is lucky enough to live in that sort of city.
I think they are implied by the din of the city which is the din of people even if it comes from a loud car, that loud car is loud because of a person. For the driver of that loud car being able to really hear the engine could mean the driver is the sort of person who wants to hear the engine and is the sort who can isolate each and every sound the engine makes telling them a great deal about how well it is or is not working. Or their engine might be about to fail and it is a constant reminder of another thing they need to figure out how to pay for and praying it holds out until next month when they get their Christmas bonus even if that means the kids will have not have much of a Christmas. Or it might just be that it is their way to block out the constant din of the city. Or they may just want the city know that they are there, that they exist. screaming to the heavens as it were.
All those sounds which make up the din of the city have meanings and are personal, they connect to a person and a life. But I did make a conscious decision between natural and unnatural noise, nature vs city, people are sort of a grey area there and getting into that would complicate my point. The person living out in middle of nowhere miles from anyone is generally allowed to make as much noise as they please unless you happen to be camping near their property, then they are probably going to be considered rude for disturbing the tranquility and your vacation from the city even though you are the one encroaching on their life, not the other way around. As far as you know no one lives within 100 miles of your campsite and here are all these noises which do not belong 100 miles from civilization.
Variation. In countryside, a cow mooing or a rooster whatevering will quite reliably wake one up. In suburbs, a car passing by will annoy the shit out of you watching a movie. In a city, one does not even notice emergency services passing by with sirens blaring.
In a countryside noise floor is so low you can hear leaves falling. In a city noise floor is the cars passing by and we adjust to that.
I've started recording the outdoor sound levels using a USB sound meter: https://i.imgur.com/IdYdhA8.png
When the quietest it gets is above 55 decibels, I don't like being outside. It's not just cars passing by, it is a pulsating drone which never ends.
My current address would be perfectly fine if people drove according to the rules, but it turns out that people in this town don't adhere to speed limits whatsoever and there is literally no police control.
Consequently, the 50km/h speed limit is ignored entirely with most cars driving around 70km/h.
That shit gets loud!
Two of my neighbors on our block bought electrical cars, and not exaggerating, it made such a difference to quality of life, no longer hearing them pull up or drive off.
I lived in a "walkable city" for a number of years. The noise outside my window was all human. Footsteps, people talking, ... At night was dead quiet. Much more quiet than the suburban street I'm on now.
City life is not inherently shitty, it's tolerance for antisocial behaviors that make it shitty. I really think americans can't always put their finger on it, and end up moving out at some point, thinking it has to do with the overall "busyness" of city life or something. But it really is just noisy cars.
It makes me wonder if the noise profile that cars make could be modified to be less annoying, even if not necessarily less loud.
My youngest has one more year of high school remaining, but maybe it's time to downsize / find a quieter place after she graduates.
Like seriously, "[exhaling air] continually engages our [...] mental faculties" is pretty nonsensical, since breathing is something autonomic. "Omnipresent chemical simulator" seems irrelavent in context. All in all, its a nonsense sentence
Now compare with the original sentence. Its an introduction to the paper. They are trying to establish why they are doing the research they are doing and why you should care. And it tells you - we did research into sound dapening because sound is all around us and its constantly effecting us. Which is something as a human i find to be true - the modern (urban) world is quite noisy. When there is too much noise it can be mentally exhausting and can tax my ability to understand those around me. After reading that sentence I now know why they are researching this area, and agree it is a worthy thing to research. That introductory sentence did everything an introductory sentence to a paper is supposed to do.
Sure, they use some fancy words, but they aren't even that fancy. It is a formal paper, i think high school level reading ability can be presumed.
The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts." This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.
I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.
Writing is all about context. What is a good sentence in one context might be a terrible sentence in another context.
To go in more detail > The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
That sentence doesn't say anything about the definition of sound at all. It makes 2 claims that are important - sound is everywhere and sound affects people. Neither of them have anything to do with what sound is. I imagine the author (correctly) assumes the target audience already knows the definition of "sound".
> Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
Sure, that might be a fine sentence in some other article, but why would it work here? It promotes the aside, that sound is important to humans, to the main idea. However that makes no sense in context. The author isn't writing an essay on the importance of sound. Sound being important is not the primary thing the author is trying to set up here, so why would you cumulate with that?
Re the fancy one - I would say the same thing. There are plenty of contexts where that would be a fine sentence, but this isn't one of them. It is inappropriate to the genere in question and communicates the wrong idea. Sound might be powerful but this isn't an essay on how sound is powerful.
> The importance of sound is underscored by its dual nature, serving as both a vital tool for communication and a potential source of harm, exemplified by the pervasive issue of noise pollution.[1] Considered to be a public health issue by the World Health Organization, unwanted noise can have harmful health effects on people who are chronically exposed to it.[1-5] In the US alone, an estimated 145 million people are exposed to hazardous noise levels.[5] To suppress noise levels, both active and passive solutions are used.
I suspect it may be angling to funding or a journal/conference purpose or something? Without that, the rest of the paper's not really going to care about noise pollution, even if it potentially indirectly offers a way to mitigate it.
But the way it's written is bad. The OP would have a point if the complaint was about the form, and not the contents. Whatever makes people believe they have to write papers this way (whether it's true or not) needs fixing.