It never ceases to amaze me that blocking noise/sound (one of the weakest forces) is very difficult, whereas blocking light (being fastest and more “powerful”) is very easy.
It might sound futuristic, but I expect noise canceling force fields to become an everyday household thing in a few years ;-)
Obviously, some things are just loud. My kids hate how loud the frogs are next to our house. And blowers will remain loud. As are fast cars.
But, I really believe the future will sound vastly different in most cities. Would be neat to hear the differences through the years. Moving from horses to pully based carriages to gas cars. Now to electric cars. We have moved really fast.
or a revamp on aesthetics with gardens full of fruit trees and other cute flowers than a bunch o grass dating the time where lawns were a symbol of status [0]
And blowers remain hard to beat in clearing leaves. Not just from grass, but also drive ways and sidewalks.
To your point, with gas blowers, I know when one is in use in the street. With the electric, I tend to know if in the yard. So, huge improvement. I'd expect if you really hate the sound and are in an apartment complex, you will still hear them some.
Again, there will still be loud things. But a lot of the noise of the modern world will go away. It is kind of startling how much of the modern world is gas motors running.
In the US, at least, this means that the vast majority of streets will not see much benefit from EV transition, at least with regard to road noise. The quality of the noise will change, but not the total volume.
As an anecdotal reference point on road noise, I live within a couple miles of an interstate, and the noise I tend to hear does not have discernible engine noise. This is, of course, from vehicles moving at a very different speed than any within a neighborhood.
Engine noise always dominates, because 1% of cars are simply purposefully obnoxiously loud, and you need to be powerful and well connected to get enforcement of existing laws about vehicle noise in your neighborhood.
For me, while I find the 1% of purposefully obnoxious engines to be annoying, the thing that grates on my nerves is anything more constant. So for me, road noise dominates in what gets under my skin, not engine noise.
I cannot speak for you or anyone else, except to say that you have no right to speak for anyone else, either, who has not granted such right to you.
This feels true to me, but I suspect it’s not. Victorian industry was _loud_, and cars now are quieter than ever.
But no one drives cars any more. They drive trucks. And motorcycles. And anything with engines designed to tell everyone how powerful they are.
I appreciate my friends/neighbors with electric cars. They do not offset the neighbors with F150s, Silverados, Tundras and other behemoths with v6/v8 gasoline engines.
2. IT'S AMERICA!!!
/s
"Loud" can be defined as dB, perhaps a distance from the source of the sound or from a neighborhood/business etc. Ex. Any sound you produce much have adequate dampening or distance such that school zones and residential zones do not recieve greater than 75dB from any singular source, nor 90dB from the combination of all sources. Then legally concerts must use different venues, planes must take a more difficult path to avoid the nearby airport neighborhoods, etc. Maybe walls erected next to speedways.
"Big" would probably need greater specification. One that already exists is lane width, so you can base things off that. Ex. Single-axle vehicles may not have a height greater than its width, where width is measured as the distance between lugnuts in the tightened position of the left and right wheels, the greater distance if the front and back wheels are at different distances.
Cars are a very big carrot for hard work. They are the modern status symbol and toy which is available for entry to all budgets. Generally, big cars are luxorious, loud cars are fast. No one is gonna work their ass off to move from a 2003 Prius to a 2025 Prius. Plenty of people work their ass off to get a sexy car and to keep it on the road.
Edit: Missed the status symbol itself being stressful. I don't think so. There's a lot of pride in just your status moving up. You get a 90s 7 series, you're happy as hell because it's yours. Moved from daddy's money to self sufficient. Your first car. Then you get a nice 00s 5 series, we moving up in the world. Then you get an old Jag as a weekend thing, oh shit, we getting fancy. It just gives you a pleasant feedback loop every year to couple years.
It's not a continual rise in noise levels – there are ups and downs – and for some things volume levels may decrease while for other things noise may increase. But by and large, there seems to have been an upward trend for quite a few decades now.
Possibly. But no cars, no AC, industry built away from housing. Of course there were horses, trains, loud people. One place that can be quite eye-opening in this regard is Venice. It's really quiet, even when you hear people talking, there are no cars at all and in the evening it's very peaceful, more than any other city I have visited.
Mind you, most suburbs are quiet.
How is sound weaker than light? Light is stopped by some thin cardboard, whereas sound will just breeze through walls.
1. We evolved to spend 50% of the time in the presence of a 1 kW/m^2 light source.
2. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_intensity, sound intensity is 10log₁₀(I/I₀) dB, where I₀ = 1 picowatt/m^2, which means 1 kW/m^2 is ~150 dB, which is about what you get from standing 1 meter away from a jet engine (Wikipedia cited a book for that claim, and doesn't itself say which jet engine).
Sound, being a vibration of matter itself rather than an electromagnetic field, actually often travels better through matter, particularly those low frequencies which are transmitted through structures or the ground itself.
But yes, the far more energetically intense electromagnetic radiation is generally far more easily addressed than far weaker sound eminations.
In my mind I've got this "silly" analogy that noise is like the strong electromagnetic force, very powerful but only in relatively short distances ;-)
edit: yes, an explosion will expel matter through a vacuum, so in some sense enough noise will travel through a vacuum, but you are probably not going to be complaining about the "noise" if you are showered with enough matter to hear it from a massive explosion as your sudden disassembly will (briefly) capture your full attention. Whereas light trivially crosses the universe, as well as through some matter.
Maybe a result of human evolution? If our ears weren't as sensitive to sound as they are, we might not all be here discussing this.
Room acoustics is so complex that I doubt that a noise-cancelling force field is physically possible. ;)
Some sounds are loud enough to be impossible to block out. If police aren't interested in enforcing noise ordinances and your landlord isn't interested either because they're too busy trying not to repair the $12K a month water leak in the basement of the restaurant you live on top of, your only option is to move.
Likewise when ambient noise goes away though. There's a challenge in a sound studio somewhere that blocks out pretty much all sound, challenge being how long you can last in complete silence. Supposedly you can hear your own blood flowing in there.
It's also why people experience noise cancelling headphones as applying a 'pressure' when they first put them on; there is no pressure as such, but just the sudden absence of ambient noise their ears/brains are used to.