The Great Animal Orchestra

by Krause, Bernie

  What was supposed to have a relaxing effect on employees, helping them to be more efficient, has not quite worked out that way. (In addition, white noise has been built into electronic bedside “sleep aids,” with the assumption—and sales pitch—that it would help insomniacs sleep. It didn’t.) Studies show that the synthetically created noise instead serves to tire employees and reduce efficiency and concentration. This is likely the result of the constancy of manufactured white noise. In the natural world, the sound of ocean waves, streams, and wind is dynamic—the intensity of the sound changes over time and contains inherent natural rhythms. White noise in the natural world is relaxing precisely because of those fluctuations: ocean waves produce cadenced patterns, streams and waterfalls have unique and subtle signatures that engage us in ways that tend to pacify. In office spaces where the sound level never varies, the white noise becomes another unconscious irritant, not unlike the fluorescent lights with which workers also have to contend.

  Some industries deliberately manipulate their acoustic environments in order to trigger human stress levels. Until very recently—before a passing groundswell movement to quiet things down occurred at the end of the last century—it was an open secret that some restaurant architects and interior designers, for example, consciously planned certain eating establishments to be more or less stressful, with noise being the main ingredient. Anytime you walk into a restaurant that has hard, reverberant surfaces built into its architecture—walls, floors, and ceilings that reflect and amplify the slightest sound—you are choosing an environment likely designed to put you on edge. To complete the architectural intention, owners might add loud, intrusive, kickass music, or lots of TV monitors featuring sports programs, or both at the same time. While the noise coming from the venue may provide the momentary illusion of “action,” the effect is a carefully calculated one; for those of us looking for more intimate settings in which to enjoy a quiet meal and another’s company, the noise quickly triggers tension and fatigue responses that encourage quick patron turnover, resulting in higher profits for the restaurateur.

  On the other hand, I know how relaxed my wife, Kat, and I feel in a quiet eating establishment with lots of sound-absorbent material factored into the design and minimal or no background music. It’s remarkable how less likely we are to hurry out the door.

  The New York Times discussed the problem of restaurant noise in a number of editorials in the mid-1980s—a time when the subject seemed to have more traction. For several years after, the paper reported noise levels as part of its restaurant reviews to give readers quieter options. Around the same period, the San Francisco Chronicle placed small bell icons in its restaurant reviews to identify establishments’ noise levels. Many other newspaper and magazine food critics followed suit in their reviews but have since dropped all but the most oblique references. With recent attention focusing more on the star quality of the chef, food, decor, and clientele, noise levels in many restaurants are beginning to climb again, along with side effects. An article that appeared in Scientific American in the fall of 2010 stressed that high noise levels may even alter the taste of your food, making it seem more bland. The level readings at a new local restaurant my wife and I visited recently measured 94 dBA. And that was without music and at around six thirty in the evening, before the establishment had reached its capacity. We’re unlikely to return.

  One person’s noise may be a meaningful sound to another—those who create noise have an investment in its origin, while others receiving it may not. I like to think of the sounds we give off as powerful additions to the visual cues we project—an extension of the clothes we wear, the cut of our hair, our body language—statements of the impressions we wish to convey and how, in turn, we experience each other.

  The overwhelming sounds of industry—the true acoustic signatures of modernity—include soundscapes that many of us cherish, especially when we feel compelled to assert our presence. At the extreme, there is the story of James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior. According to R. Murray Schafer, Watt, in reference to the status of the Office of Noise Abatement and Control (a department once within the fold of the EPA that he was determined to close down), observed that noise and power go hand in hand: the more noise we make as a country, the more powerful we appear to be. Think of boom cars calling attention to themselves as they cruise down the street and unmuffled motorcycles or muscle cars—their sounds conveying a certain bombast and arrogance (“Hey! Look at me!”). In another extreme example, after discussing his success shooting off cannons to frighten birds from airport runways, a biologist working at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground mentioned to a group at a soundscape science meeting in Washington, DC, that a colleague later remarked how she loved the noise. To her, cannons were the sound of freedom. The point, of course, is that it all depends on which side of the cannon one is standing.

  Today, we humans seem compelled to bring our noise with us everywhere we go, creating soundscapes of random sources that some few enjoy and that a great many others—who have to endure the unwanted sounds that “spill” into their spaces—find annoying. We go to the lake, and we bring Jet Skis and motorboats; we go to the seashore, and we bring boom boxes; we go to the woods, and we bring dirt bikes, off-road vehicles, and chain saws; we go to the desert, and we bring dune buggies; we go to our national parks, and we bring straight-piping motorcycles, snowmobiles, and now firearms. There is the noise of machinery—toys we cannot seem to live without. There are the sounds of war. There is the noise of other people’s music, and jets or private aircraft flying overhead nearly everywhere we live. No matter where we try to find relief from the din in our lives, noise intrudes.

  Noise is a theme played out in our recreational activities. For example, on many July and August Sunday afternoons at Infineon Raceway, which is a forty-five-minute drive north of San Francisco, a famous National Hot Rod Association drag-racing event takes place, drawing more than a hundred thousand fans to celebrate our fleeting supremacy represented by speed and noise. The track is eighteen miles south of our home. To reach us, the roar of the engines doesn’t travel in a straight line—it must first traverse several ranges of inland coastal hills, valleys, protected wetlands, and a regional park. However, as each contest begins every five minutes or so, I can measure the sound coming from the track at troubling levels. The dragsters are so loud that I have recorded them well above the normal daytime ambient levels present at our property line—even when the wind is blowing in the opposite direction. R. Murray Schafer once said to me that if it wasn’t for the noise, and speed was the only factor, attendance at drag races and U.S. Navy Blue Angels events would probably drop by more than 90 percent.

  Sound levels in movie theater trailers with THX or Dolby Digital sound systems are now more than a factor of six greater than they were in the early 1990s—often beyond the safe levels of industrial noise mandated by OSHA and the Environmental Protection Agency, when it still had an active Noise Abatement Office. When I asked a member of the sound department at Sky-walker Sound (part of the LucasFilm company) about the high level mixes for the promos, he responded on condition of anonymity: “It’s all about marketing. High levels hold the audience’s attention. Theatergoers have a hard time talking over a loud sound track. Otherwise the trailers would have no impact.” Producers and sound designers are convinced that audiences want to be assaulted by the loud, low-frequency “punches” and sound effects that now define film trailers. They create a visceral sense of excitement and tension. To me, the relationship of film to sound appears to be inversely proportional—the less substance in the film, the quicker the distracting frame cuts and the louder and more frequent the sound effects. It’s not 3-D glasses that should be supplied. When Kat and I go to the movies, we take earplugs.

  Just when we’ve started seeing big strides in quieting down our environment, in part by introducing less noisy hybrid and electric automobiles, manufacturers have new concerns that the resulting qu
ietude actually increases the danger to pedestrians and is thus a manufacturer’s liability. In response, the Fisker Karma, a roughly $100,000 plug-in hybrid vehicle on sale in 2011, has added speakers to its front bumper to transmit a sound that is “a cross between a starship and a Formula 1 car”—a health trade-off in which the danger of not hearing an oncoming vehicle becomes more important than the psychological and physical stresses induced by the roar of a Formula 1, adding yet another layer of noise to our already anxious neighborhoods. Other manufacturers are considering similar options for their electric vehicles.

  Even though it is generally thought of as an acoustic phenomenon, noise can also be visual, or a combination of both. For example, noise is introduced into the night skies by light pollution from cities—the light that spills up from streetlamps, billboards, buildings, and monuments—blocking out the heavens. Or consider a TV broadcast from any of several cable channels—a screen filled with disparate images and competing messages, further scrambled by an edgy, highly compressed, and modulated audio track, and nonstop mind-numbing aphorisms of unearned authority. All of these elements are designed to draw and hold our attention to screen images littered with multiple focus points. The combined “noise” from the audio and imagery is shrewdly calculated to keep us off balance. When we’re off balance, we’re uncomfortable.

  When we feel a high enough level of discomfort and can’t precisely identify the source, many of us express the accumulated frustration as anger, or more likely rage. Skew and repeat the substance of a distorted media message consistently enough, and the result is thought reform. It is a process that the psychologist Michael Langone refers to as the “systematic manipulation of psychological and social influences” through noise.

  Our world is hardly ever quiet. Nevertheless, what happens when just one intrusive class of noise—jets and private aircraft—disappears from our lives? An eerie yet memorable effect of the security precautions put in place immediately after the disaster of September 11, 2001, was the stunning sense of tranquillity that descended over the country for a few days. Just prior to the 9/11 event, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had changed inbound flight patterns from the northwest United States to San Francisco International Airport, so that descending commercial aircraft flew, at around seventeen thousand feet, right over our home in the Sonoma Valley. Our otherwise lovely spot (aka Jack London’s Valley of the Moon) is also a private pilot training airspace for single-engine aircraft. Because air traffic was grounded for forty-eight hours after 9/11, no planes of any type were airborne. There was also a nearly complete absence of automobile traffic.

  Emotionally drained, Kat and I sat quietly in our garden a day after the attacks. And with the anthrophony silenced, we listened to a late-summer natural soundscape that we had never before heard at that time of year. Goldfinches, juncos, bushtits, nuthatches, brown creepers, Anna’s hummingbirds, house finches, towhees, and swallows were still faintly vocal—a transparent interweaving of voices we didn’t know existed that late in the season. At one point, we turned to each other and remarked how guilty we felt for feeling mentally and physically refreshed by the absence of the aircraft—the “normal” signs of civilization and commerce. It’s the astonishment city kids must feel when seeing the night sky during a blackout.

  We were stunned by the previous day’s events, but we welcomed the healing, relaxing ambience. Even more surprising was the number of e-mails and calls we got from as far away as Europe during and immediately after those dark days, commenting on the peacefulness that had swathed the world’s airspaces for a moment in time. Every person who reached out was relieved and soothed by the serenity—amazed by the natural acoustic richness the moment revealed. We wondered aloud about the possibilities of our nation slowing down, perhaps for a National Day of Tranquillity, a time when we could take a moment to catch our collective breath and appreciate the sonic blessings in our own backyards.

  Author Garret Keizer offered a thoughtful observation: terrorist attacks such as that of 9/11 posit a war between the noise signatures of different cultures. He suggests that the terrorists’ motivations, in part, may have been based on a desire not to have the noise of Western culture bear down on them with such oppressive weight. He goes on to say: “I doubt we will ever be able to ‘listen’ to our enemies or cause them to listen to us until we can hear our own noise with their ears.”

  How can we deal with noise? Earplugs help when I have to endure a rock concert or a record mix. Yet, with something jammed in my ears, the quality of the entire soundscape is compromised—both signal and noise. So they help only when acoustic events are otherwise painful. When, in 1986, Bose introduced noise-canceling headphones—which use technology called active noise control (ANC)—they accomplished a tiny bit of what our brains do. These headphones continually sample noise from the surrounding environment and then introduce a mirror opposite (+1 and −1 = 0) of the audio waveform to cancel it, eliminating irritating background noise such as the sound of a jet engine. Now common, noise-canceling headphones cost anywhere from $30 to $350. But we can’t rely on such technologies to quiet down the environments in which most of us choose to live.

  One way we’ve managed the problem is to build ever quieter structures in which to find respite. Architecture has always influenced the ways in which sound is transmitted and controlled. Earlier, I discussed the medieval church structures that would attenuate sounds from the outside and enhance those from within. This aural architectural design philosophy has carried over into the present. Every aspect of large public-space design has been calculated to control, to one degree or another, the experience of the interior habitat, eliminating most outside sound, whether anthrophonic or biophonic in origin. Ironically, these structures may actually serve to amplify the noise levels on the street, making even more apparent the need for quiet interior spaces. With the knowledge and resources at hand to completely transform the spaces we build and inhabit, and with urban spaces becoming more densely packed and noise intense, there is every reason to create structures that completely eliminate the acoustic world outside and redefine inner spaces, conforming them to our most intricate requirements.

  In a U.S. noise survey conducted a few years ago, it was estimated that the level of urban noise increased by approximately 12 percent across the United States from 1996 to 2005. More than one-third of Americans complained of noise, and over one in ten found it annoying. As established in previous studies, the noise problem has become so vexing that more than 40 percent claimed they wanted to change their place of residence. Meanwhile, European, North and South American, and many Asian communities experienced an exponential increase in human noise as the landscape was transformed to meet the needs of exploding populations. Now, the rate of escalation in urban soundscape intensity has accelerated to the point where cities can be difficult environments in which to spend any time in the open.

  Recognizing the impact of noise on the quality of human and nonhuman life, the European Union has set the most stringent objectives on the noise automobiles can emit from a distance of ten meters (about thirty-three feet). Here’s a short comparative rundown:

  European Union = 74 dBA

  BA Korea = 75 dBA

  BA Australia = 77 dBA

  BA Japan = 78 dBA

  BA United States, Canada, Israel = 80 dBA

  In the United States, the 80 dBA level is only a recommendation—not a mandate—and it’s louder by a factor of two than the EU limit. With a segment of the U.S. populace already suspicious of government intervention and clearly supporting “noise-is-power” mantras, stricter, enforceable controls are unlikely to occur anytime soon.

  To understand why noise regulation is ineffective in the United States today, we should refer again to the first years of the Reagan administration. When, in 1982, funding for the Office of Noise Abatement and Control (ONAC) was abruptly terminated, the department was shut down, giving the FAA exclusive control over aircraft noise. The Noise Control A
ct of 1972, under which ONAC was established, is still in force. It states: “It is the policy of the United States to promote an environment for all Americans free from noise that jeopardizes their health and welfare.” However, since the funding for ONAC—the implementing department—was eliminated, the control of noise was remanded to the jurisdiction of the states, which have few resources available, very spotty records, and too many other fish to fry to address noise issues.

  Each state interprets the subject of “noise” differently: most give deference to numerous special-interest groups and lobbyists who of course represent industries that make a lot of noise, including snowmobile, Jet Ski, motorcycle, and ATV manufacturers. The EPA, watchdog agencies, and activist groups have clamored for years to reinstate the ONAC, but so far to no avail.

  The end result of all this noise is that, for most of us, hearing has become a blur. As the world’s population continues adjusting from agrarian to industrial to software economies, the local folk know that their aural environment is being transformed: highways, railroads, and factories drastically alter the land and its soundscapes. We are on our way to an encompassing, global age of the machine and all the noise that it generates; noise now permeates our world’s environments and masks more aesthetically resonant sounds—even though John Cage once referred to all sound as music. As Sasha Frere-Jones pointed out in a 2010 New Yorker music review: “To many people now, noise isn’t necessarily an aggressive or alienating element; it sounds more like nature than nature does.”