NOISE AND THE PERENNIAL HUMAN ENERGY CRISIS
Flask and I wandered on through Barton Creek Square and stepped into The Limited, a loud, throbby, high-contrast space, which to me sounded like Abercrombie & Fitch on a light Zoloft regimen. I asked Flask to analyze the store’s acoustical message.
She lowered her eyes a moment, and nodded to the beat. “The Limited girl is a little older. She works all day, but then she goes out, without having the time to drive home and change her clothes. She’s probably just out of college, just entering the workforce. This works.”
After Flask conjured up the busy, vibrant life of the Limited girl for me (I sort of did and did not want to meet her), I wondered aloud whether the noise strategy of the mall today did not, after all, just come down to sex. Was what we were hearing simply a matter of different stores taking on the acoustic personae of giant bullfrogs in a fecund swamp at springtime? A kind of precopulatory croak-off between—
“There’s a lot of sex,” Flask broke in. But it was also, she added, a matter of energy dynamics. “All of the energy of the loudness makes you feel very energetic.” She raised her voice several notches. “‘George, did you see this shirt! Did you see this?!’ It raises the ambient energy in the store. It feels like excitement, and starts a whole reaction of people. There’s a circuit of energy! The music is fast and loud so you move through the store more quickly without using as much energy.”
Indeed, one of the only repeatedly validated effects of music on shoppers relates to tempo. A faster beat makes shoppers move more quickly, while a more leisurely tempo slows physical movement through a store. The principle is derived from the effects of military music on the speed of marching soldiers. Not only does the process of falling into step with a drumbeat make the pace of the marcher subject to manipulation and lead to general arousal; recent research has demonstrated that when people are moving in synchrony to a beat, their behavior is more compliant to the collective will.
Things were beginning to fall into place. Loud, strong, fast beats pump energy—and social conformity—into any number of environments.
One of the earliest newspaper mentions of Muzak is found in a New York Times article from January 1939 entitled “Pier Equipped for Music Night and Day to Make Longshoremen Work Happily.” The Isbrandtsen-Moller Company, an operator of cargo liners, decided that its workers on Pier 30 in Brooklyn would perform better “under the influence of sweet music.” Muzak, which began in 1934 with a technological innovation that enabled phonographs to be played over electric power lines, quickly morphed into an audio-entertainment service for hotels and restaurants. The possibility of streaming music into workplaces opened new horizons for company marketers. An executive with Muzak applauded the policy decision by Isbrandtsen-Moller, declaring that “a heavy bag of coffee would assume a new aura of romance in an atmosphere charged with ebullient melodies urging the workers on.” Muzak’s program department determined the precise content of the “musical reproducing system” that broadcast dinner-and-dance music to the stevedores, loaders, and other members of the pier office force. It knew “the psychological time for ‘lift’ music and other categories fit for a worker’s wandering emotions.”
Shortly after the practice was adopted, however, and despite reports by the vice president of Muzak and Mr. Isbrandtsen that all the longshoremen were euphoric, local union leaders decided that the real purpose of the program was to speed up the pace of workers. The union called a strike that killed the music in double-time.
A couple of years later, however, during World War II, the notion of “riveting to rhythm” gained traction across the nation. Westinghouse discovered the acoustical secret to raising energy levels at work by accident, when the manager of the company’s Newark plant began playing records to test radio receivers. After the project was completed and the receivers were turned off on the plant floor, workers began complaining that they felt more fatigued than when listening to “I Do, Do You?” and “Let’s Get Away from It All,” and asked that the practice be reinstated. In response to lingering criticism by labor advocates, business leaders insisted that instead of “spurring a tired horse,” they were helping to end boredom. Music, they contended, was a healthy distraction, particularly popular tunes that hit a metronome count between sixty-five and ninety beats per minute. By 1941, William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, could say, “Music is the friend of labor—it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirits of the workers.”
EAT THE BEAT
Zagat, the restaurant-review company, reports that noise is consistently customers’ number-two complaint nationwide, ahead of high prices and second only to poor service. In 2008, more than a third of New York City patrons cited noise as their foremost complaint, up from 2002, the first year for which data is available, when only 21 percent ranked noise at the top of their list of dining grievances. Ten years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle was the first newspaper to incorporate a noise-rating system into its restaurant reviews: one bell indicates a sound level of less than sixty-five decibels, and the scale ascends through another three bells to the category of “bomb,” representing eighty-plus decibels of din. Michael Bauer, the Chronicle’s senior food and wine writer, says that he may now have to institute a “double bomb” rating, and reports a sharp decline in the number of San Francisco restaurants rating less than four bells, equivalent to loud factory noise.
The first rigorous study of the effects of fast music on the pace of dining was conducted in the mid-1980s. Customers exposed to slow music spent significantly longer at table: an average of 56 minutes as opposed to 45 minutes. Another study, performed around the same time at Fairfield University, demonstrated that people increased the speed of their chewing by almost a third when listening to faster, louder music, accelerating from 3.83 bites a minute to 4.4 bites a minute. Stoked with data of this nature, chain restaurants, such as Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill, developed computerized sound systems that were preset to raise the tempo and volume of music at hours of the day when corporate wanted to turn tables. “A lot of the managers try to turn music down because they think it’s too loud for people eating,” said Don Blanton, who developed the system for the grill. “So we’ve put in an automated system.”
Loudness has been linked to a more profitable rate of food consumption more by intuitive association than because of hard evidence. (Indeed, one study indicated a decline in the amount of money spent at the tables that turned too quickly.) But when it comes to consumption of alcohol, the data confirms expectations. A study completed in the summer of 2008 in France by researchers at the Université de Bretagne-Sud found that when music was played at 72 decibels, men consumed an average of 2.6 drinks at a rate of one drink per 14.51 minutes. When the sound level was cranked up to 88 decibels, the numbers spiked to an average of 3.4 drinks consumed every 11.47 minutes. Reasons for this acceleration may include an increase in ambient energy, the difficulty of talking—which makes it easier to just signal the bartender for a refill than to engage in conversation—and perhaps actual changes in brain chemistry.
It has already been proven that acoustic stimulation heightens the effect of MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, to a degree that influences the drug’s toxicity. Since most people are taking Ecstasy in environments where sound levels are rapturously elevated, this is a worrisome finding. Though the mechanism is not fully understood, a recent study by Italian medical researchers demonstrated that even low doses, which did not in themselves affect electrocortical parameters, when administered in conjunction with sound equivalent to a typical discotheque, spiked electrical activity in the brain sufficiently to produce what might be called a sizzle-and-fry effect. Furthermore, when animals in the experiment were drugged in silent environments, their brains reverted to normal levels of electrocortical activity within twenty-four hours. When loud sound was added to the mix it took a full five days for their heads to straighten out.
But there’s a large
r point here: noise heightens other forms of stimulation, especially other forms of overstimulation. There’s also evidence that loud acoustics make us crave more overstimulation. A group of men presented with an array of foods balanced across a salty-sweet spectrum reported pleasure from the high-sugar flavors at far greater rates when listening to loud music than when dining to a background of soft music. In other studies, researchers have shown that when people eat potato chips while wearing headphones that amplify the overall noise level of their crunching, they rate the chips as crispier, fresher—more desirable—than their counterparts chewing without an electronic sound boost.
So retailers turn up the volume to get people moving through the store and build in-store excitement. Restaurateurs crank up the sound to turn tables and build (literal) restaurant buzz. There was one other environment that came to mind when I thought of places that had been much quieter in the not-so-distant past—sports arenas. The modern-day gladiator is dependent on acoustical steroids.
NOISEBALL
In October 2008, Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium (nicknamed “Deaf Valley”) was touted in the Athens Banner-Herald as “one of the loudest places in the nation.” University of Georgia coach Mark Richt called the stadium “a place you can’t hear yourself think. A place that I can truthfully say is the loudest place I’ve ever been.” Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated put Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City at the head of its list as “Toughest Place to Play” for an opposing team—because of how loud the Chiefs fans get. Rod Smith of the Denver Broncos remarked that the first time he played at Arrowhead “it scared the hell out of me—and that was just the national anthem … I thought they were going to attack us. I thought 70,000 people were about to come out of the stands and get us.” Crowd noise at Autzen Stadium in Eugene has reached 127.2 decibels, which would make the fans’ experience resemble that of roaring in concert with a Boeing 747.
Qwest Field in Seattle, built in 2002, claims the title of loudest roofed stadium in the NFL. Paul Allen, owner of the Seattle Seahawks, instructed the architects to design the stadium to reflect a maximum of crowd noise back onto the field. He also installed a special seating zone with metal bleachers for the most raucous fans called the Hawk’s Nest, which would enable the stamping of feet to reverberate as violently as possible. When the Giants played at Qwest Field in 2005, they were called for eleven false-start penalties—attributed to crowd noise that made it impossible for them to communicate.
It’s small wonder that supporters of different teams are constantly accusing opposing home teams of electronically boosting the sound of their fans. Mike Sellers of the Washington Redskins recently said of Qwest Field, “That place had to be miked up, because the last time we played there, it was ridiculous. We couldn’t hear ourselves talk. For a stadium that small, it can’t be that loud.” Fred Micera, the Qwest Field audio engineer, pronounced Sellers’s charge an insult to the Seahawks fans, saying they had no need of artificial enhancement. (It can be done, though: a few years ago the New Jersey Nets were found to have been amplifying the sound of a crowd by broadcasting the prerecorded noise from another game.)
Outside of electronic escalation, there are structural tricks for maximizing the levels of ambient noise. Open-air stadium architects will sometimes add extra balconies and increase balcony overhang to heighten the reflection of sound into the stands and onto the field. Different materials can be used in construction to maximize reverberation. And yet, as Jack Wrightson, president of WJHW, an acoustical-design firm responsible for many of the best-known stadiums in the United States, told me, “The building doesn’t make the crowd. You can enhance, but you can’t turn a bad crowd into a good one with just building materials.” The classic example, Wrightson said, is Denver’s Mile High Stadium where, in 2000, Bronco fans entered the Guinness World Records for the loudest single crowd roar ever recorded. At one point the NFL began penalizing home teams when the noise went above a certain decibel level that was deemed an interference with quarterbacks barking commands to their lineup. (Wrightson pointed out that the NFL crowd-noise regulations are almost entirely ignored. “Nothing a crowd likes more than getting a penalty called on itself,” he said.) But there was nothing special about the Mile High Stadium from an architectural point of view, Wrightson went on. “It’s all about the crowd.”
Yet the crowd is not just tens of thousands of spectators howling, clapping, stamping, and pounding. It’s also every electronic and nonelectronic device that adds to the noise they can make with their own lungs. Some stadiums give out noisemakers like cowbells, maracas, and clackers. Barkers sell whistles, megaphones, handheld sirens, air horns, stadium horns, sports horns, and “super loud air blaster necklaces.” And then of course there are the endless official stadium noise amplifiers generated by PA announcements, PA music, PA advertising, PA fireworks, PA applause, and general PA crowd incitement.
As for the athletes whom all this noise bombardment is intended to energize—they are playing in conditions that exceed by hundreds of percentage points what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration states is safe for the roughly three-hour duration of a game. Not only do extended balconies and enclosures beam whatever sound the crowd can make directly onto the fields, the roar is, as former Colts defensive tackle Larry Tripplett put it not long ago, “right in your ear. With the helmet that sound gets in there and rattles around.” To prepare for these conditions, NFL and college players now regularly practice with rock music played at earsplitting levels as well as with noise machines parked along the sidelines that mimic the noise of a coliseum full of bloodthirsty spectators. While these machines are designed to help teams adjust to the distractions of fan noise, they are also used at the players’ request, according to New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin, because players believe the noise helps them keep their energy level high. Between the noise of the games and the artificially generated noise of the practice field, many of today’s professional athletes will suffer premature hearing loss.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sounds Like Noise
A German friend who lives part of each year in the United States told me recently that when he was first getting acclimated to the States, noise was one of his biggest problems. Not the noise in the streets, the stores, or the restaurants, but the actual word “noise.” He could not get used to the way that people would use the word “noise” to signify a loud, offensive sound (as in, “I can’t stand the noise here!”) and also to refer simply to the sound something made (as in, “Don’t you love the noise of that fountain?”). People might have thought him hard of hearing when he kept asking, “Do you think we’re hearing a noise?” German, with its geräusch (sound) and lärm (nasty noise), preserves a clear distinction between creating a sound and emitting an unpleasant one.
The word “noise,” as we know by now, derives from the Latin root nausea. How did that notion transfer to sound as such? The neutral usage crops up in late Middle English in England—around 1400. It would seem plausible that the switch occurred in the acoustical equivalent of a population explosion: too many disparate sounds heard together make for an experience of noise.
But that’s not the whole story. What about noise-canceling headphones? These work by analyzing the waveform of background noise then generating an equivalent counter sound wave. Active noise control actually involves making more sound so that we hear less noise. And even without technology we all know that sometimes it’s much harder to hear a person we’re speaking with when there’s one person with a penetrating voice standing next to us than when there’s a whole group of people chattering in our vicinity.
“We’re pattern recognizers,” Wade Bray, an acoustical engineer with Head Acoustics, remarked to me. “When you’re driving a car and there’s a low-level rattle somewhere, even if the engine is making a loud, steady roar, the rattle is going to be the thing that bothers you. If you wanted to mask that sound, you’d be doing something so that the peaks weren’t as high or as low. Total p
attern always trumps objective level of sound. That’s where human impressions and the loudness meter disagree.” As an example, Bray asked me to imagine a quiet neighborhood in which two or three cars go by every ten minutes compared with a busy neighborhood where twenty cars might pass in the same time period. “There’s going to be less peak value and less modulation in the quiet neighborhood.” For that reason the two cars are often going to be more disturbing than twenty.
This is not, of course, a phenomenon unique to the human brain. There’s an ancient evolutionary basis for the preference. We can see it in action today in the red-eyed tree frog, a creature that uses acoustical pattern recognition to perform the extraordinary feat of fast-forwarding its own birth to escape death. The normal hatching period for these frogs lasts four to seven days. A group of biologists and engineers affiliated with Boston University has spent the last several years in Panama studying how it happens that when the eggs sense that they’re about to be attacked by a predator, embryos can expel themselves from their jelly capsules ahead of time and start doing their best to survive as preemie tadpoles. The answer, they’ve discovered, lies in their ability to recognize patterns in vibration or sound. Snakes are the biggest threat to the eggs, and when a snake strikes at the clutch, its rippling vibrations start the embryos firing out into the water. That may not be surprising, but the biologists discovered that raindrops and wind produce vibrations on exactly the same frequency spectra as the snakes. So how can the eggs tell the difference? As it turns out, the vibrations made by the snake produce a regular on-off pattern as the reptile reaches for an individual egg, withdraws to munch its frog caviar, then reaches in again. The gap between the vibrations makes for a pattern that tips the eggs off: hit the ejector button and get the hell out. The random pattern of raindrops and wind is a sign to eggs that they can mature at their leisure. (Maybe there’s a clue in this phenomenon as to why we’re often soothed by sounds of falling water.)
In Pursuit of Silence Page 9