Indeed, much of the “unnecessary” noise people make is responding to existing sonic pain. We instinctually try to turn the tables on the sound that’s playing havoc with our equilibrium. A neat example of this can be found in the history of the Mosquito™.
A few years ago, a diabolical English inventor by the name of Howard Stapleton developed a product called Mosquito Teen Deterrent to disperse young people engaged in antisocial behavior. The device emits a sound near the upper end of the human hearing range—around 18,000 cycles—that almost everyone over the age of twenty has lost the ability to perceive. The Mosquito’s promotional literature describes the product as “the solution to the eternal problem of unwanted gatherings of youths and teenagers in shopping malls, around shops and anywhere else they are causing problems.” Thousands of Mosquitoes have been ordered and installed in Europe and North America. Demand seems to be on the uptick—along with outrage among various civil-liberty groups that have tried to legislate against the device for infringing on the rights of the teens, not to mention small children who are unwittingly blasted with sonic repellant. While the selectivity of the pain dealt out by the signal may be a factor of the pitch, the pain itself reflects the fact that the sound is being played at levels hitting ninety decibels—louder than standing next to an idling bulldozer. Stapleton says it’s not loud enough to cause hearing loss, likening it rather to “a demented alarm clock.” But here’s the thing: almost immediately after the Mosquito began to catch on, the high-frequency tone was co-opted by U.K. adolescents to create Teen Buzz, a cell-phone ringtone that would go unheard by teachers and anyone else old enough to object. The sonic weapon became one more acoustical device youth could turn back on those trying to silence them.
If you’re used to thinking of punishing sound as a good thing, it’s natural that you start thinking about how to share the pain. When I spoke with my boom-car aficionados, one name kept cropping up as a kind of idol of the car-audio competition world: Tom Danley. He was described, with a kind of awed chortle, as the individual who took subwoofer fever to its extreme. Danley was the inventor of the Matterhorn: the largest subwoofer in the world. “You’ve gotta hear about the Matterhorn!” Buzz Thompson told me.
Danley’s company, Danley Sound Labs, which is based in Georgia, features on its Web site a biblical “verse of the day.” When I first looked at the site the scripture reading was from the second book of Samuel: “How great you are, Sovereign LORD! There is no one like you, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears.” Danley traces his own fascination with low-frequency sound to the time when he was nine years old and his grandfather let him go into the pipe loft in a church. “I didn’t know whether to run or stay—but I stayed!” he recounted. And he began building his own speakers shortly thereafter.
His colleague, Michael Heddon, told me that Danley had been considered “the Guy” for subwoofers since the glory days of the mid-1980s to the 1990s. “Journey, U2, Bon Jovi—all those guys used Tom’s subs,” Heddon said. “The Michael Jackson Thriller tour had all Tom’s subwoofers doing the heavy lifting.” Cirque du Soleil uses his products in several venues in Las Vegas. IMAX is a customer. Danley has built loudspeakers for the home theaters of Bill Gates and George Lucas, and for many houses of worship.
It is not surprising, then, that when the military wanted a new weapon comprised of a massive subwoofer, Danley was their man. Hearing about this from Heddon, I tried to remember the food chain: Car-audio competition inspired the development of more powerful audio for everyone. More powerful audio inspires more powerful audio-based music. Ultimately we realize that what we’ve made to punish ourselves is virtually a weapon. Take this one notch further and it can be an actual weapon.
The Matterhorn boasts forty subwoofers powered by forty thousand-watt amplifiers. By deploying this speaker, the military would be able to create a sound wave to conceal the noise of a stealth aircraft launch. Another use, Heddon told me, would be to back the Matterhorn up to the entrance of a cave. “I’ll assure you that no one is staying in that cave, because they can’t.” The monstrous energy of the weapon’s sound would remain almost completely intact as it thundered forward great distances. “The Bible says all creation sings, but all creation vibrates,” Heddon noted. “This kind of sound—let’s say 150 decibels at 10 or 15 hertz at the mouth of the cave—that messes your eustachian tube up. You can get vertigo—all kinds of weird stuff.”
Indeed, as Hillel Pratt, a professor of neurobiology at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, has reported, the simulation of the vestibular organ by frequencies below audibility induces a discrepancy between the visual system and the processing systems for everything from temperature and body position to the sense of touch and the activity of the heart. The soundtrack and the images of our film of the world are knocked violently out of sync. Once more, we’re back in futurist country. The vestibular organ, assaulted by powerful low-frequency noise, signals an experience of intense acceleration—of speed. The individual subjected to the Matterhorn becomes overwhelmed with motion sickness even when standing dead still.
“There’s really nothing like it in nature,” Heddon said. “There’s just nothing that emits massive amounts of continuous, low-frequency energy. When you get into big amplitude, low frequency and continuous, then you start to get into stuff that’s scary. If I hit you with a blast, I can stop you because your heart is knocked out of rhythm. Let’s say you hit a cave with the Matterhorn—you could create a cave-in.”
Abruptly, Heddon stopped. He’d begun by saying most of the data on the Matterhorn was classified; now he suddenly seemed to hear himself, and with no transition, switched course. “We’re just helping people have a good time with IMAX,” he said. “They’re blown away by what we do. We’re fortunate. We’re just blessed.”
I hung up the phone feeling pretty vertiginous myself. As I was listening to Heddon, I’d recalled a report I had read on the use of amplified noise at Guantánamo Bay. The report contained some interesting details about dissonant harmonic changes along the lines of Andy Niemiec’s work (in this case, dubbing Meow Mix commercial soundtracks over the sound of crying babies). One line stood out. When James Hetfield, co-founder of Metallica, heard that U.S. interrogators were using Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as an instrument of torture on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, he laughed. “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music forever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?”
PODOPHILIA
When I think of the iPod, I think of Audiac.
In 1960, Dr. Wallace Gardner, a dentist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, collaborated with one of his patients, an acoustical expert named Licklider, to develop a new technology for pain management. Audio analgesia, patented under the trademark name of Audiac, purported to transform dental treatment into relaxation by way of loud sound. To be given Audiac, dental patients donned a pair of giant, heavily padded headphones like the ones worn by navy pilots. Then they would lie back on the chair and choose from one of eight musical selections (“Bali Hai” was a favorite) that had been mixed into a tape of “masking sound” similar to a waterfall. Whenever the dentist approached a sensitive spot, the patient twisted the knob to increase the volume of sound. The worse the pain, the louder the noise. According to Gardner’s research, 90 percent of patients said that Audiac reduced the pain of filling a cavity to the level of a mosquito bite. A couple of thousand were in use in dental offices across the country less than a year after Gardner got his patent. Soon Audiac was being brought to hospitals for use in childbirth and minor operations.
Audiac was actually invented to deaden the pain of noise itself. Because of a punctured eardrum, Dr. Gardner was tortured by the sound of his own dental drill. Licklider developed a way of diminishing the suffering by creating a louder, masking noise; the pair realized that the “controlled sound” of Audiac would “overlay the pain message to the brain” no matter what the source.
&nb
sp; It’s not quite clear what scuppered the bright future of Audiac. The American Dental Society of Anesthesiology mounted a hostile campaign against the product—whether out of genuine concern about the side effects of the device (not just potential hearing damage but reports of patients entering into a hypnotic state) or from a desire to save their own investment in drug-based anesthesiology, it’s difficult to say. Obviously, the pain relief of Audiac came at a cost. But at least one contemporary firm, Sound Pain Relief, is now trying to resuscitate audio analgesia, invoking more fashionable explanations for its effects, like cross-sensory masking.
Reading back through newspaper reports of public response to the release of the Sony Walkman in 1979, the precursor of the iPod, it’s striking how often devotees of the device praise the Walkman as soundproofing against painful noise and the afflictions of modern life in general. This feature got as much attention as did its ability to supply music “wherever you want,” which Sony had focused on. Users claimed the Walkmen made commuting tolerable and provided relief from “the awful sounds of the city.” Anthony Payne, a New York TV producer interviewed by Time magazine in 1981, declared, “There are buses, airplanes, sirens … You have to replace them with something louder, by force-feeding your own sounds into your ears.” A Manhattan computer executive called the Walkman “a great way of snubbing the world.”
We also come once more upon the connection between noise and speed. The Walkman’s very name contains the notion of motion. But the association went beyond walking to encompass any movement that enhanced the sense of personal freedom. Howard Bogaz, a carpenter Time interviewed while he was roller-skating in Venice Beach, summed up the appeal: “I take it when I ski or on long drives. I’m into my music! The sun is out, the wind is blowing, and you’re on your wheels!” When Sony initially released the Walkman in Tokyo, the launch centered on demonstrations of people listening while roller-skating, riding bicycles, and jogging. One of the popular television commercials for the product presented the Walkman as an instrument to make your body “fleet.” A woman in a leotard is shown engaging in graceful, dancer-like stretches in a light, airy room; after a few seconds, a male voice announces, “Now you can lose inches off your waistline effortlessly”—the woman pauses to switch the cassette player at her waist for a smaller model—“thanks to the new Super Walkman from Sony; the world’s smallest cassette player.” She resumes her motions.
Sony’s Walkman was sold as the ultimate portable music device, but it also used sound to transform the experience of mobility.
The iPod upped the phenomenal success of the Walkman to the point where people speak of an iGeneration. The iPod appeared in 2001. As of the fall of 2009, Apple announced that 220 million had been sold worldwide. By way of comparison, sixteen years after its release, Sony had produced a total of 150 million Walkmans. Part of the explanation for the iPod’s extraordinary success may lie in the way that it amplifies the idea of personal sound as a surrogate for motion. With its enormous capacity for storage, the iPod is no longer about taking music anywhere you want; it’s about letting the music take you anywhere that processed sound goes.
In the same years that the iPod was taking off, and one began seeing cords dangling from more and more ears like bits of cranial wiring come unstuck, my own walking habits changed. My office is only five blocks from Central Park. When I first began working in midtown, at the end of the 1990s, I could get to the park in six or seven minutes. Today, at lunch hour or the end of the day when gridlock is at its height, it can take me fifteen minutes to walk the distance. The park is no longer an easy, quick break from the urban grid. It’s a thirty-minute back-and-forth commitment, and I walk there far less now than I used to.
It’s difficult to get statistics on the increasing congestion of pedestrian movement in major cities, but indubitably walking in any of the world’s major cities has become a more choked-up affair. New York City population growth began declining in the 1960s, with the largest drop, a whopping 10.4 percent, between 1970 and 1980. Then, between 1990 and 2000, the city grew an astonishing 9.4 percent—a figure you have to go back before the Second World War to approach. Though the numbers aren’t quite as high, the population of inner London falls and returns to growth in close parallel with New York’s trajectory. Tokyo, which also saw a steep decline in population for several decades, has seen growth every year since 1997.
Perhaps the iPod took off when people’s actual freedom of movement became compromised to a degree never before experienced in history. We might go one step further and speculate about a larger overload, a mounting congestion of stimuli that drives us to try to recapture the lost sense of untethered acceleration through sound.
Even if we hesitate to tabulate precise correlations, I think it’s fair to assume that part of the iPod’s appeal is that it allows people to interpolate inside their headphones a sense of speed and motion that’s clogged up one way or another in the outside world.
Those who love the iPod are keen to sing the praises of the device. And what they have to say about their passion is remarkably consistent.
When self-professed “heavy users” are questioned about what makes the device so addictive, they often mention access to endless great tunes, but very quickly the argument shifts. For many people, it seems that iPods are less about the individual pieces of music they allow one to hear than about the overall sound they weave—the acoustical superhighway they open. People talk about how the iPod provides continuity through sound, stitching together experience through music. Over and over, people describe the iPod as providing a soundtrack for their lives. “It makes everything harmonic,” said one fifteen-year-old. “Everything that was confusing it makes smooth and flow together. It gives the perfect soundtrack for your life. It makes everything become clear.” Stitching together fragmented experience and feelings, the iPod injects a new sense of flow into everything we do. It drives us. The iPod covers over the gaps, the silent holes in our day-to-day being, as nothing before in history. The iPod gives the user 24/7 access to audio analgesia.
In my own conversations and in interviews I’ve read in which people talk about why they love their iPods, one no longer hears, as one did with the Walkman, about the need to block out awful city sounds. Instead, what comes up again and again is the ability of the iPod to “filter out distractions,” including people talking on cell phones, playing digital games, and playing music too loudly on their own sound devices—as well as the magnetic pull of Internet noise on users themselves. The iPod is touted not for its ability to mask over old infrastructure sound but for the way it blocks out the discretionary din that got plastered on top of that layer and defines the new noisiness of the digital age. Based on how people speak about their iPods, it would seem that today the nexus of pain is not so much any single loud noise as it is our diffraction between multiple stimuli engaged in a continual “boom-off.” Rather than ranting about the “alienation of the iGeneration,” we have to ask ourselves what we did to make our larger soundscape so disposable that it became the sonic equivalent of fast food.
And still, as with the Audiac that tried to end dental pain by increasing noise, the cure in the end may be worse than the disease.
POD-COSTS
If you poke around the Internet, you’ll find numerous stories about people on foot or riding bicycles being hit by cars, purportedly because they were wearing iPods and couldn’t hear the approaching machine. Swinton Insurance, a large U.K. firm, recently declared that one in ten minor traffic accidents are now attributable to “Podestrians,” pedestrians listening to personal sound devices. Most of the time, the Podestrians aren’t hurt themselves, according to Swinton, but cause rear-end collisions when one car slams on the brakes to avoid hitting the walker wearing headphones.
We haven’t quite evolved beyond the need to take the acoustical measure of our environment. When Dirksen Bauman, a professor of Deaf cultural studies at Gallaudet University, began telling me about a group of people who’d abru
ptly lost their hearing, I assumed he was going to describe the psychological experience of being suddenly cast into silence. In fact, each person in this group, recounting their initial shock at having gone deaf, commented that they did not think to themselves, “Oh how terrible—I can’t hear anything.” Rather, what they experienced was a deep sense of “Where am I?” “Their whole sense of place, the cues they use, the foundation of how they situated themselves in the world around them, were gone, without them even having realized until then what that foundation had been based on,” Bauman said.
Our ears may have been more sharply attuned to this problem when sound devices first became popular. Shortly after the Walkman’s release, the dangers of blocking out the soundscape occasioned a number of legislative initiatives to restrict their indiscriminate use. Within two years of the Walkman’s appearance, nine states banned the use of headphones while driving. Woodbridge, New Jersey, went further, passing a law forbidding pedestrians from listening to headphones when they stepped onto the street: $50 or fifteen days in jail was the penalty for violating this law. A member of the New York City Council tried to have a similar bill passed there. But what seemed a growing movement soon trailed off. Enforcement was too difficult. The allure of noise in motion was too great. Some people would say we all became more nimble at gauging where we are in space without hearing the world around us. I suspect we just got habituated to being more clumsy and collision-prone.
But what about the more obvious problem of losing the ability to hear at all? There have now been multiple studies indicating that the use of personal sound devices at sufficient volume poses the risk of hearing loss. What has been far trickier to ascertain is the number of people who regularly listen to their MP3 players at levels that threaten hearing. By and large, what studies have reported is that there are young people who regularly listen to their iPods too loudly; but the numbers, while significant, are not alarming. That, of course, depends on your definition of alarming. The most authoritative recent study, a joint undertaking by the University of Colorado at Boulder and Children’s Hospital Boston, places the percentage of teens who listen to iPods at dangerous levels somewhere between 7 and 24 percent of the population.
In Pursuit of Silence Page 14