In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  More interesting than the parade of statistics on high-volume iPod use are the findings about how young people react to learning about these hazards. The UC Boulder/Children’s Hospital Boston study found that teens who are told most forcefully by their peers and others about the dangers of loud iPod use respond by … turning up their iPods. The more these teens were made aware of the damage they were doing to themselves, the more damage they did.

  It’s a poignant finding. The teens’ response points toward the built-in limits of antinoise activism. At a certain point, whether out of evolutionary aggression or our general cultural predilection for challenging whatever threatens our right to make some noise, we react to being told to turn down the volume by doing precisely the opposite.

  What, then, should we do? Educate people less about the dangers of noise so that they won’t feel that their right to be loud is being threatened and will keep noise levels lower of their own volition? Perhaps when it comes to certain teenagers, yes. This would be a version of the legalize-drugs argument. But the noise problem may be even more complicated than the drug problem—on many levels.

  For one thing, we don’t really have a handle yet on the ways the new noisiness is damaging our hearing. For another, the whole debate about safe levels of sound may be basically moot. According to Jim Hudspeth of Rockefeller University, who studies the biophysical and molecular bases of hearing, even lower sound levels that are tolerable for a short period can be damaging over the long run. “Living in New York City, we’re very aware of noise all around us that’s not immediately painful, but the question is whether spending hours and hours with that exposure causes permanent damage,” Hudspeth said. “Remember when the Walkman came along and it was a big deal? Now we have the iPod, and it’s ubiquitous. With the iPod, people have something stuffed in their ears all day long—at work, while commuting, even while exercising and having meals, they have those wires stuck in their ears. Well, even if their level of sound exposure is moderate, it’s not clear that sufficient duration of exposure won’t cause real damage.”

  Once again, the issue may be less about literal loudness than about constant inundation. It might prove to be that surprisingly few hours a day at a surprisingly unpunishing sound level is enough over time to dramatically degrade our hearing. If you thought it was hard telling your teenager to turn down the music on their personal sound device, try telling them to turn it off altogether. “Turn off your iPod at least eight hours a day or ten years from now you will not have any high-frequency hearing!” I can just see the volume dial spinning smoothly round and round to drown out the sound of that warning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Home Front

  At this point I thought that I understood a little better why our world sounds the way it does. For a combination of evolutionary, commercial, infrastructural, and sociocultural reasons, there’s more continual, inescapable noise than ever before. And the new noisiness that’s tipped us over the edge into the land of loud may be the hardest to mitigate of all. Why? Because we ourselves crave that noise to keep us feeling energized, youthful, focused, free, fast—and protected from all the other noise we can’t control. But that doesn’t make the need for silence any less profound. How can we opt out of the world of noise? What can we do in practical terms to soundproof our lives other than by just making more masking noise?

  In a summer of a thousand bass-heavy thunderstorms, I traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, to attend Noise-Con 2008. The conference billed itself as an event “facilitating interaction among a wide spectrum of noise control professionals.” I listened to lengthy papers on subjects it had never occurred to me anyone had ever given the slightest thought to, such as “The Effects of Wear Estimates and Prediction Practices on the Production of Planetary Gear Whine” and “The Influence of Body Cavity Acoustic Modes on Booming Noise During Acceleration.” Some of the essays sounded as if they could have been lifted from a poem by John Ashbery, such as one from NASA entitled “Vibration Response Models of a Stiffened Aluminum Plate Excited by a Shaker.” Others smacked oddly of lines cribbed from a 1950s etiquette book: “Ceiling Performance Is Best When No Touching Is Allowed.” Then there were the more cocktail-party-minded presentations, like one on mitigating noise from a private racetrack. (Its author told me he had recently done a study for a major theme-park operator on roller-coaster noise in response to complaints from surrounding communities. The main thing this study discovered was that by far the most annoying noise at the theme park came not from roller coasters but from musical concerts.) The event also boasted many, many papers on airplane, airport, vehicle, and road noise, along with a special session by a somewhat mysterious body known as the Noise Control Foundation. I learned a great deal. What I was most interested in, however, was not the papers but the vendors.

  The conference brought together just about every major player in the soundproofing industry. I wanted to learn what was happening at the cutting edge of the business and came armed with a simple question: What could we do—more precisely, what could I do—to shut out the world and create a reasonable approximation of complete quiet?

  Scores of vendors packed the mega-ballroom exposition hall at the Hyatt Regency Dearborn. Many of them were sloshing back drinks and seemed to be enjoying the kinds of uproarious conversations that would have been equally appropriate at Noise-Pro 2008. There were snake-oil-style soundproofers in loud suits manning booths arrayed with tiles and slabs of peculiar layered materials, canisters of sprays and foams, odd metal bits, rubber mats, door panels, as well as over-magnified, bleached-out photos on poster board of function venues, housing developments, cement blocks, trees, and pretty, pigtailed girls with their fingers to their lips above the word “QUIET.” Men and women who looked as though their products had been concocted for late-night-TV sales spots jostled up next to earnest northern Europeans dressed like influential architects and standing before black boxes projecting gray needles, faceless heads wearing headphones, and laptops in suitcases with screens displaying sharp, dancing green lines and complex spectral grids. Though there were exceptions, by and large Americans seemed to be making the stuff that actually got glued to, hammered on, or squirted into walls, floors, and cracks to cut sound down, while the Europeans were the sound-measurement jocks—devising ultrasensitive decibel counters, vibration analyzers, and software systems to figure out exactly what kind of noise problem you were dealing with.

  I paused a second before a neat display of rough, pasty tiles at the booth of the International Cellulose Corporation. A bald, tan guy bent forward to read my name tag.

  “How are you doing, George?” he asked.

  “I’m doing well,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “If I was any better, there’d be two of me. And you don’t want that. Even I can only stand one of me.”

  “So, listen,” I said. “I’ve got noise problems all over my home. What can you do for me?”

  “George,” he said regretfully, “we only sell through licensed applicators, architects, and acoustical engineers. But … are you familiar with our new SonaKrete?” I shook my head. “It’s our new premium acoustical finisher and probably the product we’re most excited about right now. Unbelievably effective. George, they’re using this everywhere. Courtrooms. Restaurants. They’re putting it in the Freedom Tower. It occupies the niche between textured sprays and European-type plaster finishes that might sell for $35 a foot. Whereas this is $8 to $12 a foot.” And what exactly was SonaKrete? I asked. It was, he replied, an extremely smooth, “architecturally acceptable,” acoustical treatment that was “getting famous for doing custom, integral colors that soak right into the material.” It looked good to me, and I could just hear the commercial: “SonaKrete: The Krete That Made the Freedom Tower Fall Silent.”

  I moved on to the Material Sciences Corporation. The written material I read on this company explained that “Whether it’s cars, dishwashers or computers, we live in a world where quiet equal
s quality in the minds of consumers.” Was that really true? There are stories about how, when quieter vacuum cleaners were introduced into the market, customers wouldn’t buy them because the sound suggested feeble suctioning power. “Put simply,” the promotional literature concluded, “at MSC we manufacture quiet.” While I tried to figure out how I felt about the idea of manufactured quiet, the booth team approached saying that they wanted to talk about Quiet Steel™ roofing. Quiet Steel has been a successful product for years now in the realm of automobile manufacture, where it’s described as one of the company’s “family” of NVH damping products. (NVH: noise, vibration, and harshness—I love the idea of getting rid of harshness along with noise and vibration. The reverse would be a QSC product. Something offering quiet, stillness, and compassion.) MSC’s booth displayed little steel plates hanging on chains from stick-and-post arrangements in the manner of Chinese gongs. The salesman explained that it was “basically laminated steel, two layers, with polymer in between.” It can be used, he said, “wherever there’s radiated noise. Automobiles. Washing machines. Driers. Vacuum cleaners. Now roofs as well!”

  He gave me a little wooden hammer and invited me to strike an untreated steel plate, and then give a whack to Quiet Steel. I did. The first plate, of regular steel, made a nice, reverberating cymbal sound. Quiet Steel made just a little, discreet, dent-thud. I half expected the Quiet Steel plate to say “Excuse me” after its polite little sound emission. The vendor excitedly told me that he had a washing machine treated with Quiet Steel and had recently left coins in the pockets of his pants. “My wife could barely even hear them clattering around inside the machine!” he marveled.

  The danger, of course, with such effective noise, vibration, and harshness damping is that you might not hear sounds signaling that you’re in the process of demolishing your product. At another point in the conference I heard about what happened when John Deere proudly introduced soundproof cabs into its agricultural machinery to combat the very real problem of farmers suffering noise-induced hearing loss. The machines were a hit—until farmers realized that they could drive across an entire field in their air-conditioned, stereo-equipped cabs dumping engine parts without realizing anything was wrong until they’d totaled the machine. That put a damper on silence as a selling point for heavy farm equipment.

  At the 3M booth, a big guy with a flat face and a loud bang of a voice told me that the hottest new thing in soundproofing was microperforated film. It’s a new film that has holes in it that you can “tune” for absorption, I was told, and should be commercially available for large-volume usage (“like carpeting all the systems under an automobile hood”) in the next couple of years. When I asked where microperforated film could go, I was told, “Where can’t it go might be a better question. It absorbs all sounds anywhere you put it. And you can print on it.” What exactly does it do? I asked.

  He told me that while most sound absorbers today are fiber based—using materials like fiberglass, polymeric foams, and materials based on polyurethanes and acoustic tiles—there are “environmental implications” for many of these substances, since they release particulate matter into the air. Micro perforated film, on the other hand, is a thin flexible sheet that can be stretched over anything with no loss of particulate matter. The sound hits these micro holes (you can control the cavity depth, which influences the sound-absorption spectrum) and the undesired frequencies get sponged up while other frequencies vibrate in a “free span” portion of the cavity.

  Microperforated film might have been, as the 3M man told me, “as hot as nanofibers were a few years ago,” but there was one word I heard whispered over and over in the Hyatt ballroom. Actually, two words: “Green Glue.” With all the high-tech products being flogged at Noise-Con, nothing was as omnipresent as this “viscoelastic material” (a gunky green plastic ooze that’s a dead ringer for the substance in the Dr. Seuss masterpiece Bartholomew and the Oobleck). It comes in tubes and buckets and can be squeezed in between just about any two surfaces to make a sound-killing oobleck sandwich. The noise waves pass through the first material, hit the layer of oobleck, and, as the company’s diagrams reveal, turn into a series of hapless red lines squiggling any which way they can in order to flee the oobleck. As Green Glue puts it: “the vibration energy” is “dissipated and gone.” Green Glue is probably the top-selling soundproofing product in the world today and was acquired last year by the massive French multinational construction materials firm Saint-Gobain. As Green Glue reveals, soundproofing doesn’t have to be all that state of the art in order to be pretty impressively effective.

  Indeed, until very recently the art of soundproofing, even at its most sophisticated, boiled down to a handful of principles: blocking sound through mass or distance; reducing or damping sound by absorbing the waves in some kind of material, like heavy curtains; and decoupling the sound source so that it can’t transmit sound waves. Soundproofers may quibble, but basically from an end user’s point of view you’re either trying to knock out the noise or to suck it up. Dan Gaydos’s description of sound as a “brute force” might have been lifted from the annals of soundproofing; many of the basic tactics have the ring of military phraseology. Soundproofers speak of “isolating the noise,” “flanking noise paths,” and “neutralizing or deadening sound vibrations” before they ever manage to invade your home. In broad outline, at least, these principles have also been known for a very long time.

  PULL OUT YOUR PLUGS

  We began soundproofing by blocking the entry of sound into our own heads. Probably the earliest literary reference to soundproofing occurs at the moment when Odysseus ordered his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax as their vessel approached the Sirens. True to the snake-biting-its-own-tail relationship between desirable and undesirable sound, this first-ever mass soundproofing event was not dedicated to protecting the sailors against obnoxious noise but to safeguarding them from a sound so enticing that it might tempt them to their deaths. Odysseus himself exchanged silence for stillness—getting roped to the mast but keeping his ears free to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime serenade.

  The Greeks became adept at all manner of acoustical techniques in the process of navigating sound problems in their theaters. We still don’t fully understand how the interplay between sound and silence worked in these structures. Exploring the astonishing acoustics at the giant theater of Epidaurus, which enabled some 15,000 spectators to make out actors’ lines without a single subwoofer, researchers recently found that the stone seats actually serve in part as sound blockers. By tracking the way in which voices carry from the stage up through tier after tier of limestone seats, scientists found that natural corrugations in the rock filter out lower frequency sound (such as the distracting noises of an audience stirring) while bouncing the higher frequencies, within which most human speech transpires, all the way to the back of the space. In its early iterations, soundproofing was less about creating quiet than about ensuring that the noise we wanted to hear wouldn’t get lost in the crowd.

  There were, of course, many improvements in soundproofing methodology over the next hundreds of years, but the ability to mute a room really took hold in the muffled interiors of the nineteenth century. By the early 1800s, the soundproofing profession had grown enough to have its own jargon. It was then that the definition of “deafening” came also to mean rendering a floor or partition impenetrable to sound by way of “pugging” (packing empty space with materials ranging from earth and sawdust to hair and cockleshells). There were still kinks to be worked out in soundproofing technique, to be sure. The writer Thomas Carlyle discovered these, to his hair-tearing regret, when he tried to build a quiet study in his home.

  Carlyle was a vociferous Victorian pursuer of silence. He often dissolves into raptures on the subject, as he did to one correspondent in 1840, writing “SILENCE, SILENCE: in a thousand senses I proclaim the indispensable worth of Silence, our only safe dwelling-place often … This shallow generation knows nothing of Silenc
e: that is even the disease of it; will be the death of it, if not cured. ‘Self-renunciation’ too, that is Silence in one of its senses.” He is less uplifting on the subject of noise. In the midst of a rant against a “vile yellow Italian” organ-grinder who plied his street and ruined his summer, Carlyle wrote, “The question arises, whether to go out and, if not assassinate him, call the police upon him, or to take myself away to the bath-tub and the other side of the house.”

  Carlyle was not alone in his struggle for quiet. Rather, he was part of a surge of intellectual professionals in Victorian London who were making their homes their principal place of employment—and requiring a new standard of silence outside the walls in consequence. Street musicians were often their biggest complaint. Some did, indeed, station themselves before the homes of people they knew hated their sound, demanding money in order to leave. But many of them were also indigent immigrants desperate to make a little loose change. This was not the production of noise for noise’s sake. And the foreign-born status of many of these musicians triggered ugly racial profiling. The City Press described street musicians howling “like apes and baboons escaped from the Zoological Gardens, and looking much like these creatures too.” The mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage became so fixated on shutting down street music—he called it an “instrument of torture”—that he provoked an uprising. His neighbors grew so weary of his loud pursuit of silence that they broke his windows, shadowed him in a screaming mob, dropped dead cats across his doorstep, and threatened his life.