In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  Were the Rices’ autos, motorcycles, and aeroplanes, and the vogues they helped ignite, sources of necessary noise? Surveying the history of the Rice family and noise, I thought of King Lear: “Reason not the need.”

  But still, the campaigns mounted by Rice’s society were impressively effective for as long as they lasted. Why the initial wave of support for them? Each new offensive was founded in a scrupulous exercise in noise measurement.

  Sound measurement also underpinned the next great wave of antinoise initiatives. When cities around the world issued declarations of war against noise in the 1920s, the spurs to battle were often new measurement technologies, such as the Bell Laboratories audiometer, billed as the world’s most scientifically accurate sound-measurement device. With one ear naked to the environment and the other fitted to an earpiece connected to the machine, the audiometer’s operator turned a dial, thereby amplifying a buzzing sound until that noise was intense enough to mask the noise of the surroundings. The number at that point on the dial became the noise rating for a given location. It thus became possible for the first time to definitively establish the loudest spot in a city. In New York in 1926, this was determined to be the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, where the noise intensity was measured at “fifty-five sensation units above quiet.” According to Dr. E. E. Free, a scientist who studied and wrote about noise under the auspices of the journal Forum, this degree of intensity meant that to communicate with someone at that corner, “you must shout as loudly as you do to a person who is more than half deaf.” One wonders what the audiometer would have revealed four years later when excavation for the Empire State Building began half a block away.

  Though this was still not the most objective calculation, it began to change the standards of how the level of sound was quantified. In 1929, when health commissioner Shirley Wynne established the Noise Abatement Commission, engineers traveled the city with what Wynne called “a strangely fitted noise measuring truck, the first roving noise laboratory.” The truck covered more than 500 miles and made 7,000 observations at 113 locations around the city, recording everything from “the quiet of remote residential streets to the din of main highways,” using the decibel unit. This marked the first broad application of the noise-measurement scale we continue to rely upon. Today, though, what we’re using it for is making noise maps.

  Noise maps represent the future of the pursuit of silence through policy. Millions of euros and hundreds of thousands of pounds have already been invested in them. But no one seemed able to explain to me what a noise map was. Was it an actual map that showed noise sources or noise levels? When I talked to Jim Weir, a products manager at Brüel & Kjær, a Danish company at the vanguard of acoustical measurement, the closest he came to a definition was to say that it involved “environmental noise monitoring of an entire city.” He told me that noise mapping had been around for years at airports. Well, what did the maps set out to accomplish? I asked. “The FAA fines airports for noise,” he said.

  “So the maps help airports deal with noise pollution?” I ventured.

  The maps did help reduce sound, Weir said. Equally important, they reduced complaints. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial register. “I’ll tell you what I discovered,” he remarked. As far as airport management is concerned, “the pretty charts with color profiles, the ways that noise is presented with pictures and overlays, is more important than the microphones.” He knew of cases where airport noise had ceased to be a problem the moment the public saw a map of it. “The knowledge of measurement happening can be more important than the measurement,” he observed.

  I soon saw that I would have to travel to Europe to see for myself what city noise maps looked like.

  As Rice herself once wrote: “They order these things better in Europe, where the steam whistle has been largely suppressed. We are indeed a wonderful nation, but have much to learn from the Old World as regards the simple, sane commonplaces of ordinary life, of which protection from unreasonable noise is one of the most obvious.”

  THE ACTUAL FUTURE

  A huge seagull bobbed above me. A handful of cars were nestled in the soft, pale grass. My first glimpse of the low, gray Quonset-hut-type structures that made up Brüel & Kjær’s global headquarters on the outskirts of Copenhagen suggested a comfortingly old-fashioned retreat for naturalists. But when I walked into the lobby everything was slick and steely, with multiple silent flat-screen televisions flickering away on every conceivable surface. It was the future, after all.

  My chief liaison for the afternoon was Doug Manvell, a young Scotsman with muttonchop sideburns and a mouthful of official title: application specialist and environmental noise management solutions product manager. We had lunch together in the B&K cafeteria with several of Manvell’s colleagues and I began grilling them on noise mapping.

  Manvell told me that B&K made its money through two channels: legislative and commercial. In 2002, he said, the European Union had passed something called the European Noise Directive. The directive, commonly referred to as the END, put noise on the EU agenda and established a framework for reducing noise across Europe that will continue to be the dominant policy road map for many years to come. The central requirement of the END is that all EU member states create noise maps.

  But then what was a noise map? I asked.

  Someone at our lunch table said that it involved “predictive modeling of the soundscape.” Before I had a chance to ask what this meant, we were deep into the subject of how principles of soundscaping also informed their business’s commercial track.

  Manvell explained that companies turned to B&K in order to gain a commercial advantage from adjusting the sound of a product. “Typically,” he said, “this means a manufacturer looking to do soundscaping within vehicles or other things.”

  I knew a little bit about the idea of soundscaping motor vehicles. Some years ago, Harley-Davidson was forced to comply with noise regulations outlawing the cycle’s earsplitting roar. Yet, as Alex Bozmoski, who headed up Harley’s noise and vibration facility at the time, put it, “The experienced Harley community demands a certain distinctive and unmistakable sound.” So the company’s goal became to make a motorcycle that would still sound like a Harley but be quieter. They damped out whines, knocks, and other undesirable mechanical noises, while adjusting the design to maintain the desired balance of tone, pitch, and beat from the exhaust and engine. At the same time, Bozmoski reported, they maximized “the frequency and amplitude of excitation wherever the rider and machine interface: handlebars, seat and footpegs.” Basically, they made the Harley into a giant vibrator. Then they patented the sound. Another case in point involves Jaguar. Some years ago, after surveys revealed that the noise of Jaguar engines was being poorly received by customers, Leyland Motors developed focus groups to study the issue. Although they’d set as their benchmark the sound of a luxury-car rival known for the sophisticated quiet of its engine, they found that Jaguar drivers actually wanted two different acoustical experiences at the same time: one of refinement, the other of power. Jaguar needed to soundscape its engine to create the right balance between the purr and the roar.

  Manvell explained that the idea of commercial soundscaping was spreading from cars to building interiors. This could involve something as simple as creating a miniature indoor waterfall in an office reception area to mask unwanted conversation. Or it could mean shaping the sound inside a hospital so that it would be more conducive to healing.

  Kevin Bernard Ginn, a colleague of Manvell, explained that you might walk around a hospital with the Investigator, B&K’s new handheld sound meter, recording sound levels and types of noises. (It looks something like a BlackBerry grafted onto a Breathalyzer and runs about 10,000 euros a pop.) Then you could decide which noises and sound levels you liked. “Everything is being made to harmonize more and more,” Ginn said.

  Manvell added that the same principle might be applied to an entire town square. He asked me to imagine traf
fic on one side, a park area on another where people relaxed, and a string of restaurants and bars in a third sector where people want to enjoy “the thrill of being in a big city.” New measurement technologies would enable someone to go around the square measuring sound in each zone. This data could then be fed to engineers who would look at the discrepancies between the actual sound in a given area and its ideal. Does the park sound relaxing? Do the bars sound thrilling? The engineers could then say, “Okay, maybe now we can adjust this one and this one.”

  I was beginning to get a sense of what Manvell and Ginn were talking about. In the un-soundscaped, “natural” version of the square he was describing, unless the music of the restaurant and bars was unbelievably loud, the only sound you were going to hear anywhere was traffic. But perhaps this could all be manipulated. Manvell spoke of the entire world of sound, both inside and outside, as something controlled by one gigantic sound-mixing board with someone like him at the dial—constantly adjusting the gain on different features to get the balance just right.

  Manvell and Ginn agreed that as recently as five years ago people were claiming that any alternative to physical sound-level reduction was against the ethics of noise control. But positions were softening. As people realized the extreme cost of getting levels down to where experts would deem them completely safe, support was growing for the idea of making the environment at least more appealing.

  “The work I’ve been doing for the past ten years has involved trying to compare a city with a vehicle,” Manvell continued. “You have a car—right now, everyone’s going for aerodynamics, everyone’s going for fuel consumption, everyone’s going for color. So now we go for soundscaping as another way of positioning ourselves. The city itself, in this sense, is like any other product. Because as a town you’re not alone in the world, this leads into marketing questions. The same way some people are dedicated to Ford purchases—they’ll never buy anything else—there are people living in Berlin who would never live anywhere else. But there are a vast majority of other people who are not so settled—which leads to cities looking to soundscaping and noise issues not just to protect their citizenry but to attract visitors. In the end, it comes down to that.”

  As we continued talking, I wondered who would be making the decisions about sonic branding of urban environments in the future.

  In truth, the more people I spoke with on the subject, the more I found that the mere sound of the word “soundscaping” generates buzz. Whenever sound professionals start speaking about improving what anything sounds like, it has come to mean pretty much whatever the person using the word wants it to mean. Along with the growing commercial interest in soundscaping, there are also idealistic projects unfolding. The best of these often involve collaborations between artists and urban planners who draw on historical soundscaping: the study of types of sounds that characterize an environment over time. With this knowledge in hand, people can work to enhance the audibility of so-called “iconic sounds” of a given neighborhood (old church bells, a town clock, flowing water, or even footsteps). They can support biodiversity so that there will be greater opportunities for hearing the sound of wind in vegetation and birdsong. But the realization of such projects tends to be extremely sparing in the use of technology, and much more concerned with stripping away recent strata of noise than with adding any new sounds into the mix.

  Take the work of Max Dixon, an urbanist specializing in soundscapes, who works with the Greater London Authority. Dixon was part of a team that wanted to change the fact that traffic noise drowned out the sound of the fountain at Trafalgar Square. By diverting cars away from just one side of the fountain—the one adjacent to the National Gallery—they not only diminished overall vehicular noise but also allowed sound waves from the fountain a free path to the overhanging portico of the gallery, where they were reflected and amplified for people gathered around the entrance of the museum, exactly the position on the square where one would be most likely to enjoy the liquid concert.

  Sometimes soundscaping can also take advantage of cross-sensory perceptions and psychoacoustics to enhance the sense of silence. So, for example, studies have indicated that in areas with sound barriers, there’s a ten decibel difference in how annoying noise is depending on the visual attractiveness of the barriers. An ugly barrier makes for a significantly greater perception of loudness. Other research has indicated that while falling water is often the best way to mask traffic noise, water falling on a metal grating often communicates not a spirit of calm but a reminder of drainage. To convey tranquillity, tests have shown, high-frequency water sounds are best. The most soothing of these are produced by water splashing over small, uneven boulders.

  Projects taking advantage of such principles are often simple and worthy of support. But their very subtlety makes them unlikely candidates for the kinds of major metropolitan self-promotions I heard about at B&K. Noting the vulnerability of soundscaping to corporate interests with more tangible profits in mind, Dixon told me that “in the hands of people seeking a cheap ‘quick fix’ rather than going to the root of the problem, applied electroacoustics could become a nightmare.”

  The nightmare need not be electroacoustic. Honda recently paid a large sum of money to soundscape a busy road in Lancaster, California. The project—versions of which have already been undertaken in several cities in Asia—involved cutting thousands of tiny grooves into the asphalt so that the road surface would “play” the William Tell overture as cars drove across it. (It played best for Honda Civics cruising along at fifty-five.) People living nearby were driven nuts by the endlessly repeated snatch of Rossini and, as the road surface corroded with use, the music became equally degraded.

  The reality today is that traffic has washed over the palette of other noises across the world. The exorbitant cost of creating quiet in the world’s major cities opens up some awfully big marketing opportunities for the plugged-in vendor with some catchy noise to pedal.

  OOMPA LOOMPA-SCAPE

  After lunch, I was given a tour of B&K. We milled by endless arrays of microphones of every conceivable dimension, rocket shafts and foamy black eggs able to hear every pin drop; numberless black-and-silver sound-measurement devices that resembled large digital thermometers for taking temperatures of zoo animals; boxes lined with different materials into which objects could be put and shaken to see whether you could still hear them clatter; dummy heads with screws, clamps, and black spikes projecting from them, looking like over-edgy S&M gear, but ostensibly used to test telephone transmission frequencies. There were also many, many laptops showing off the bright color fields of modeling software for indoor acoustics and environmental noise management. These latter represented a core B&K contribution to the noise-mapping initiative.

  I walked by an intricate scale model of an airport with a little plane zooming around on a wire, and a helicopter, and multiple tiny pen-cap microphones tracking different airplane noise types and air traffic densities. Most dramatic of all was a life-size car that looked like it had spun into a giant spiderweb—some kind of metal grid laced with dozens of little black bud microphones. This allowed the engineers to hear and predict every vibration in the engine and chassis and then prescribe minute adjustments to create the ideal sonic equilibrium.

  Somewhere in the course of my tour, I was handed a glossy B&K company profile. I flipped back the cover and on the opening page saw a big photograph of a burly man wearing a suede jacket, standing before a blurry barrage of urban neon. He might have been a rough-around-the-edges detective. In fact, he is Svend Gade, of Brüel & Kjær University, a mostly online course platform run by the company. Above his head runs the following quote: “Sound and vibration is all around us. It penetrates every aspect of our everyday world. Our challenge is to keep it from affecting the quality of our life.” The point, the brochure explained, is that we are increasingly aware of the myriad effects of sounds and vibrations on our health and happiness; there is no object or environment that couldn’t
benefit from B&K’s techno-silencers.

  Even if we are a long way from soundscaping entire cities, B&K presents a vision of how the future war against noise will be waged: with an arsenal of new, officiously harmonizing noises that can be projected over the gap where silence used to be.

  THE MAP

  A famous story by Jorge Luis Borges describes a land where, Borges writes, “the Art of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” Eventually even these maps failed to satisfy the cartographers, and they created a map that corresponded at every point with the empire itself.

  I thought of Borges’s story when Doug Manvell finally gave me a crash course in noise mapping. Noise maps, he explained, had actually been around for a long time. In response to an EU directive from the late 1980s, big employers began mapping factory-floor noise to identify zones requiring hearing protection. Then, in the mid-1990s, several German and Dutch cities launched broader noise-mapping projects of their own. In the late 1990s, John Hinton of the Birmingham City Council created a noise map that “was very well described—not only in terms of the map itself but in terms of the whole process,” Manvell explained. It became the predecessor of the maps eventually mandated by the END.

  But what are noise maps? I cried.

  To create a noise map, Manvell went on, “you need building heights, then all the road aspects—speed of vehicles, road-surface characteristics, and so on. A whole series of databases.” In fact, Manvell observed, while the information is presented in the form of an actual map, the true strategic document is a mass of statistics. The calculations required are so colossal that they were beyond earlier generations of computers. By way of example, he outlined B&K’s work noise-mapping Thüringen, Germany. Thüringen, he said, “which is a bit hilly, has 20,000 square kilometers of road-noise networks. We did it on a 50 meter grid with 600,000 individual road objects where the road changes over 5 million topographical data elements. It took 10 hours to do the calculation on 4 PCs, using the fastest software on the market. Buildings were ignored as, if included, their vast numbers and impact on calculation complexity would have exploded the calculation time. That’s the danger of pressing the start button. Data costs. A strategic noise map is not an acoustic problem but a data-handling problem. We’re making strategic noise maps and they’ve got nothing to do with maps and nothing to do with noise.”