Cities aren't loud; motor vehicles are. Tire noise near heavy stroads and highways are in particular egregious offenders. There's a lot of other points in the comments about some other urban nuisances (leaf blowers, anyone?) but I encourage anyone to walk around (yes, walk) while measuring the ambient noise levels with your smartphone's microphone.
It will be extremely obvious where the noise is coming from. This is an often misunderstood part of "the war on cars:" the stress gained from additional constant noise (e.g. like a highway) takes YEARS off our lives.
And don't get me started on how loud shops are in North America. For whatever reason they seem to always keep the volume three or four levels above comfortable, making it much harder to have a conversation without shouting at least a little.
It wasn't until I started traveling a lot that I started to notice any of this. You can have your quiet part of town, but often you get to your quiet part of town by driving through the noisiest part of town where a good number of people live and work.
I think almost everyone operating a sound system is biased toward making it too loud. I’ve been to events for small children with painfully loud sound. There will be a DJ blasting 95-100 dB, never mind that (a) no one is on the dance floor because it’s too loud, (b) everyone is there to chat and do crafts anyway, not to listen to music, and (c) it’s actively dangerous to expose people to that volume.
I’ve also seen events where the DJ or band keeps edging the volume higher. It’s like they become desensitized to their own music and keep feeling like it needs to be 1 dB higher to sound right.
I believe that France actually regulates sound exposure. I bet that France’s maximum SPL plus a pair of good 10-15 dB earplugs would make for a great concert experience.
At this point I just bring my earplugs everywhere, but everywhere I look around and I’m surrounded by people my age who are actively destroying their hearing and seem oblivious to it.
It seems like there should be a lot more public health education about hearing loss. That’s why it was especially disappointing to see CalAcademy not even have earplugs for sale when they operate as a music venue, along with the plainly unsafe (and poorly mixed, frankly) PA system volume.
This is very much a thing and not limited to DJs or bands.
Some advice I got a long time ago (but can't find the source): if you've been listening to music for a while, turn the volume down to zero, and then slowly increase the volume back to where it sounds the same. You usually end up with an absolutely lower volume but it sounds exactly the same.
Also if you go to concerts and wear earplugs, your brain eventually recalibrates the sound so eventually it sounds just like normal volume.
Most dj’s are children and you can’t leave them alone for a second even if you’re very clear about noise restrictions, even driving very clearly into digital distortion without noticing or caring. More loud more better. Brick wall compression and have them sending hot and don’t let them near the console.
Potentially a hidden killer is exposure over time. You might be under because your 88db concert only went a couple of hours but you drove there with loud music and you’re going some place after with loud music and drive home. So nothing specifically was too loud but you’ll still be over for the day. But try having that conversation :/ far as anyone’s concerned duty of care applies while you’re in the limits of one specific place.
I just don't get the appeal.. maybe hearing your RPMs to know when to shift? Even that would be overkill to the extreme.
Cars are ridiculously loud and few of us really recognize how loud they are.
I started nearly permanently wearing them because I read some articles about the effect of ambient noise on hearing over long-term. But since then I've also noticed how noisy and disturbing cities are in general. It's so damn peaceful and calm when I have the headphones on and I could never do without them anymore.
Cars aren't loud here unless you specifically live on a major road.
What is loud is construction noise. Aeroplanes. Excitable drunks walking by at night. Sirens from emergency vehicles.
This is just what living in a city is. You have people and people do and need things.
Sirens are an unfortunate reality, but the reason they're so loud is because most cars have a ton of sound-proofing. I'm sure you know this, but you can hear sirens blocks away when they're trying to alert a driver... maybe 20 metres in front of them to move out of the way?
As for excitable drunks, I think there are places where that's a constant problem, but again, this isn't constant and permanent. Traffic noise and airplanes are pretty constant though - I live on what should be a pretty quiet stretch of land but the local stroad always has at least a few really loud cars in the wee hours of the morning. The rest of the day it's just lots of regular cars making a lot of noise as cars are want to do. At least with the excitable drunks they don't make noise all hours of the day, since they have to sleep or be drinking at some point!
Cars comparatively are nothing.
Also it takes about 10 minutes, maybe a little bit less, to get through the Transbay tube. Maybe bring hearing protection if you take it everyday.
It’s mostly the aerodynamic pressures coming from the flaps, the landing gear, and the angle into the airflow of the craft. Most planes are pretty quiet in cruise, in relative terms.
(Except for high-performance military-power engines that just don’t care. They have to defy gravity with much less stable glide lift. They also get to.)
> And it took me a little while to realize why. There is simply no traffic noise. No hooting, no engine noise, not even much of the noise of cars accelerating on tarmac. Because there are so few of them. Most of the time you can walk in the middle of the street, so rare is the traffic. There are not even cars parked at the side of the road.
https://heatmap.news/economy/tokyo-anti-car-pedestrian-parad...
Very strange that the Government here that is proud of its Bharat Stage(BS) regulations, does not factor in regulations for honks and the noise pollution that it is causing by and large!
the reason the shops are loud, and the reason many offices have white noise generators or music in public areas, is so you and the person with whom you are talking have at least some level of privacy while in the middle of a crowd of people. in fact, even outside of privacy, it's a lot better to hear white noise or music, than the 20 individual conversations taking place around you.
This is what cities are - lots of people, not going far, everything is right there, and then you go up 20 floors for your quiet. If you need quiet, the place to be is not where you have thousands in density per city block. That would be like going to the indy500 and complaining about the noise.
As far as highways, a few cut through the city, but most of the city is not highways. They go around the city, with off ramps onto a few wide city roads, from which you get onto the tiny streets. There is not highway noise in 99% of the city.
leaf blowers in a city? car noise and leaf blower noise is immediate suburbs right outside the city. The urban noise in the actual city, where it's all highrises, but it's no leaf blowers, is subway, street performers, a couple of overweight (excluding an adjective because statistics look racist to some) women in bright spandex arguing, city outdoor events.
This is due to stress. I have wondered for a long time how increased education contributes to cardio vascular risk as we are learning things to avoid and when we encounter them cortisol spikes. This could be red meat or sugar or UV rays or lack of sleep or lack of exercise or in this case too much noise etc.
We were always tribal and social animals, so I wonder if the security from communal living played a very important role in moderating stress and building resilience.
Much much lower actually. We use the same stress response for seeing a lion that we do to stress about making a mortgage payment. That's why we get ulcers and zebras don't
On top of that Homo sapiens also just had much more freetime and the median lifespans were actually not too far off from what they are today (~72 years[0]). Yes there was a huge dip in lifespans in (some) agricultural societies and when the industrial revolution started and there's definitely a lot of variation in difficulties faced but overall on average prehistoric peoples were healthier and much less stressed out than the average American is today. Also peoples that lived on islands and certain other ecosystems didn't really have to deal with predators at all. Predators are very unlikely to be the biggest source of stress in general as even the most dangerous of all predators, big cats, are very unlikely to attack a group of humans. As long as you're with your tribe you generally don't have much to fear.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
Don't have a source on hand though, may have come from a book by Robert Sapolsky
Carrying this forward, we humans will have to work on better systems, because it's about to get worse/weirder. Our brains aren't designed to be good at detecting lies visually -- we have mental processes for speech, but visually, what you saw was always real. Now with AI in the mix, it's gonna get... messy.
Highly recommended listening.
As a neuroendocrinology researcher, much Robert Sapolsky’s life work revolves around the questions your pondering on. He has spent years studying wild baboons in Kenya, “ .. specifically, Sapolsky studies the cortisol levels between the alpha male and female and the subordinates to determine stress level.” [2]
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/...
You... wonder? It's a well known fact that tribal societies are hypersocial. Rugged individualism and loneliness are very modern things.
if you can, read Sapolsky's book about it "Why zebras don't get ulcers"
Friendly health experts still insist that 97% of the population still don’t eat enough cauliflower
So that's why they've put it in pizza crusts now...
Sure, it's possible to be relaxed about your lower status, but it's way easier to be relaxed about being richer: e.g., look at your coworkers who are quietly working for 4 hours and then going out biking in the middle of the day.
There's a cultural narrative that in some ways, richer people have it harder than poorer ones. It's responsible for underpinning the moral legitimacy of our class system, but I don't think it's actually true on average.
The thing is, no matter where you land you're going to find people who are unhappy or are struggling with their problems, but that's just because humans in general struggle with things.
(Or that noise isn't causing physiological stress)
You can find all kinds of rat studies where noise worsens rat health. The rats surely haven't been reading media articles about the effects of noise.
Edit:
> Researchers have found that the more people are bothered by noise, the greater the health risks they face from it.
It would be great to do a study where people learn a technique like meditation to be less "bothered" by noise and see how that affects their biomarkers.
When I turn on the bass, I am in control. I can turn it on when I don't have anything important going on and I can always turn it off. That makes the bass enjoyable. If it's somebody else's bass, then I don't know when it starts, when it ends and whether it will interrupt me. That's the source of frustration for me.
I'm generally fine with monotonous background noise, as long as it's not too loud. There's probably still some subtle passive effect on my health, but I can live with that.
That said, one difference is also that they do use their leaf blowers after they wake up first or are in the mood to do it, so they're not disturbing their own sleep or quiet time.
I wish there was something similar I could wear during sleep comfortably. I tried earplugs but somehow my sleep is less restful with them in. I suspect they either make my inside noises more noticeable or block airflow during night time breathing.
I guess the other more expensive solution is to move to an apartment facing a courtyard rather than the streets or to get heavy noise blocking curtains.
I know Bose used to make noise canceling sleep buds but I’m not sure how well they work. Since they’re discontinued I’m guessing not well.
They're way more comfortable than any polyurethane foam earplugs and still manage to block out quite a lot of ambient noise (I probably wouldn't use these on an airplane, but they're more than good enough for the home). I just tried laying on my side and they don't press against my ears at all. Wow.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Earplugs also tend to cause noise when you move your jaw, or even just slightly move your head.
I use Peltor X4A noise reduction earmuffs, with only the top of the head on the cushion when I'm on the side, that's the best I could find (its very dense foam makes it much better than a lot of earmuffs, also it's passive so no need for batteries).
You can also combine earmuffs with earplugs, it improves the reduction a little bit (can't do magic with some of the sound going through the body anyway), but you shouldn't need it unless your place is very noisy.
Peltor X5A is a bit better but much larger, so with it it's best to lay on the back.
With such good protection you might not ear your alarm clock, so instead you might want to use vibrate phone alarm with the phone in your pocket.
I've never thought about this feature. It looks very amazing!
I'm not sure if it's due to their being used to loud/disturbing noise , or if Indians in general have some kind of ongoing inner Zen, but the amount of noise that the general population seems to completely ignore (e.g. a vehicle loudly and continuously honking right behind you as you walk) is really quite impressive.
I remember eating dinner at a restaurant in Rishikesh one night in a quiet remote-ish area. There were some workers about to unload a truck, and just in front of them on the restaurant grounds was a multi-generational Indian family all together enjoying their meal. I saw two of the workers casually hurl this big piece of sheet metal onto a metal trailer, resulting in a massive clash of ear piercing noise that the family somehow just ignored, not a head turn of annoyance (as would be typical in the west), just continue the conversation without skipping a beat -- amazing.
Similar to what? This article is the magazine's feature content editor writing about how he doesn't like loud noise.
Do you think there's a meaningful advantage over using quality ear plugs?
I'll likely always prefer some amount of white noise to a totally silent space. A smooth-running fan has regenerative properties for me. Up to certain thresholds, I can turn that fan up to drown out the majority of whatever noise might be going on outside my room or building. It's helpful to be able to disconnect and float in your cocoon, whether for work, play, meditation or sleep.
in my most recent neighborhoods (newly constructed multi use ones)
* my neighbors would have all-night parties
* people would revv and race their modded sports cars and hogs up and down driveways and the street (residential culdesac) at all hours of the day and night
* teams of leaf blowering maintenance workers walked around during the day
* an open air venue opened across the street. they had loud, bass heavy music that made the walls and furniture shake, and drunk people screaming, fighting and loitering past closing time (3am)
* a cross fit gym opened across the street. they also played loud, bass heavy music that made the walls and furniture shake, with cargo doors open and trainers and clients screaming and doing intervals in the street (they opened at 5am)
* a bbq restaurant opened across the street. it had a vent that released basically unfiltered smog around the clock. it made it impossible to be on the balcony or keep windows open, and it quickly built up a brown, sticky residue on surrounding buildings. EDIT here is a recording of one of the vents https://photos.app.goo.gl/gxNBn5LGkZBCQc9o6 note that right above it are the residential balconies and windows of the same building - would you want to live there? + you didn't need to live in that building to get the "benefits", the smog was generously distributed all over the neighborhood and came inside and made the clothes inside your closet smell even if your windows were closed
needless to say, it's impossible to function while living in such an environment, so I moved, only to find the new neighborhoods also plagued by the same things. (in case anyone is wondering, this was Broadbeach, Newstead and West End QLD Australia)
me I'm a hardcore YIMBY. I want to live in a mixed use urban environment with entertainment, exercise, restaurant and everything you need around. but it becomes impossible if it's 24-7. common sense hours like 08:00-22:00 would be good. oh and breathable air.
many residents asked council and state government especially about the hours of operation of the venues (if bars play music until 3 and gyms at 5, when are we supposed to sleep?) and the unfiltered smog coming from the vents (100% hazardous levels, especially since it's all day every day long term), but they said all of it was OK.
I live 5 min from Wellington CBD, and apart from buses or the occasional construction work it's deafening silence.
Anecdotes like this make me feel so lucky.
but that would be in solitude, not near any urban life lol
in urban spaces in Australia you're all but guaranteed having to deal at the very least with hooning and inconsiderate neighbours (I've lived in many different countries and Australia def stands out in how incredibly inconsiderate and aggressive people can be, and how large the share of the population are like that, lol)
Even my own brain appears to have acclimated somewhat, though. Last week I got some nice noise-canceling headphones, and each time I take them off I'm shocked to realize how noisy the environment is, unless I'm at home. (Actually even at home, when I'm running the air filter, to protect myself from a different kind of pollution ...)
We’re seeing things like former green belts around airports now being turned into housing developments. There were no houses there in large part because of noise. Now developers move in and build big developments there with new residents screaming about how bad the noise is. Can’t make it up.
Stricter zoning isn’t the answer. Looser zoning is.
I don't mind noisy DIY work, older cars polluting, parties on the weekend. It means that I can do them too.
As long as it's not preventing people from sleeping on work days I don't see the problem to be honest.
Yeah, we need to up our game on making better places and it needs to be a holistic approach.
Re the stuff about heart health and noise sensitivity:
Magnesium deficiency can cause noise sensitivity. Magnesium is also critical to heart function, specifically the ability to keep the beat.
Furthermore, noise causes physical vibrations much like the beat of the heart, which is something you can listen for in a patient.
Armies historically marched to the beat of a drum because you can feel the vibrations even if you can't really hear it over the din of war.
You can put a baby to sleep by calming yourself and then holding them in your arms. The beat of your heart will not only set the pace for theirs, it will lend their heart some of your energy, making it easier for them and helping them to relax.
Given the constructive ways vibrations can impact us, it should be no surprise that vibrations from noise can also negatively impact the heart.
"Stephanie Dutchen is manager of feature content and multimedia in the HMS Office of Communications and External Relations."
I find it strange that in our modern houses the “weak” sound is so difficult to get blocked, whereas the “powerful” light can be easily kept out.
I have been suffering from chronic parastesia... which I can _hear_!
Falling to sleep and focus are challenges everyday. No pause, no break, no cease fire.
