Noise and quiet
Last month, I spent a cold morning wandering around Hampstead Heath, one of London’s largest green spaces, with a sound designer named Nicholas Allan. For many, the Heath is an escape. There are almost 800 acres of it: meadows and woodland, hollows and springs, hills and ponds.
I once lived in a bedsitter just off the Heath, so I spent a lot of time exploring it. There are several similarly vast parks in Seattle, which I spend a lot of time exploring.
In July, Allan awarded the Heath “Urban Quiet Park” status. He was acting on behalf of Quiet Parks International, or QPI, a non-profit based in Los Angeles that is “committed to saving quiet for the benefit of all life”. QPI’s purpose is to identify locations around the world that remain free from human-made noise for at least brief pockets of time. As humanity grows louder, these places are in danger of extinction, the organisation argues, even though they are integral to our wellbeing and to the health of the natural world.
At least one of the Seattle parks is one of those locations, I’m pretty sure. There’s a main trail that can be crowded on sunny weekend days, but there are also large meadows where you can stop and look around and see not a single human.
Allan spent four days in the park in total, monitoring decibel levels. To pass the QPI test, noise levels must remain below 40 decibels, similar to the hush of a library, for at least an hour.
The hush of a library? Is he kidding? There is no hush in a library; that whole idea has been banished. Maybe in the UK there still is but not in the brash loud US.
Though many of us drive, and fly, and listen to music, and turn the volume of our TVs up very high, and drill and saw and hammer, and live in busy cities, which are relentlessly loud, we do seem to broadly understand that too much noise is bad for us. To escape, some turn to wellness practices – meditation, sensory-deprivation tanks, silent retreats – which have turned quiet into a consumable product.
Just go to a good park instead. If there’s not a festival or something going on (and if you’re not near any sports area), it should be quiet enough for a break from noise. Unless of course parks department people are mowing or blowing leaves or trimming hedges – I worked as a parks department people in the past and we made noise. Too much noise. The backpack blowers in particular seemed like an unnecessary intrusion to me.
Studies have shown that experiencing quiet can reduce stress and anxiety, bring down heart rate and blood pressure, improve mood, cognitive ability and concentration, and increase pro-social behaviours, such as generosity and trust. It is helpful to experience silence in long periods, though every little helps – a 2006 study found that even a minutes-long session can be beneficial.
There are also sounds that feel beneficial though. The sound of a brook or river, or waves on a beach, or wind in trees, or heavy rain – sounds that aren’t sharp, that are more or less regular, that are benign and natural.
“And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!
There’s one thing I hate! All the NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!”
– How the Grinch Stole Christmas
I concur wholeheartedly about the noise problem. I’m a curmudgeon, and the insistent presence of environmental music irritates me. People all over the place listening to music rather than ambient sound, often listening with the sound loud enough for other people to hear, and all the conflicts between different people’s music choices adding to the cacophony. Restaurants with several televisions playing different shows, plus the piped-in music.
Perhaps I don’t know any good parks, but I don’t find much respite from music players and city noises in any park. The noise is diminished but not eliminated. I have to force myself to ignore it.
I don’t listen to music very much. I don’t like background music; it’s a foreground activity for me. I think this makes things worse, unfortunately.
A lot of young people these days shut the world out of their ears with earplug-headphones, and listen to music relayed to it from some pocket electonic device. Whatever floats your boat.
But nothing IMHO beats the sound of rain on a tin roof; on a cold dark night, when in bed; snug. That, or the silence of the vast inland of New South Wales, which I enjoy from time to time (and it looks nothing like South Wales. Aside: I think it was so named in 1788 by a bunch of drunks from HM Rum Corps.) .
I don’t even think that’s curmudgeon – as the article says, noise is stressful, whether people realize it or not.
Seattle is the home of one of my favourite parks–Freeway Park, literally on top of a busy freeway downtown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_Park
The noise of a large waterfall covers and blends with the noise of the cars speeding by underneath, which look like fish darting to and fro under the water.
I’m a classical music recording engineer, and the best place I’ve ever worked is a small deconsecrated church out in the country, just 20 minutes from my house. It’s always quiet there. Well, sort of. I’m also a once-and-wannabe-future electronic music composer, and I had a notion to use a continuous recording of the sounds of nature out there, capturing the daily cycle of afternoon cicadas, nighttime katydids, middle-of-the-night owls, early morning songbirds, and so on through a full 24 hours of a midsummer day, for a composition. But what I found was that no matter what the hour, there was never a total absence of man-made sound. Horizon to horizon, 360 degrees, 35,000 feet up, is a whole lot of cubic miles of air, and there are always jet aircraft in it, somewhere.
Except for one week in September, 2001, when I happened to be recording a classical guitar CD. With all commercial flights grounded right after 9/11 it was very, very peaceful.
It is really difficult to get away from urban noise. In our city, we have these regularly occurring loud bang noises, which in 15 years of living here I’ve never figured out what it is. It might have something to do with the frequent coal trains, but I’m not sure.
The bells…the churches insist on bells (and one of them plays Sunday School songs, which are all ear worms and get stuck in your head and irritate you forever).
The loud trucks, motorcycles, other signs of macho posturing. I never realized just how much noise there was here until I was trying to record some lectures for online students and had to stop frequently because the noise level drowned out my voice.
Our parks are not quiet, though there are quiet spots at the reservoir. We usually go out to an outlying town about an hour from here to a Nature Conservancy property, or to a couple of prairies, also about an hour drive. Those can be quite quiet if no one is working there that day.
I crave quiet, but it’s very hard to find. And now that I have tinnitus, impossible.
I work in acoustics, so this is of real interest to me. Sound, and when sound becomes noise, is predictable on a community basis, but highly variable on a personal level. it’s really hard to get away from man made noise in even peri-urban areas now. I used to go for walks on the hills above Christchurch. People would describe the environment as quiet, or even silent. And it was, locally. But if you actually listened, you could still hear the rumble of city traffic, the aircraft using the distant airport, occasional distant motorsport noise. All this was very background, you had to listen for it and analyse what you were hearing (which is a big part of my job), but the point is that isn’t how most users of the area perceived it.
There’s also been some really interesting work done on creating urban soundscapes, where by adding the right noise(s) to the environment, people perceive the environment as being improved. because our senses are often dominated by vision we tend to ignore hearing, but it’s actually a very powerful sense indeed.
Omar, nothing beats rain on a roof. Nothing.
Iknklast, tinnitus can be quite debilitating for some. My sympathies. In at least some cases tinnitus is made worse by silence. it’s a form of self-noise generated to fill an absence of external signal. Some people have found that they can ‘train’ the tinnitus away (or at least down) by judicious use of suitable broad band masking noise. You could try listening to noise such as brown, white, or pink on ear buds. Some people find man made noise such as constant traffic, hair dryer, clothes dryer, a fan, or vacuum cleaner works better. others find the roar of a waterfall, running water or surf work best. Experiment. Aim is to have the masking noise just loud enough to reduce the perceptibility of the tinnitus. Works best in a quiet environment. Aim is to be able to wean yourself off the masking noise as symptoms reduce.
It would also be nice to find a palce to get away from light pollution. I’ve read many literary descriptions of the moment of dawn — when the whole sky is still black, but one can see a point of light starting at the very east of the horizon — but I’ve never seen it myself, due to light pollution.
I remember yard noises like a manual mower and a grass/leaf rake. I also tend to like background noises of children on a playground. Or rainbird sprinklers chirping rhythmically.
I really appreciate the area I live in. Several twists and turns separate me from the nearest major road, meaning traffic noises are very infrequent despite my location being inside Adelaide. The noisiest thing in my vicinity is almost always the magpie population of the park around the corner from me. Add the contented fussing of the chickens in my back yard and the bees working over the golden wattle (acacia pycnantha), and the soundscape of my back yard becomes truly tranquil.
Better still is what happens after rain: kookaburras. When they and the magpies have a sing-off, I come over all ocker and feel like I’m inside a Henry Lawson story.
I could regale you for the rest of the evening with tales of dealing with outside noise when trying to record classical music. Like that time at Lehigh University, recording 17th-century Italian chamber music. There was a big snowstorm, and although it hard to get the church, the recording was great — no traffic. Until people trying to get out of the parking lot got stuck and spun their wheels. And then snowblowers. And there was the medieval music project at an historical Catholic orphanage church in Marin County, with a high school graduation party across the courtyard. Or even my ideal country church, with a stonemason carving a new name on a gravestone. Of course in Bach and Handel’s time there was plenty of noise in the towns also!
GW, I remember those moments. I grew up in the country. Though there was a large city to one side of us (about 30 miles away) and a smaller city about 10 miles away, there was still the ability to see stars, to see those moments of darkness.
When my son was about 15, we were out at my parents, and he was astonished by the darkness. He asked why there were no stars in the city (he knew there were actually stars, it was just shorthand for why can’t we see them). I used to have several places I could go to get away from light pollution, but now it seems like there are few places to escape.
One thing I have learned over the years from talking to my students and colleagues is that almost all of them do everything they can to make sure it is never quiet, and never dark. Playing the TV all the time is what a lot of them do. They want it light and loud all the time.
When I find myself in those rare moments of quiet and dark, I find that I think more deeply. I’ve often wondered if that’s why people like it light and loud; they can’t stand being alone with themselves.
Ah, Holms, the laugh of the Kookaburra. Since moving to Waikerie I am woken and sent to bed by their laughter. In between times, however, it is still “Corella Season” out here and with a caravan park and sports oval on my doorstep, their constant shrieking is the background 24/7. They never seem to sleep. They never stop their shrieking, even when eating. :-)
But quiet is returning, most of the holiday makers have gone home, jet skis not so frequent, and the sounds of ducks, gulls, and the odd plop of a fish on the river is returning. The gentle clank of the ferry docking and undocking is a reminder that commerce exists, but is not a constant intrusion in our daily lives.
Here’s a pic of one of my favourite vistors.
https://i.postimg.cc/zfhc9w2X/ADB1403-DAP-Golden-Age.jpg
iknklast, I have often opined that humanities worst invention was the electric light. :-)
I wonder if I can find some audio of kookaburras…
iknklast @ 6 – if you’re in hearing distance of trains I bet that is what the banging noise is. I hear it from here, 400+ feet up from the tracks (but only about 8 blocks away horizontally), Trains coupling and uncoupling. I also hear the rumble of the locomotives, but I love that sound.
OB: @ #15:
Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqdRQxgtZtI
GW @ 8, it’s amazing when you get the chance. I’m fortunate to have spent a lot of time in places with literally zero light at night and very clean air. Even better, I now live in one. It is simply amazing.
iknbklast @12,
For some, sure. For others, too many horror movies probably!
Those loud bangs – ‘sight unseen’ I’d put money on Ophelia’s guess of trains if it’s ongoing.
Roj, one of humanities better inventions is the automatic light switch. It’s just a pity people won’t use them. Near me in inner city Brisbane is a school (Catholic, of course) which sees the need to flood-light it’s playing fields all-night, every night – I can see the damn things if I sit up in bed. I wouldn’t mind doing some astrophotography but since I can no longer travel, that’s out. But that’s small beer – it’s not my future that being screwed up.
I lived in Rostrevor for a while, and that was considerably quieter than the place in Magill. Except for the kookaburras, which are extraordinarily loud when they’re just outside the window.
What I find extraordinary about Adelaide architecture – indeed, architecture in all the places I visited or lived in when we were in Australia – is the lack of insulation. Despite needing to maintain a temperature differential far greater than that we have to maintain here, there were no double-glazed windows, no cavity wall insulation, no insulation in the attic or between the ground floor and the outside world. When we lived in Canberra, we watched a house being built on the plot next door (the original house having perished in the 2003 fire) and were horrified at its flimsiness. It was as if they were building a temporary home that they expect to be destroyed within ten years. The amount of electricity/fuel used to keep the homes warm in winter and cool in summer is extraordinary to me.
^ WTF another (apparently temporary) Australian! I cannot be the only one to think we are strangely overrepresented in the population of regulars here. Ophelia, what did you do to attract us in such numbers? A demonic ritual involving the sacrifice of lamingtons and fairy bread??
I’ve wondered that myself!