I think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it'd cost you to get freedom from your neighbor's lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person's brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity.
I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.
With modern (unmodified) cars a lot of the time tyre noise is actually more significant than engine noise, so a switch to electric by itself won't do it.
It depends, rolling noise is more important at high speed, but engine noise is more important at slow speeds. If you are next to a highway, it probably won't make a difference, but if you live in a city with a lot of slow traffic, it will.
Also, mopeds, even unmodified ones are way too loud, especially for the speed they are going.
Anecdotally, I live in a large apartment building in car-centric Southern California, and individual cars driving into the parking garage outside my window don’t disturb me (I like to sleep with the windows open). It’s the larger work vehicles that are the problem. The engines in big trucks (moving vans, trash trucks, construction equipment) are not tuned how personal autos are, for a variety of reasons.
This is often repeated here, but from where I’m sitting it self evidently isn’t true. I wonder if it could be because in the US there are so many automatic transmissions, and hearing high revs is relatively rare.. but most cars here are manual and high revs (in traffic) is common place
Rural living can be noisier than the suburbs. It depends on density, agriculture type, presence of commercial activity, etc. Where noise ordinances exist, they are generally more lenient outside city limits. In the USA, getting action against a noise nuisance is extremely difficult.
The quietest living experience I've had over the past decade has been a modern high-rise apartment in Korea. Between-unit noise insulation is good. If you are in a low-traffic area and high enough to be away from incidental street noise, you can have true silence most of the time. The only real threat to your peace is if you get clog dancers living above you.
Yeah, newer build city building in SF is much quieter than Palo Alto.
The constant lawn equipment in suburbia make them incredibly loud. Gas leaf blowers are banned but it doesn’t matter, they’re used anyway along with hedge trimmers. They are basically going at all daylight hours, it was one of the surprising perks of moving to the city - much quieter.
Yep. The country seems nice and quiet until your neighbor decides to have a drunken ATV party with music. (This is, unfortunately, not a theoretical occurrence for me).
I've lived in both the city and the sticks and I can tell you that out in the sticks, you don't hear your neighbor's tractor. In general the ambient noise is far, far less and on many days idyllic. In my case the most egregious sound was the morning braying of the neighbor's donkey, which never lasted long.
In my case, I live in the sticks and I heard my neighbor's tractor all day today. It's not all that often I do, but believe me when he's working the fields the machine is very audible. I don't mind it much- he's being productive and that's great (and as I write this, he's wrapped up for the day and I'm listening to a wood thrush and the sound of the creek as it runs over the rocks, both of which are very soothing). The one noise that's deeply annoying here carries much further than any tractor- it's the yokels and their seemingly unlimited supply of ammo.
Maybe you can't hear the tractor but that doesn't stop you from hearing cars on the racetrack well over 20 miles away. There are plenty of noises to be heard
On the other hand, I found my former situation with the Swiss regulations around noise, including mandated, legally-backed, police-enforced quiet from 12:00-13:00, 22:00-07:00 M-Sa and the entirety of Sunday a source of continual angst. (Of course, the church bells which bang every 15 minutes 7x24 are exempted from these strictures.)
On balance, I think I'd rather take the risk of having a neighbor running a chainsaw any time he wants over getting a knock from the cops because some busybody decided hoovering up broken glass on a Sunday afternoon was sufficiently verboten to necessitate involving the authorities.
But was it quiet in Switzerland? I read a lot about the poor quality of their apartment blocks, to the extent that one could hear their neighbours just talking.
We already have noise ordinances but police don’t enforce them.
It is really hard to prove a person was making a noise I guess. Maybe with the right motivation they could just make certain vehicle modifications entirely illegal. Loud cars and leaf blowers are the bane of my existence.
For vehicles, at least in France, the law says how the noise should be measured, and it doesn't seem that complicated. But, in practice, it's basically never enforced.
Recently, they've started deploying a few "noise radars". I don't know how well they work, since I haven't seen much talk about those since the initial announcement.
I recently moved to a more rural place (which in my coutry means: The neighbours are at least 20 meters away in separated houses instead of 5 and the houses are attached to each other), I though it would be more quiet but indeed: No.
In the city people listened to music in their yard, but here, people have leaf blowers, big lawnmowers, large dogs, large heat pumps (for home and pool), roasters, complete bars in their yard, there are festivals in summer that push sound for kilometers over the acres.
Strange thing is, I hate the music and the leaf blowers, don’t mind the dogs or screaming kids at all. Also, when busy I don’t notice the sounds, but then the moment comes where I listen intently and get very annoyed. So I feel the answer to my peaceful life must be in me. I must be like Seneca, accept how it is. I won’t move yet again and my wife does not want to live in the middle of nowhere, just so that all I hear is birds.
I wish I was more like the people that just blow leaves for 5 hours a day and don’t care. I guess for some, noise really is no problem.
The quietest place I've ever experienced is out on the ocean, after a calm, anchored on the great Bahamas bank. A stillness came over us as we shut the engine off and listened to the vast nothing.
This has happened to two friends of mine (in the UK).
One moved out to somewhere on the country and of suburban, only to find out that his neighbour was running a firewood selling business on the side. So saws going for at least several hours each day.
Another moved somewhere very much in the country. Then the owner of the field next door decided to rent it out to dirtbike racers. So every weekend they have to deal with tons of noise and clouds of dust for ~6-8 hours.
Ditch the fossil-powered lawn mower. Get a robotic electric one. And reduce your trimmed lawn area so that there is more wild meadow-like area for insects.
In suburban London and the surrounding countryside, so much of the noise is caused by a handful of motorbikes that have been made deliberately, I think usually illegally, noisy.
Stopping noisy vehicles would improve millions of people's lives and moderately upset a few thousand bikers.
I have no idea why it isn't a more popular cause.
One person doing laps of a built up area in their modified car is likely waking up tens of thousands of people. The police do nothing. If you had a party that caused equivalent nuisance it would be shut down instantly.
Many "grown-up" countries do care about this. This problem is non-existant in Austria, or Germany for the most part. Roadside police checks consist of decibel metering, which they are trained to use. They will impound the vehicle on the spot if its over the legal limit. Even race tracks have strict sound limits, the scrutineering process has a sound measurement part.
I can tell you this problem does exist(and is getting worse) in germany, and it's terrible. Calling the cops doesn't help, because they really don't care, I mean they even don't care anymore if cars are parking on the sidewalk. I live in a small "town" of around 10.000 people, I really can't imagine how bad it must be in bigger citys.
A lot of cities already have a communication channel in place to notify authorities about noise (like sending them an email about the culprit).
But its difficult to gather evidence of noisy vehicles, and could be a nuisance to notify authorities.
I wonder if a "NoisyVehicleRecorder" app/device would be able to capture the evidence from the comfort of our apartments or yard?
The device and app should be able to
- Take accurate(ish?) noise levels, and start recording above a certain decibel
- Store the recording somewhere
-- AI_Vision can then spot if there is a car in the video, if not then delete the video
-- AI_Vision can then extract the number plate from the video, if no number plate then delete the video
- At the end of the week the app should send yourself a report of the culprits in descending order of most infringements per license plate
- The user then decides to forward these to the authorities (this email address could be pre-stored in the app somewhere as well per city)
- Would be great if this app could be open source so it can be tweaked per country according to their laws
Possible issues:
* Recording cars without permission might be an issue
* The device might be too expensive, as it might need to be waterproof / burglarproof
Not just London. I've written about this on here before. Last time I was in the Peaks all I could hear were revving engines coming from somewhere miles away. It's getting really hard to get away from these bastards now.
The worst part of cars and motorbikes is they can't hear it. Motorbikes helmets are ear defenders too. The cabins of cars protect users from the engine noise. It's just everyone else that has to put up with it.
I've heard the safety argument before and I find it astonishing. If you can't drive safely without making a noise audible from miles away, your vehicle isn't fit for the road. However this argument does hint at what bikers are often doing, which is racing on public roads and massively breaking speed limits.
I think modern scooters are also held to strict noise standards, the noisy ones have been made noisy deliberately.
And yet cyclists don't install loudspeakers so cars would notice them. A motorbike is more visible than a bicycle and can go with the flow speed so unless one drives dangerously it should be safer than cycling even without loud engine.
I ride a pushbike a lot and I only hear those stupid motorbikes right as they go past me. Even the headwind from cycling at a moderate speed like 30 km/h is enough to completely drown the motorbikes out. Usually all they do is scare the shit out of me as they come flying past.
I imagine inside modern cars that completely seal you off from the outside you wouldn't be able to hear them at all.
Sure but weren't mufflers invented specifically to address this? I think the OP is trying to talk about people who modify or remove mufflers in order to actively make their car louder.
Pretty much every car for the last thirty years has had fuel injection, but most of them aren't very loud.
No doubt engine noise is caused by lots of factors. You can modify they exhaust to make it louder or quieter. I understand a lot of bikers modify their exhaust to make it louder.
As I understand it, there is a legal limit on noise emissions
some for vehicles. To get round this bikes are supplied with a quiet exhaust and a second loud exhaust. They tell customers the loud exhaust is for use on private race tracks but obviously this is widely ignored.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Future of Luxury (1998):
Attention. This, too, is a scarce commodity, with all the media competing bitterly for a piece. Watching the melee of money and politics, sports and art, technology, and advertising, leaves little attention leftover. Only the person who turns his back on these overbearing claims on his attention and turns off the roar of the channels can decide for himself what is worth his attention and what is not. In the barrage of arbitrary information our perceptive and cognitive capabilities decline, they grow when we limit our attention to those things and only those things that we ourselves want to see, hear, feel and know. In this we can see an occasion for luxury.
Quiet. This, too, is a basic requirement that has become harder and harder to satisfy. Anyone who wants to escape the everyday din must be very extravagant. In general, apartments cost more the quieter they are; restaurants that do not pour musical pollution into the ears of their guests demand higher prices of their discerning clientele. The raging traffic, the howling sirens, the clatter of helicopters, the neighbor's droning stereo, the month-long roar of the street fair—the person who can elude all of that enjoys luxury.
I'm always surprised that we tolerate so much unnecessary noise. We let people fly helicopters around and run leaf blowers. We even allow trucks to go beep beep beep and alert everyone within a kilometer that they are backing up, even though we have rearview cameras, like it's everyone else's responsibility to scurry out of their way.
As someone with tinnitus and hyperacusis I think about this often. A bus or truck dumping its air brakes right next to you, incredibly loud sirens, squeaky breaks that pierce the soul. I feel fairly certain you could make the case that many sounds we have grown to just accept in society are in fact at dangerous decibel levels.
There are ordinary household activities that reach dangerous decibel levels too. Stacking ceramic dishes, slamming the toilet seat, vacuuming in a tight space, etc.
You will actually find that doing every day chores is much more pleasurable with hearing protection.
I live about 2 miles from a regional airport. Normal flight patterns mean I rarely hear planes flying in or out. Occasionally, when the winds require a different pattern I’ll hear a 20 seater jet.
Air shows. Ugh. Nothing but the loudest, most obnoxious airplanes ever made circling over my house for 4 days straight. At least we’re done for 2023. Time to figure out when next year’s show is so I can be out of town.
The more money you have, the less you hear. Why is it homes are the cheapest next to airports? Because planes on their flight path will drive you crazy.
People don’t tolerate noise. It’s the poor people that do, the ones that can’t control their environment.
Not necessarily - there are a lot of factors into house prices, and in Sydney some of the most trendy and pricey areas are on the flight path. It is only once the plane noise becomes so loud you can't talk (500-1000ft?) do I think it hits on the home values. A 3000ft high commercial jet every 4 minutes doesn't touch the house prices.
Re trucks beeping - that’s partly legal responsibility isn’t it? I mean, we have had the ability for trucks to beep as they back up for far longer than we have had the ability for them to realistically have functioning rear view cameras. And since the normal expectation is that vehicles go forward, it makes sense to alert when doing something unexpected, like backing up. And so the laws we have mandate and expect beeping noises from large vehicles because the idea that laws would mandate rear cameras hasn’t caught on yet.
More modern trucks use white noise instead of a beep anyway, it's both much easier to tell direction from a broad spectrum sound, and significantly less annoying at the same time.
It looks like it is required in the US only when the view is obstructed, which I interpret to mean only when there isn't a camera. I would guess people keep using them because there is no perceived downside, and if they hit anyone they can say, "Hey, we told them we were coming." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-up_beeper
It might make sense for older larger vehicles that primarily move forward to have backup beepers. But every commercial oriented vehicle seems to have them now, including the smallest of dock loaders. These smaller vehicles have clear visibility in all directions but still put the burden of avoiding danger on everyone else instead of the vehicle operator. This is unreasonable and disturbs and annoys people at a large radius away. There is no excuse in this day and age to not build and retrofit commercial vehicles with obstacle avoidance systems and proximity sensors to replace backup beepers.
Just wait until the Amazon drone delivery service starts to roll out. You'll have drones humming along all day long. It'll be advertised as a "benefit" in your new neighborhood—buy the house, your address is eligible for drone deliveries! Or you have to pay a little extra in your HOA for the "luxury" of having your Amazon orders delivered in 30 minutes.
Good use of AI: detect delivery drone, fire Nerf sentry guns to eliminate noise.
At least this type of noise is more of a side effect and not the purported goal of the device. Contrast that with subwoofers which over 12in should just be illegal in apartments...
> “Telling people to be quiet is not a good thing,” he says. “Part of the charge to us as human beings in the world is to listen to other people, right? Especially if they are suffering. Especially if they are crying out to us for help. If our expectations are ‘I should not have to hear anything,’ and I can convince myself that the right way to live in the world is to live in this acoustically tailored environment, then I don’t have to hear all that stuff. . . .
I think the writer here is confused, they very likely mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense not the literal sense, since it's obvious there are real world scenarios where it's physically damaging to actually listen.
But if they mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense, as in perceiving another's mental thoughts through any medium, then the noise levels of everyday environments has little to nothing to do with it.
Big fan of quiet. My home environment sits at about 30dB as measured by NIOSH’s sound level monitoring app, 32 during fridge cycle, 35dB when I have air conditioning running. In previous places I wasn’t able to control external noise as much and I had to use earplugs to focus; I tried half a dozen and found Etymotic’s earplugs to be by far the best (they claim to designed to reduce sound by approximately 20dB at all frequencies, which really feels miraculous compared to most ear plugs - they were at their best on long flights, where I could hear flight attendants and announcements just as easily with them in or out; if you are like me and more sensitive to noise than most people, these feel like a way to increase your threshold by 20dB, I can’t speak highly enough of them).
Two things in the article do jump out at me, though. One is that it talks about active noise cancellation - people do find this helpful, but there’s also a smaller community who find it causes problems for them, including worsening tinnitus. All else equal I would say it’s probably safer to reduce incoming sound as much as possible before using noise cancellation -it fundamentally involves “detecting noise and making more noise in a specific way such that the noises cancels out”. The theory is very sound (heh), I’m not suggesting it doesn’t cancel out, but there may be some very weird edge cases or subtle effects we don’t understand there.
The other thing is more of a nitpick, it mentions truck horns can be as loud as 150dB. That’s “standing 25 meters away from a jet engine at takeoff” level, like we’re talking “immediate rupture of eardrums” intensity here. I don’t doubt that you can buy truck horns that have “150dB” printed on their box, but I really doubt they’re actually that loud. And yes, looking at someone who’s done the research, only the very loudest of full size train horns that fill up a tank of compressed air get to just barely below 150dB - at 3ft away. At 100ft they all drop below 120dB. https://www.djdlabs.com/horns/
Thanks for the earplug recommendation—just purchased! I have to bring earplugs to the movies now. Maybe it's me, but the audio in some movies is so absurdly loud that I want to just get up and walk out.
I second the Etymotic's earplugs suggestion. They are really great to have and pretty inexpensive. For around $20 you can get hearing protection that is great for cutting the grass, going to concerts, or just getting some peace and quiet around the house. Plus they're not the cheap disposable kind, so it's not a recurring purchase. You can just toss them in the carrying case and take them where you need them.
I just bought some earplugs for that same reason (In the DnD movie I was like "That's it, I need to get earplugs"). The ones I'm trying are not supposed to block noise necessarily, just dampen and take the harshness out of the sound. Going to take them to the next movie or bar I go to and see if it makes it more manageable, because my ears can't really take the noise anymore.
Badly measuring is a pastime of horn manufacturers but people do mount train horns on trucks. I had one in an old car, and it was certainly loud as blazes, but once you were some tens of feet it was dropping off.
It does carry for miles in a way that’s hard to explain.
They do get closer to their rated volume than I expected, that’s true - I honestly expected the best would top out at 120dB even close up, just because these things are necessarily mounted within a few feet of the truck cabin and that would be physically painful already. But at least some truck horn manufacturers are almost living up to their claims (sadly). “Super bright” flashlight manufacturers still take the trophy for bad measurement. It also seems like “train horn” doesn’t really mean “a horn mounted on a train”, it means a horn that uses compressed air, so you will see train horns on trucks and cars.
Of course this is completely anecdotal, but I was walking around a zoo in a city I'm visiting today and couldn't help but notice how much noisier the zoo was, both in terms of how much traffic and city noise breaches the walls, and how much noise the visitors make (yelling after each other across the zoo, talking loudly, just generally not attempting to keep their own noise down) when compared to visiting zoos in my home country.
I also observed that the animals seemed to be a lot more likely to shy away, and (in my completely not zoological/biological opinion) perhaps even slightly more on edge or distressed in some cases. This also meant whenever an animal was doing something interesting, the visitors would all be interested in that one exhibit, which caused further noise and commotion.
I couldn't help but think how much nicer the zoo could've been for both guests and the residents if more of a focus was placed on reducing the noise levels.
It was also quite a culture shock to me that smoking was allowed throughout the zoo as it seems to me that a ban would be easily justified on the grounds of animal comfort/welfare (not to forget all the children walking around, too).
It pisses me off that NYC still allows through-wall PTAC units to be installed in new buildings.
PTACs are the combined heat/AC units you will find in cheaper hotels/motels. They are installed through giant 4ft x 2ft holes that are left in the exterior wall during construction.
Not only are they terrible for energy efficiency because they are impossible to seal correctly + result in a direct thermal coupling with the outdoors due to their sheet metal construction, they are also the #1 vector of outside noise getting into the apartment. You can hear whenever a truck drives by, even when your window is closed.
Also worth mentioning they universally use the cheapest compressors available with awful damping so they’re 70db or more when they’re running.
All in the name of saving a buck. People pay $5000 a month to be subjected to these things.
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I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.
Also, mopeds, even unmodified ones are way too loud, especially for the speed they are going.
The quietest living experience I've had over the past decade has been a modern high-rise apartment in Korea. Between-unit noise insulation is good. If you are in a low-traffic area and high enough to be away from incidental street noise, you can have true silence most of the time. The only real threat to your peace is if you get clog dancers living above you.
The constant lawn equipment in suburbia make them incredibly loud. Gas leaf blowers are banned but it doesn’t matter, they’re used anyway along with hedge trimmers. They are basically going at all daylight hours, it was one of the surprising perks of moving to the city - much quieter.
On the other hand, I found my former situation with the Swiss regulations around noise, including mandated, legally-backed, police-enforced quiet from 12:00-13:00, 22:00-07:00 M-Sa and the entirety of Sunday a source of continual angst. (Of course, the church bells which bang every 15 minutes 7x24 are exempted from these strictures.)
On balance, I think I'd rather take the risk of having a neighbor running a chainsaw any time he wants over getting a knock from the cops because some busybody decided hoovering up broken glass on a Sunday afternoon was sufficiently verboten to necessitate involving the authorities.
It is really hard to prove a person was making a noise I guess. Maybe with the right motivation they could just make certain vehicle modifications entirely illegal. Loud cars and leaf blowers are the bane of my existence.
Recently, they've started deploying a few "noise radars". I don't know how well they work, since I haven't seen much talk about those since the initial announcement.
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In the city people listened to music in their yard, but here, people have leaf blowers, big lawnmowers, large dogs, large heat pumps (for home and pool), roasters, complete bars in their yard, there are festivals in summer that push sound for kilometers over the acres.
Strange thing is, I hate the music and the leaf blowers, don’t mind the dogs or screaming kids at all. Also, when busy I don’t notice the sounds, but then the moment comes where I listen intently and get very annoyed. So I feel the answer to my peaceful life must be in me. I must be like Seneca, accept how it is. I won’t move yet again and my wife does not want to live in the middle of nowhere, just so that all I hear is birds.
I wish I was more like the people that just blow leaves for 5 hours a day and don’t care. I guess for some, noise really is no problem.
For someone living in Europe this is such a bizarre source of noise.
One moved out to somewhere on the country and of suburban, only to find out that his neighbour was running a firewood selling business on the side. So saws going for at least several hours each day.
Another moved somewhere very much in the country. Then the owner of the field next door decided to rent it out to dirtbike racers. So every weekend they have to deal with tons of noise and clouds of dust for ~6-8 hours.
True also of conspicuous work that isn't noisy like hanging washing to dry outdoors.
Stopping noisy vehicles would improve millions of people's lives and moderately upset a few thousand bikers.
I have no idea why it isn't a more popular cause.
One person doing laps of a built up area in their modified car is likely waking up tens of thousands of people. The police do nothing. If you had a party that caused equivalent nuisance it would be shut down instantly.
This is highly dependent on where in Germany you are talking about. In some parts the police don't care at all.
But its difficult to gather evidence of noisy vehicles, and could be a nuisance to notify authorities.
I wonder if a "NoisyVehicleRecorder" app/device would be able to capture the evidence from the comfort of our apartments or yard?
The device and app should be able to - Take accurate(ish?) noise levels, and start recording above a certain decibel - Store the recording somewhere -- AI_Vision can then spot if there is a car in the video, if not then delete the video -- AI_Vision can then extract the number plate from the video, if no number plate then delete the video - At the end of the week the app should send yourself a report of the culprits in descending order of most infringements per license plate - The user then decides to forward these to the authorities (this email address could be pre-stored in the app somewhere as well per city) - Would be great if this app could be open source so it can be tweaked per country according to their laws
Possible issues: * Recording cars without permission might be an issue * The device might be too expensive, as it might need to be waterproof / burglarproof
The worst part of cars and motorbikes is they can't hear it. Motorbikes helmets are ear defenders too. The cabins of cars protect users from the engine noise. It's just everyone else that has to put up with it.
Though I think the small cheap engines in scoters or small bikes are loud because making them quieter would be more expensive.
I think modern scooters are also held to strict noise standards, the noisy ones have been made noisy deliberately.
I imagine inside modern cars that completely seal you off from the outside you wouldn't be able to hear them at all.
Pretty much every car for the last thirty years has had fuel injection, but most of them aren't very loud.
As I understand it, there is a legal limit on noise emissions some for vehicles. To get round this bikes are supplied with a quiet exhaust and a second loud exhaust. They tell customers the loud exhaust is for use on private race tracks but obviously this is widely ignored.
Attention. This, too, is a scarce commodity, with all the media competing bitterly for a piece. Watching the melee of money and politics, sports and art, technology, and advertising, leaves little attention leftover. Only the person who turns his back on these overbearing claims on his attention and turns off the roar of the channels can decide for himself what is worth his attention and what is not. In the barrage of arbitrary information our perceptive and cognitive capabilities decline, they grow when we limit our attention to those things and only those things that we ourselves want to see, hear, feel and know. In this we can see an occasion for luxury.
Quiet. This, too, is a basic requirement that has become harder and harder to satisfy. Anyone who wants to escape the everyday din must be very extravagant. In general, apartments cost more the quieter they are; restaurants that do not pour musical pollution into the ears of their guests demand higher prices of their discerning clientele. The raging traffic, the howling sirens, the clatter of helicopters, the neighbor's droning stereo, the month-long roar of the street fair—the person who can elude all of that enjoys luxury.
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You will actually find that doing every day chores is much more pleasurable with hearing protection.
Air shows. Ugh. Nothing but the loudest, most obnoxious airplanes ever made circling over my house for 4 days straight. At least we’re done for 2023. Time to figure out when next year’s show is so I can be out of town.
People don’t tolerate noise. It’s the poor people that do, the ones that can’t control their environment.
Good use of AI: detect delivery drone, fire Nerf sentry guns to eliminate noise.
I think the writer here is confused, they very likely mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense not the literal sense, since it's obvious there are real world scenarios where it's physically damaging to actually listen.
But if they mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense, as in perceiving another's mental thoughts through any medium, then the noise levels of everyday environments has little to nothing to do with it.
Two things in the article do jump out at me, though. One is that it talks about active noise cancellation - people do find this helpful, but there’s also a smaller community who find it causes problems for them, including worsening tinnitus. All else equal I would say it’s probably safer to reduce incoming sound as much as possible before using noise cancellation -it fundamentally involves “detecting noise and making more noise in a specific way such that the noises cancels out”. The theory is very sound (heh), I’m not suggesting it doesn’t cancel out, but there may be some very weird edge cases or subtle effects we don’t understand there.
The other thing is more of a nitpick, it mentions truck horns can be as loud as 150dB. That’s “standing 25 meters away from a jet engine at takeoff” level, like we’re talking “immediate rupture of eardrums” intensity here. I don’t doubt that you can buy truck horns that have “150dB” printed on their box, but I really doubt they’re actually that loud. And yes, looking at someone who’s done the research, only the very loudest of full size train horns that fill up a tank of compressed air get to just barely below 150dB - at 3ft away. At 100ft they all drop below 120dB. https://www.djdlabs.com/horns/
It does carry for miles in a way that’s hard to explain.
I also observed that the animals seemed to be a lot more likely to shy away, and (in my completely not zoological/biological opinion) perhaps even slightly more on edge or distressed in some cases. This also meant whenever an animal was doing something interesting, the visitors would all be interested in that one exhibit, which caused further noise and commotion.
I couldn't help but think how much nicer the zoo could've been for both guests and the residents if more of a focus was placed on reducing the noise levels.
It was also quite a culture shock to me that smoking was allowed throughout the zoo as it seems to me that a ban would be easily justified on the grounds of animal comfort/welfare (not to forget all the children walking around, too).
But then you’re not guaranteed to see them all up close.
PTACs are the combined heat/AC units you will find in cheaper hotels/motels. They are installed through giant 4ft x 2ft holes that are left in the exterior wall during construction.
Not only are they terrible for energy efficiency because they are impossible to seal correctly + result in a direct thermal coupling with the outdoors due to their sheet metal construction, they are also the #1 vector of outside noise getting into the apartment. You can hear whenever a truck drives by, even when your window is closed.
Also worth mentioning they universally use the cheapest compressors available with awful damping so they’re 70db or more when they’re running.
All in the name of saving a buck. People pay $5000 a month to be subjected to these things.