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Home , Acoustic quieting, Bruitparif, Noise pollution

all the way forward in his seat and cov- DEPT. OF PUBLIC HEALTH ered his ears with his hands. That was five years ago. Mark’s con- dition is called hyperacusis. It can be VOLUMETRICS caused by overexposure to loud , although no one knows why some peo- Why is more dangerous than we think. ple are more susceptible than others. There is no known cure. Before the BY DAVID OWEN onset of his symptoms, Mark lived a life that was noise-filled but similar to those of millions of his contemporar- ies: garage band, earbuds, crowded bars, concerts. The pain feels like “raw in- flammation,” he said, and is accompa- nied by on his ears and his tem- ples, by tension in the back of his head, and, occasionally, by an especially dis- turbing form of : “You and I would have a conversation, and then after you’d left I’d go upstairs and some phrase you had been saying would re- peat over and over in my ear, almost like a song when they have the reverb going.” He manages his condition bet- ter than he did five years ago, but he still lives with his parents and doesn’t have a job. The day before my visit, he had winced when his father crumpled a plastic cookie package that he was putting in the recycling bin. By the end of our conversation, which lasted a lit- tle more than an hour, he had put his earmuffs back on. Hyperacusis is relatively rare, and Mark’s case is severe, but hearing dam- age and other problems caused by ex- cessively loud are increasingly common worldwide. Ears evolved in an acoustic environment that was noth- ing like the one we live in today. Dan- worried about ringing the doorbell. Mark and I sat at opposite ends of a iel Fink—a retired California internist, Then I noticed two ragged rectan- long coffee table, in the living room, and whose own, milder hyperacusis began Igles of dried, blackened adhesive on his parents sat on the couch. He took off in a noisy restaurant on New Year’s the door frame, one just above and one his earmuffs but didn’t put them away. Eve, 2007, and who is now an anti-noise just below the button. I deduced that “I was living in California and working activist—told me, “Until the industrial the button had been taped over at some in a noisy restaurant,” he said. “Some- revolution, urban dwellers’ sleep was point but was now safe to use. I pressed body would drop a plate or do ­something disturbed mostly by the early calls of as gently as I could, and, when the door loud, and I would have a flash of ear roosters from back-yard chicken coops opened, I was greeted by a couple in pain. I would just kind of think to my- or nearby farms.” The first serious their early sixties and their son. The self, Wow, that hurt—why was nobody sufferers of occupational hearing loss son has asked me to identify him only else bothered by that?” Then everything were probably workers who pounded as Mark, his middle name. He’s thirty suddenly got much worse. Quiet sounds on metal: blacksmiths, church-bell ring- years old, and tall and trim. On the seemed loud to him, and loud sounds ers, the people who built the boilers day I visited, he was wearing a maroon were unendurable. Discomfort from a that powered the steam that plaid shirt, a blue baseball cap, and the single incident could last for days. He created the modern world. (Audiolo- kind of sound-deadening earmuffs you quit his job and moved back in with his gists used to refer to a particular high-­ might use at a shooting range. parents. On his flight home, he leaned hearing-loss pattern as a “boilermaker’s notch.”) Noise is now seen as a factor in a range of ailments, including heart disease. Today, the sound source that people 26 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 13, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY KATI SZILAGYI

TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 26—133SC—LIVE ART—R34293—PLEASE USE VIRTUAL PROOF. 4C first think of when they think of hear- Health Organization with “noise maps” graph. Harmonica’s most appealing ing loss is amplified music, the appeal based partly on data from its own net- feature is that it makes no reference to of which may be biological. In 1999, work of acoustic sensors. It concluded, , which even acousticians have two scientists at the University of Man- among many other things, that an av- trouble explaining. (Part of the diffi- chester, in England, conducted an ex- erage resident of any of the loudest culty—but only part—is that decibels periment in which they had students parts of the Île-de-France—which in- are logarithmic. A hundred- listen to songs at dance-club volumes, cludes Paris and its surrounding sub- sound isn’t twice as intense as a fifty-­ which are high enough to cause per- urbs—loses “more than three healthy decibel sound; it’s a hundred thousand manent damage if the exposures are life-years,” in the course of a lifetime, times as intense.) long enough. The scientists concluded to some combination of ailments ’s director of technology that the stimulated the parts caused or exacerbated by the din of is Christophe Mietlicki, Fanny’s hus- of the subjects’ inner ears that govern , , , and trains. These band. He used to develop computer balance and spatial orientation, thereby health effects, according to guidelines systems for financial institutions, but, creating “pleasurable sensations of published by the W.H.O.’s European in 2009, he decided that his wife’s job self-motion”: crank up the volume, and regional office last year, include tinni- was more interesting than his, and you feel as though you’re dancing when tus, sleep disturbance, ischemic heart went to work for her. They are in their you’re sitting in your seat. Classical mu- disease, obesity, diabetes, adverse birth forties, have three children, and com- sicians and their audiences face risks outcomes, and cognitive impairment mute each day from Suresnes, a sub- as well. For the musicians, the threat in children. In Western Europe, the urb directly across the Seine from the comes not just from their own instru- guidelines say, traffic noise results in Bois de Boulogne. At the headquar- ment (violinists, like right-handed an annual loss of “at least one million ters, Christophe and I spoke in a sort infantrymen, tend to lose hearing on healthy years of life.” of reception-and-recreation area on their left side first) but also, often more The headquarters of Bruitparif is the floor below Fanny’s office. On one significant, from the instruments of the in a low-rise office complex in Saint-­ of the walls was a large noise map of musicians who sit behind them. Denis, a suburb just north of the Paris and its suburbs, on which , Modern sound-related health threats Eighteenth Arrondissement. I visited train lines, and flight paths had extend far beyond music, and they affect a couple of weeks after the February been highlighted in angry, glowing more than hearing. Studies have shown report was issued, and met with Fanny red, like inflamed nerves in an ad for that people who live or work in loud en- Mietlicki, who has been Bruitparif ’s a pain reliever. On a wooden table in vironments are particularly susceptible­ director since 2005. She had warned front of the map was a white bowl that to many alarming problems, including me, before my trip, that she spoke very was filled with what appeared from a heart disease, high blood pressure, low little English. I, on the other hand, distance to be individually wrapped birth weight, and all the physical, cog- speak French almost as well as my fa- pieces of candy but turned out to be nitive, and emotional issues that arise ther did. He studied it in school, and earplugs. from being too distracted to focus on was stationed in France at the end of We stepped into an adjacent room. complex tasks and from never getting the Second World War. Years later, at “Here is our acoustic laboratory,” enough sleep. And the noise that we a restaurant in Paris, while travelling Christophe said. He handed me one produce doesn’t harm only us. Scien- with my mother, he said something of Bruitparif ’s sound-monitoring de- tists have begun to document the effects to a Frenchman sitting at the next vices, which he had helped invent. It’s of human-generated sound on non-­ table, and the Frenchman said some- called Medusa. It has four microphones, humans—effects that can be as dev- thing back. Neither man could under- which stick out at various angles, hence astating as those of more tangible forms stand the other, and my mother even- the name. The armature that holds the of ecological desecration. Les Blomberg, tually identified the problem: the microphones is bolted to a metal box the founder and executive director of Frenchman didn’t realize that my fa- roughly the size of an American loaf the Clearinghouse, ther was speaking French, and my fa- of bread. Inside it is a souped-up Rasp- based in Montpelier, Vermont, told ther didn’t realize that the Frenchman berry Pi—a tiny, inexpensive computer, me, “What we’re doing to our sound- was speaking English. which was originally intended for use scape is littering it. It’s aural — Mietlicki’s English turned out to be in schools and developing countries acoustical litter—and, if you could see better than she’d let on. “You need to but is so powerful that it has been ad- what you hear, it would look like piles have data in order to know where to opted, all over the world, for myriad and piles of McDonald’s wrappers, just implement noise-abatement actions,”­ other uses. (You can buy one on Am- thrown out the window as we go driv- she told me. “Before Bruitparif, poli- azon for less than forty bucks.) Em- ing down the .” ticians were fighting to get money to bedded in the central microphone stalk construct noise barriers, but not nec- are two tiny fish-eye cameras, mounted n February, Bruitparif, a nonprofit essarily where the most people live.” back to back, which record a three- organization that monitors environ- In 2014, Bruitparif was one of the hundred-and-sixty-degree image each Imental-noise levels in metropolitan principal creators of the Harmonica minute. Medusas are the successors Paris, published a report that combined index, a way of presenting the severity of Bruitparif ’s first-generation sen- medical projections from the World of sound disturbances with a simple sors, called Sonopodes, which rely on

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TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 27—133SC. BW expensive components imported from plaints or respond to them days later. oped the unanticipated additional func- Japan. Sonopodes are still in use, al- “The idea of this system is not to tion of accumulating tangled masses of though they are too big to move around depend on the police,” Christophe the wind-­borne hair of N.Y.U. students.­ easily. “The Japanese system is very said. “That should be the last resort. The method that SONYC uses to good, but each one costs almost thirty We prefer a system in which people collect data and to document noise- thousand euros, and we can’t deploy like you, like me, can put a sensor code violations is different from the it as much as we expect,” Christophe somewhere and have objective data, one used by Bruitparif. The SONYC re- told me. “So we built our own system, and then we can talk with one an- searchers are developing algorithms which is small and low-cost. The idea other and find some solution together.” that they hope will eventually be able is the same.” Bruitparif has installed Ah, mais oui. (But the data would to identify a full range of noise sources fifty Medusas in the metropolitan area, probably also stand up in court.) by themselves—an example of so-called and will add many more this summer. machine listening. “Having a network In a nearby room, a young woman few weeks later, back in the States, of sensors deployed around the city en- was assembling Medusa microphones I visited the headquarters of a ables us to start understanding the pat- from components that were spread out smallerA but similar noise-monitoring terns of noise and how they develop on a counter. Most of the parts had project, at N.Y.U.’s Center for Urban around things like sites,” been 3-D-printed, and she was doing Science and Progress, on Jay Street, in Charlie Mydlarz, another scientist on something to some of them with what Brooklyn. That project is called Sounds the project, told me. He said that SONYC looked like a soldering iron. “In fact, of (SONYC) and is funded also gives the city’s Department of En- it’s very simple,” Christophe said. “And, mainly by the National Science Foun- vironmental Protection actionable ev- as with many things that are very sim- dation. SONYC’s purpose, Mark Cart- idence of violations. Mydlarz and his ple, finding the solution was very com- wright, one of the scientists on the proj- colleagues are still training their algo- plex.” The orientation of the micro- ect, told me, is “to monitor, analyze, and rithm, with help from “citizen scien- phones on a Medusa enables it to mitigate noise pollution.” Each sensor tists,” who visit a Web page and anno- pinpoint the origins of the sounds that in its network has just one microphone, tate ten-second audio files, collected it monitors; the cameras preserve time- which is roughly eight inches long and by the sensors, with what they think stamped images of the scene. Bruit- covered in foam. The microphone is at- are the sounds’ likeliest sources: jack- parif can place a Medusa on a street tached to a small, weatherproof alumi- hammer, alarm, chainsaw, lined with noisy bars and, later, docu- num box, which also contains a Rasp- of uncertain size. He demonstrated the ment precisely which bar, at what time, berry Pi. Sometimes the sensors are algorithm’s current iteration by alter- was playing music, say, eleven decibels mounted with a long strip of plastic nately operating a Black & Decker louder than the local code allows. spikes, which are meant to deter pi- electric drill and the siren of a toy fire I said that documentation like that geons from using the devices as latrines, near a sensor on the table in front would be useful in New York, where and which, on monitors installed near of him. The algorithm successfully the police often ignore noise com- Washington Square Park, have devel- identified each and measured its deci- bel level. (It can also identify the fire truck’s horn.) I was accompanied to the SONYC lab by Charles Komanoff, an econo- mist who created models that the city’s congestion-pricing plan is based on. In the course of the past five decades, he’s worked on just about every environ- mental issue, including noise. “In the mid-nineties, I spoke fairly regularly to small but spirited anti-car gather- ings,” he told me. “I would ask for a show of hands: ‘If you could eliminate all motor-vehicle noise or all motor-­ vehicle —but not both— which would you choose?’ As a rule, the majority chose noise.” I had asked him to join me mainly because he owns a professional sound-level meter. Komanoff and I travelled to and from Brooklyn by bicycle, and half- way across the Manhattan Bridge we “Hi, you’ve reached Kara’s phone. Mom, you’re the only one stopped to take sound readings. His who calls me, so go ahead and leave a voice mail.” meter showed that, at the spot where

TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 28—133SC. —LIVE CARTOON—A21725—PLEASE USE VIRTUAL PROOF BW we were standing, the average ambient-­ sound level, arising mostly from motor traffic on the bridge, was about seventy decibels, or roughly what you’d expe- rience while using a vacuum cleaner at home. Then a train went over the bridge, on tracks twenty or thirty feet from where we were standing, and the read- ing jumped to ninety-­five decibels— more than a three-­hundredfold increase in sound intensity and a five- to six- fold increase in perceived loudness— or roughly what you’d hear while using a gasoline-powered lawnmower in your yard. The train sound wasn’t physically painful, but almost; even shouted con- versation became impossible. In the United States, sound expo- sure in the workplace has been regu- lated by the federal government since the nineteen-seventies. But the rules don’t cover all industries, and they’re applied inconsistently. The govern- ment has acknowledged that, even when compliance is absolute, the lim- its aren’t low enough to protect all workers from hearing loss. The regu- lations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for example, allow workers to be exposed to ninety-­ five decibels for four hours a day, five days a week, for an entire forty-year career. That’s always been crazy, but in the past decade it’s begun to seem even crazier, because recent research into what’s known as hidden hear- ing loss—which involves a previously undetected permanent reduction in neural response—has suggested that catastrophic losses could occur at sound levels that are much lower than had been thought, and after much shorter periods of exposure.

y the mid-nineties, some scientists had begun to believe that traffic Bnoise must be harmful to creatures other than humans, but they didn’t know how to measure its effects in isolation from those of roadway construction, vehicle emissions, salting, and all the other direct and indirect eco- system insults that arise from our de- pendency on cars and trucks. In 2012, Jesse Barber, a professor at Boise State University, in Idaho, thought of a way. He and a group of research- ers built a half-kilometre-long “phan- tom road” in a wilderness area where

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TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 29—133SC. BW Fundy. (They were assisted by dogs trained to detect the scent of whale turds from the side of a boat.) In mid-­ September, 2001, the metabolite con- centrations fell; when they were mea- sured again the following season, they had gone back up. The scientists had been using hydrophones to monitor underwater sound levels in the bay, and they realized that the drop in stress had coincided exactly with an equally sudden decline in human-­generated underwater noise. The cause was the temporary pause in ocean shipping which followed 9/11. I learned about the Bay of Fundy project from Peter Tyack, an American behavioral ecologist, who, for the past seven years, has been a member of the faculty at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. He also does research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Insti- tution, on Cape Cod, where he used to work full time—and that’s where we met. We sat in a lab on the second floor of W.H.O.I.’s Marine Research Facil- ity, and he explained that sound can harm marine creatures both directly, by physically injuring them, and indirectly, by interfering with their feeding, their mating, and their communication. “We’re visual creatures, but sea animals don’t need to be,” he said. “­Underwater, you can see maybe ten metres, but you “His monogram says it all.” can hear things a thousand kilometres away.” The loudest human sounds in the oceans are made by seismic air guns, •• which are used to search for undersea deposits of oil and natural gas. (They’re no real road had ever existed. They clined, on average, by twenty-eight per so loud that acoustic monitors on the mounted fifteen pairs of bullhorn-like cent, and several species fled the area Mid-Atlantic Ridge pick them up from on the trunks of Doug- entirely. Some of the biggest impacts hundreds, and even thousands, of miles las-fir trees, and, during bird migration were on species that stayed. Heidi Ware away.) “In terms of the total sound en- in autumn, played recordings of traffic Car­lisle, who earned her master’s de- ergy that humans put into the ocean, that Barber had made on Going-to- gree for work that she did on the proj- though, shipping is by far the biggest the-Sun Road, in Glacier National Park. ect, told me, “If you just counted Mac- source,” he said. Chris McClure, who worked on the Gillivray’s warblers, for example, you Tyack gave me a tour of the research project, told me, “We cut up garden might say, ‘Oh, they’re not bothered by facility downstairs. We passed a bank hoses to run the wires through, so that noise.’ But when we weighed them we of freezers, a room with a CT scanner, mice wouldn’t chew on them, and we found that they were no longer getting and a band saw big enough to carve a duct-taped pieces of shower curtains fatter—as they should have been, be- small whale into chunks, and then en- over the loudspeakers, to keep off the cause fat fuels their migration.” tered a room that was furnished with rain.” The recorded sound wasn’t deaf- A dozen years before the phantom-­ supersized versions of the kind of stain- ening, by any measure; to a New Yorker, road experiment, a group of American less-steel tables you’d find in the au- in fact, it might have seemed almost researchers accidentally performed a topsy room of a morgue. “There’s a big soothing. But its effect on migrating similar study underwater. They had door over there, so that a truck can birds was both immediate and dramatic. been measuring concentrations of back right up,” he said. “And those gan- During periods when the speakers were stress-related­ hormone metabolites in tries up on the ceiling move the ani- switched on, the number of birds de- the feces of right whales in the Bay of mals onto the tables.”

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TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 30—133SC. —LIVE CARTOON—A22727—PLEASE USE VIRTUAL PROOF BW One of Tyack’s ongoing research two hundred and twenty feet from the tional Institute for Occupational Safety interests is the impact of on ma- building. Bronzaft’s student said that and Health. And I did know: Richard rine mammals. He and his colleagues she and some other parents were plan- Nixon. She took me into her office, a have developed a sound-and-move- ning to sue, but Bronzaft, whose hus- book-filled study that she calls the ment monitor—“sort of a waterproof band was a lawyer, told her that, in Noise Room, and, on a couch, opened iPhone”—which they can affix, with order to be successful, they would need an accordion folder that contained a suction cups, to whales’ backs. They to prove that their children had been dozen or so U.S.-government pam- have discovered, among other things, harmed. Bronzaft offered to help and phlets, most of them from the seven- that some species are more sensitive to found that, in classrooms on the side ties. One described noise impacts iden- sonar than anyone had previously sus- of the building facing the tracks, pass- tical to the ones that researchers all pected. “If they hear sonar, they’ll stop ing trains raised decibel readings to over the world still study today, includ- foraging, leave the area, and not come rock-concert levels for roughly thirty ing hearing loss, cardiovascular dis- back for several days,” he said. Some- seconds every four and a half minutes, ease, interrupted sleep, and delayed times frightened whales bolt toward and that, during those periods, teach- reading and language development. It the surface and die of decompression ers had to either stop teaching or shout; concluded with a quotation from Wil- sickness—the bends—or of an arterial then, once a train had passed, they liam H. Stewart, who served as the Sur­ gas embolism. He continued, “We are had to regain their students’ attention. geon General under both Lyndon B. now quite sure that what happens is Bronzaft obtained three years’ worth Johnson and Nixon. In his keynote ad- that the whales are a kilometre deep, of reading-­test scores from the school’s dress at the 1968 Conference on Noise and they’re foraging in the dark for principal—“I must say, he was an ac- as a Public Health Hazard, in Wash- food, and the sound of sonar from a tivist principal,” she said—and was able ington, Stewart said, “Must we wait naval exercise triggers a panic reaction.” to demonstrate to the city that the sixth until we prove every link in the chain Tyack said that it’s long been known graders on the track side of the build- of causation?” and added, “In protect- that human-created sound can also in- ing had fallen about eleven months be- ing health, absolute proof comes late. terfere with mating calls, thereby re- hind those on the quieter side. To wait for it is to invite disaster or to ducing the reproductive success of Bronzaft stayed involved. She helped prolong suffering unnecessarily.” many species, including ones that have persuade the city to cover the class- That was half a century ago. Sci- already been hunted virtually to non- room ceilings with sound-deadening entists still don’t know everything there existence. Consequent reductions in acoustic tiles, and the M.T.A. to in- is to know about the effects of sound those species’ numbers can be invisi- stall rubber pads between the rails and on living things, but they know a lot, ble even to marine biologists, since the the ties on tracks near the school (and, and for a long time they’ve also known failure to reproduce doesn’t result in eventually, throughout the subway sys- how to make the world substantially carcasses on beaches. “Even now, our tem). In a follow-up study, published less noisy. Peter Tyack told me that estimates of the population size of ma- in 1981, she was able to show that those reducing the sound impact of global rine mammals are plus or minus fifty measures had been effective and that shipping would be possible, since “the per cent,” he said. “So, basically, the the gap in test scores between students navies of the world have spent billions population would have to be on its on the exposed and less exposed sides of dollars learning how to make ships way toward extinction before we’d no- of the building had disappeared. quiet.” One method, he said, is to phys- tice. And by then it would be too late.” Those experiences increased Bron- ically isolate engines from metal hulls; zaft’s impatience with scientists and another is to shape propellers in ways n the day that Charles Komanoff politicians who hesitate to act on per- that make them less likely to produce and I took those sound readings shock waves in the water. Subway cars Oon the Manhattan Bridge, I also vis- everywhere could roll on rubber , ited Arline Bronzaft, a retired profes- as some of the ones I rode in Paris do. sor of environmental psychology, at Highway speed limits could be en- her apartment, on East Seventy-ninth forced; so could laws requiring the use Street, near the river. In 1975, she and of E.P.A.-approved exhaust systems a co-author published an influential on all motorcycles. Maximum earbud research paper that, like the phan- volumes could be limited to indisput- tom-road and whale-poop studies, ably safe levels. Directional sirens could hinged on an accidental discovery. “One significantly reduce or eliminate noise of my students, at Lehman College, suasive but incomplete data. She asked for people who are not in the path of told me that her child attended an el- me if I knew who had been the Pres- an emergency vehicle. Measuring noise ementary school next to an elevated ident of the United States at the time is important, Bronzaft said, but it isn’t train line, and that the classroom was of the passage of the federal Noise an end in itself. “If I don’t see the data so loud that the students were unable Control Act and of the establishment being used to get action, I’m not going to learn,” she said. The school was of the Environmental Protection to be happy,” she continued. “We had P.S. 98, in Inwood, near the northern Agency, the Occupational Safety and all this stuff in the nineteen-seventies. tip of Manhattan, and the track was Health Administration, and the Na- And what have we done?” 

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