1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page i THE UNWANTED SOUND OF EVERYTHING WE WANT 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page ii ALSO BY GARRET KEIZER Help The Enigma of Anger God of Beer A Dresser of Sycamore Trees No Place But Here 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page iii THE UNWANTED SOUND OF EVERYTHING WE WANT A Book About Noise GARRET KEIZER New York 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 3/16/10 12:47 PM Page iv Copyright © 2010 by Garret Keizer Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Excerpt from The Homecoming by Harold Pinter copyright © 1965, 1966 by H. Pinter Ltd. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and re- views. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107. PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please con- tact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Text set in 11.5 point Arno Pro by the Perseus Books Group Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keizer, Garret. The unwanted sound of everything we want : a book about noise / Garret Keizer. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58648-552-8 (alk. paper) 1. Noise—Psychological aspects. 2. Sound—Psychological aspects. I. Title. BF353.5.N65K45 2010 363.74—dc22 2010005391 First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page v For Kathy and Sarah 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page vi 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page vii CONTENTS PART I What We Talk About When We Talk About Noise: A Basic Introduction 1 Noise Is Interested in You 3 2 The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want 21 3 The Noise of Political Animals 47 PART II Laetoli Footprints: A Brief History 4 What the Python Said: Prehistory to the Eve of the Industrial Age 75 5 What Laura Heard: The Industrial Age to the Present 101 6 Their World Too: Noise Today 131 PART III Lighter Footsteps: A Broad Perspective 7 Loud America 165 8 Sustainability and Celebration 211 9 The Most Beautiful Sound in the World 241 vii 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page viii viii Contents Sitting Quietly at the Back: A Set of Resources A Time Line of Noise History 263 Common Terms Used in Discussions of Noise 271 Decibels in Everyday Life and Extraordinary Situations 275 Organizations That Deal with Noise 277 Practical Considerations for Noise Disputes 281 A Personal Noise Code 287 Notes 289 Bibliography 343 Acknowledgments 369 Index 373 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page 1 PART I What We Talk About When We Talk About Noise: A Basic Introduction 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page 2 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page 3 CHAPTER 1 Noise Is Interested in You You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. —ATTRIBUTED TO LEON TROTSKY oise is not the most important problem in the world. Compared to the disasters of famine, war, and global climate change, the existence N of “unwanted sound” hardly counts as a problem at all. It rarely emerges as a public issue in countries struggling with the worst forms of poverty and violence. So far as I am aware, there is no Society for the Suppres- sion of Unnecessary Noise in the cities and villages of Afghanistan and the Congo. Even among societies with levels of political stability and industrial com- motion sufficient to raise an organized cry for quiet, that cry can quickly be silenced by a crisis. The so-called Roaring Twenties included a number of initiatives in both the United States and Europe to address the Jazz Age roar of motorcars and radios. But with the Great Depression, followed by the Sec- ond World War, the issue of noise all but vanished from the public agenda. Established in 1929, the New York Noise Abatement Commission was dis- solved in 1932, by some accounts one of the worst years of the Depression. Noise did not again become a prominent issue, even in New York, until the 1960s. Noise might be called a small or a “weak” issue, in some cases a fussy issue, which may be what certain individuals had in mind when they asked me why 3 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page 4 4 THE UNWANTED SOUND OF EVERYTHING WE WANT on earth I wanted to write a book about it. My father asked me when he first heard of my plans, as did several of my friends and acquaintances. “Why noise?” It was a good question, and this was my best answer: I chose to write a book about noise because it is so easily dismissed as a small issue. And because in that dismissal I believe we can find a key for understanding many of the big issues. Noise reminds me of a Norse myth in which the god Thor is invited to wrestle with a giant king’s decrepit old foster mother. Though Thor is one of the mightiest of the Norse gods, he is unable to gain any advantage over the crone. He cannot lift her, throw her, best her in any way. Only later is he told that he was wrestling with Old Age itself. Noise is a lot like Thor’s mysterious opponent. It appears lightweight and even frail at first glance, but once you try to pick it up, you discover that you are trying to heft the whole world. A “WEAK” ISSUE BECAUSE IT AFFECTS “THE WEAK” To say that noise is a relatively weak issue because it is less momentous than world hunger or global climate change is to make an incomplete statement. Noise is a weak issue also because most of those it affects are perceived, and very often dismissed, as weak. The ones who dismiss them, in addition to being powerful, are often the ones making the noise. In using the word weak I am not referring to personal capabilities, to some- one’s IQ score or muscle mass, though these factors may come into play. I am thinking rather of a person’s social standing and political power. Make a list of the people most likely to be affected by loud noises (though not all noise is loud), either because of their greater vulnerability to the effects of loud sound or because of their greater likelihood of being exposed to it, and you come up with a set of members whose only common features are their hu- manity and their lack of clout. Your list will include children (some of whom, according to the World Health Organization, “receive more noise at school than workers from an 8-hour work day at a factory”), the elderly (whose abil- ity to discriminate spoken speech from background noise is generally less than that of younger contemporaries), the physically ill (cancer patients un- 1586485528-Keizer_Layout 1 2/26/10 1:10 PM Page 5 Noise Is Interested in You 5 dergoing chemotherapy, for example, are often more sensitive to noise), racial minorities (blacks in the United States are twice as likely, and Hispanics 1.5 times as likely, as whites to live in homes with noise problems), neurological minorities (certain types of sound are especially oppressive to people with autism), the poor (more likely than their affluent fellow citizens to live next to train tracks, highways, airports), laborers (whose political weakness has recently been manifested in weakened occupational safety standards), pris- oners (noise, like rape, being one of the unofficial punishments of incarcera- tion), members of the Armed Forces (roughly one in four soldiers returning from Iraq has a service-related hearing loss)—or simply a human being of any description who happens to have less sound-emitting equipment than the person living next to her (who might for his part have car speakers literally able to kill fish) and no feasible way to move. Consider a toddler holding a toy capable of emitting 117 decibels* (on a par with the sound pressure of a rock concert or a sandblaster) at the length of her stubby arms and a combat-fit Marine exposed to weapons fire and ex- plosive devices that may produce sound levels as high as 185 dB and you seem to be looking at two very different categories of human strength and weak- ness. Take a closer look and you see two human beings who have less say than many of us do about what goes into their ears.† Consider an elderly person living in a noisy tenement, a patient in the notoriously noisy wards of certain hospitals, a studious undergraduate living in a typical college dorm; then con- sider the likelihood that any one of them could improve his or her situation * A decibel (dB) is a unit for measuring sound pressure. It has been in common use since the 1920s. Strictly speaking, it is not a measure of loudness, of what you “subjectively” hear with your ears.