Noise is nothing new. Even the main reasons for most noise—convenience and speed—are as old as the first squeaky wheel. Chariots racing noisily over Rome's cobblestones forced Julius Caesar to try—unsuccessfully—to ban daytime charioteering. The unwanted sounds of the past were less intense, less frequent, traveled shorter distances, and reached fewer ears.
Some would like us to think we have merely traded new noises for old. But the acoustic attack on man and his environment really began in earnest with the Industrial Revolution. From a predominantly agricultural husbandry, man found himself uprooted by the pull of the factories to the grime and congestion of the cities. He found himself surrounded on all sides by factories making millions of devices to enable him to speed over the surface of the earth, soar through the skies, and blend orange juice.
Men by the millions work in these factories. They operate noisy machines to noisily blast, buff, chip, stamp, punch, forge, grind, and polish metal; saw, plane, sandblast and polish wood; press ink on paper; weave wire and textiles, and work all kinds of plastics. Fabricated parts—bearings, pistons, gears, levers, fan blades—are assembled into devices that turn, rotate, blow, slide and push, and explode. The noisy components are welded, mechanically screwed, bolted and glued into visually attractive outer shells and pushed openly on the markets of the world.
Behind their high-style façades, air conditioners, for example, generate the complex sounds of: magnetic hum, reciprocating compressor put-put, fan-generated pure tones, and cycling noise, described as a combination of clatter from piston slap and magnetic hum. Fans in ventilating systems and air conditioners, or just plain electric fans, generate noise because of imbalance, bearings, brushes, gears and magnetic hum. Communities in which many homes use heat pumps and window units are described as sounding like beehives. A curious acoustical engineer took noise level readings one evening in a narrow New York street, surrounded by high-rise luxury buildings, each with its own air conditioner unit. There were no lullabies in the 90-plus decibel levels. The new type of unit used for detached homes leaves the condensing unit outdoors for the neighbors to hear. These units are so noisy, manufacturers advertise that new designs direct most of the noise upward instead of at the neighbors.
Mechanical marvels transport man and his goods by land, by sea, and by air with explosive-type engines that propel his vehicles; certain types of planes now traverse the air so rapidly, sound cannot keep up. Powerful mechanized versions of the pickaxe and the sledgehammer build the places he is going to, and the roads to get there-air compressors, jackhammers, piledrivers, steam shovels, bulldozers, compactors, rock drills.
Many of the more delicate mechanisms are called appliances and they provide man with convenience and comfort once his shelter is built. They are available in infinite variety to use in the kitchen to refrigerate his perishables, freeze his ice cream, make ice cubes, crush ice, grind his meat, juice his fruit, electrically cut, slice and shred, mix and blend his food, open cans, purify water, broil, masticate the garbage, exhaust the smells of it all, and wash the dishes.
Other appliances speed him through his bathroom operations with dispatch and a minimum of effort. All he has to do is stand at a stooped attention and give the toothbrush salute, and electric motors will squirt water into every dental nook and cranny, polish every ivory. With no more effort than moving his arm up and down, his stubble is removed from under a lather which just slithered into his hand from the mechanical lather-making machine. If he has time to sit in a tub, a hydrotherapy machine will spare him the need to paddle the water around.
No sultan in his harem had the mechanical servants modern man has in his living room. Consider the devices to cool air, purify air, warm air, push air, while mechanical fingers massage his aching frame as he reclines in his motorized vibrating lounge chair.
When he has used his electric shoe polisher and is ready to retire for the night, he has a massage machine and an electrically operated bed. His wife has a mechanical hair dryer (4.3 million were sold in 1967), an electric manicure outfit, and even an electric razor.
And for all rooms, TV sets, radios, stereos, tape machines, and for creative self-expression, amplified instruments. Not to mention mechanical hobby tools—including chain saws—and lawn mowers. It is almost impossible to find a home that does not have at least one radio and one television set. In the last twenty years the electronics industry has sold more than 450 million radios, 130 million television sets, 83 million phonographs, 33 million tape recorders and playback units. The industry estimates that more than 515 million consumer electronic instruments are in use today, and these products are selling at a rate of 75 million annually.
One of the latest noise sources is the siren-like burglar alarm. Installed in automobiles and in homes, their owners are usually not around when they go off. Innocent neighbors, in increasing numbers, are being forced to endure hours of agonizing mechanical screams.
Without regulation, toys have joined the decibel madness, and are designed with noise as a sales feature. Velocipedes are equipped with simulated motor noises, plus horns. Toy carbide cannons make a mighty roar that can be heard for blocks. The acoustician reviewing a patent for a device designed to sound like a one-cylinder motorcycle engine was provoked to comment: "The joy of making noise is the birthright of every youngster. but must he have a battery-powered machine to make it for him!"
Animal noise, too, is proliferating. Possibly to assuage the increasing coldness and alienation of urban living, apartment dwellers are taking to pets. It is estimated that whereas five to ten per cent kept pets five years ago, the odds are that one out of six now has a dog or cat.
One of the major reasons for today's noisy world is the mobile noise source of vehicles. Trucks and buses are especially obnoxios. London studies have shown that if the traffic mix reaches 50 per cent heavy vehicles, there is a doubling of loudness over traffic with only 20 per cent heavy vehicles. According to that survey, when traffic moves on even a slight gradient, there is an increase in noise, and under these circumstances, trucks are the worst offenders. A truck can almost double its noise level on 1-in-20 gradient at 30 mph.
Unpleasant noise exposure is a combination of power and the number of times that a powerful source makes itself heard. The aviation industry is providing us with both exposure to incredibly powerful—and noisy—motors, and millions of exposures.
The Federal Aviation Administration handled 41 million landings and takeoffs in 1966, recording 1,925 landings and takeoffs in one day that year at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. An average of one a minute. New York Congressman Joseph P. Addabbo has reported as many as one movement every 30 seconds at Kennedy International Airport. When a typical long-range, four-engine jet transport lands, approximately eight square miles of land outside the airport are exposed to generally unacceptable noise levels. This is a conservative estimate of the area rendered intolerable.
No wonder the Federal Council for Science and Technology could report that "the over-all loudness of environmental noise is doubling every ten years."
Let us imagine that John Doe and his family want to escape some of these noise sources, not by running away to some South Sea island, but by being able to close the door of their home. This form of escape, too, is disappearing. Whether he pays $100 a month in a low-income housing project, or can afford $1,000 for a postwar luxury apartment, it is fairly certain he will hear the steps, jumps, radio, TV, dropped toys, and furniture-moving of the people in the apartment above. Paradoxically, as his world grew noisier, John Doe's dwelling space was built to allow that noise to enter. Gone are the dwellings of fifty years ago with their heavy walls and rooms separated from each other by tightfitting doors. Returning after World War II, Private John Doe was rewarded by the building industry with some of the noisiest buildings in existence.
Even those new glass office buildings with their glittering façades can be a nightmare to work in. Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, President of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, describes his reaction to this type of postwar construction: "I recently saw a building on Park Avenue, one of those glass boxes. They were tearing up the street outside, of course. The architect asked me if it weren't beautiful from the outside. I couldn't hear him, fortunately. Inside, in order to preserve the open space and the beautiful visual environment, he had kept the walls down low. The office racket added to the racket of the street, beautifully transmitted through the glass. So it was the environment of a boiler factory. I told him later, when we managed to get where we could talk, that only the stone deaf could have enjoyed the visual experience."
This unprecedented noise exposure, plus the increasing scarcity of areas of escape, is distressing millions of human beings. And not only the popular stereotype of "the little old lady in tennis shoes" (meaning by that someone who has nothing better to do than complain about something), but heads of state, government officials, and responsible citizens, are upset. A distinguished architectural acoustician and former Chancellor of the University of California, Dr. Vern Knudsen, finds noise "the scourge of the twentieth century." Dr. Rosen of CQC describes noise as a "molester." Other noise victims describe noise as something that drives them wild, gives them a headache, makes them nauseous and dizzy, keeps them from sleeping. Even the cow is affected by noise, and to a farmer, noise means less milk yield. Society now speaks of "noise pollution," "ear pollution," "audio pollution," and "audible harassment." It is so noisy that the Handbook of Noise Measurement lists 106 words "commonly used to describe sounds of various types." These range from bang and bark through ping, pop, pow, to rattle, scrunch, squeak, and thud, thump, and yap.
Noise is even penetrating the subconscious. A disc jockey started to read a weather report just handed to him: "...very loudy today." He stopped, and broke up laughing. He then predicted that in the future there will be noise reports—mildly loudy, impossibly loudy, and so on.
Noise is such an omnipresent part of our lives that to many it is the "natural" accompaniment of civilization, the "price of progress," with the jackhammer as its symbol. To mark the opening of that Sixth Avenue subway extension, businessmen placed full-page newspaper ads featuring a happy jackhammer operator. It was a shock to me to see him again in a public service ad promoting religion in American life. Presumably the advertising agency saw him as a happy symbol of progress.
Some city people believe that it would detract from the function of the subway if the trains were pleasingly quiet and stations were designed for tranquility. A young but able and imaginative New York architect told me he would not want to design a subway train so quiet that its riders and those waiting in the station would be unaware there was a train in their midst. Neither did he want the subway stations to look "like the lobby of the Plaza Hotel." He cautioned me against trying to make the city too quiet. He wanted New York to maintain a certain level of sound energy as a desirable aspect of city life. Perhaps he was also being considerate of the needs of the wife of a Midwest manufacturer of musical instruments who enjoys noise and "imports" tapes of New York street noises to sleep by!