The Tyranny of Noise
Robert Alex Baron
Part I — Chapter 1 — Today And Tomorrow
Partly because of the duality within each of us as both makers and receivers of noise, we wish to be free to make noise ourselves, even if we may not enjoy the noise made by others. "The North American motoring public," reports George Thiessen, a Canadian government researcher, "has a split personality about the growing problems of traffic noise. As homeowners they would like to enjoy an evening out of doors in peace and quiet, but as motorists they want the maximum power to give maximum acceleration even if the tires squeal. They like to hear their vroom, or at least some of them do."
It is a commonplace that noisemaking is associated with virility, and that objections to noise are associated with a lack of masculinity. To protect oneself from noise, let alone complain, is also deemed unmanly. In a lecture on noise, one acoustical expert related a personal experience during his early years working in a factory. He literally had watched a colleague go deaf. "It took five to six years. He was working in a test block at Republic Aviation. He was too much of a man, he thought, to wear earmuffs."
Motorcycle (and sports car) manufacturers design to satisfy the demand for conspicuous noisemaking. The theories behind this demand are many, ranging from the use of noise as a protective device to ward off the drivers of bigger cars and trucks to the concept of noise as a mating call. Why would any sexually frustrated motorcyclist support noise-control legislation if he equates noisy motorcycling with lovemaking? The sex-via-noise theory was reported to the American Psychiatric Association by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Armand N. Nicholi, Jr. According to one press report, Dr. Nicholi believes that some sexually troubled college-age men relieve their feelings of sexual inadequacy with "an unusual preoccupation with the motorcycle." Though he described his patients as expressing fears of death and castration when they discussed motorcycle riding, he also reported on the "appeal of... the intrusion of the deafening noise into other people's ears..." as suggesting a genital or phallic feature. This line of thinking suggests that the big-city cab driver is not blowing his horn to satisfy his passenger's desire for speed. It also suggests that "showboating," as columnist Russell Baker describes the unnecessary use of fire engine sirens, may not mean that the firemen are saying to the taxpayers, "See how productive I am." With very little stretching, Dr. Nicholi's sexual aberration theory might give the public grounds for attacking noisy motorcyclists and motorists as perpetrators of aural sodomy.
New York's 1930 Noise Commission psyched the horn-honking driver. "Even in free flowing traffic, some motorists appear to take an almost fiendish delight in sounding their horns when there is nothing in the way." Today's American motorists object to the quieter city horn on European imports, and some European car manufacturers are discontinuing the export of the dual city-country horn to the United States.
I once naively told a horn-blowing New York cab driver, "You're violating the law."
"What law?" he smirked. "My elbow slipped."
In contrast, a Cockney cab driver taught me a lesson in driver attitude. We were caught in rush-hour traffic on the way to Heathrow Airport. Several times other vehicles cut in front of us.
Each time, conditioned by those New York cabbies, I braced for the retaliatory horn. Silence. Finally, after a third such incident, my horn-conditioned nervous system couldn't take the suspense, and I asked the driver, "Why didn't you blow your horn? Is it against the law?"
"No, it's not against the law. Only at night. I didn't toot because it's not good manners. Besides, might rattle the chap."
Is the horn honker a sadist? The horn-blowing truck driver or motorcyclist who has gutted his muffler may not be as interested in expressing his virility as he is in acting out a need for inflicting pain. If the operator and the manufacturer of noisy machines are unconsciously working out sadistic tendencies that exist in many of us, the rationale behind objections to noise-control legislation becomes clear.
This innate desire to make noise and to inflict noise on others may be one explanation of the electronic noise explosion. That the rapid growth of television and stereo is likely more than a hunger for culture is indicated in a paper by Dr. H. Angus Bowes presented before the Psychiatric Research Association in 1957. As reported in Time Magazine, his "Psychopathology of the Hi-Fi Addict" contained this revealing passage: "Naturally, the less organized will treat their hi-fi set rather like the emotionally immature treat a car—as an expression of aggression, as a power symbol. To many [hi-fi] has a sexual connotation. Perhaps in the twiddling of knobs, there may be a masturbatory equivalent. Certainly the ability to take control of a situation relieves anxiety and what control is given to the manipulator of a hi-fi apparatus when, with a flick of the wrist, he may attenuate his treble, emphasize his bass, turn down the volume to a whisper, or blast the neighbors with a Niagara of sound."
Manufacturers of audio equipment are not unaware of the needs they are satisfying. A Fisher Radio advertisement offered "Power! Power! The power to unleash wattage and make an almighty noise is a favorite fantasy of the hi-fl extremist...Take, for example, the devastatingly powerful Fisher system...The 700-T and the two XP-18s can blast the roof off your house if you have an itchy volume-control finger."
This kind of intense noisemaking is not all give. The maker wants to hear, as well. Some of us want to be "turned on" with sound. This phenomenon parallels the increasing use of LSD, marijuana, and other means of getting high. A member of one of the popular electronically-amplified combos, the Grateful Dead, told a reporter from The New York Times: "Part of our thing is to try to turn people on with our music, because if you're up tight you can't relax." This new music-to-relax-by can sound like a "derailed freight train plunging over a cliff." Audiences enjoy this new listening experience. When the Butterfield Blues Band blasted away in New York's Town Hall behind ten massed amplifiers, the bulk of the audience did not find it too loud. Audiences are also responding favorably to the use of multimedia, an attack on all senses with intense light, sound, colors, smells, visual images, combinations of high decibel rock'n'roll, wailing sirens, simulated thunderclaps—all used to blitz the audience.