In 1967 the Scali, McCabe, Stoves advertising agency volunteered to prepare public service advertising for Citizens for a Quieter City. President Marvin Stoves, copy chief Ed McCabe, and creative director Sam Scali spent weeks poring over a small library of noise reference material. They ended up confused as to the technical nature of noise, but clear about one point: the noise problem is easier to solve than to understand.
The scientists who work in the field of noise have tended to concentrate on those aspects of noise which are readily demonstrable and measurable. The emphasis is on the physics of sound, the sense of hearing, and the attempt to find formulae for measuring and predicting "annoyance" reactions.
The public—and many of its elected officials and government administrators—is intimidated by an alphabet soup of decibels and noise scales. It is almost as if the noisy machine is protected by a wall of measuring systems and units. Trying to define noise and quantify human response has become a substitute for seeking to achieve a less noise-stressed civilization. Quality is dictated by statistics and formulae, not by intuition and common sense.
Noise is defined by the American National Standards Institute as:
(1) any undesired sound
(2) an erratic, intermittent, or statistically random oscillation
A Federal report on the subject was titled Noise: Sound Without Value. It would be more accurate to define noise as destructive sound.