Modern man no less than his primitive ancestors must depend upon his ears to warn him of danger. In 1930, New York City's Noise Commission reported that "There are many places where a tiger from Siberia or Bengal could roar or snarl without attracting the auditory attention of the passersby." In 1968, human tigers could murder in the city jungle and not be heard. On January 18 of that year, a middle-aged jeweler, held up in his shop in the heart of Times Square, was shot, not once, not twice, but four times without any of the scores of pedestrians hearing a sound. The shots were drowned out by the noise of compressed air hammers and other equipment at construction sites nearby. The two holdup men escaped.
When a 13-year-old New Jersey girl was found beaten and strangled to death 75 feet from the back door of a neighbor's home, the neighbor's son told reporters: "My father heard nothing. None of us heard anything. We had the air conditioning running all night." A quality environment should, at the very least, have noise levels low enough to permit shots and screams to be heard.