Less dramatic than the sonic boom, but no less disturbing, is the effect of noise on personal communication. Very rarely these days can we hear the sound of the human voice as a solo. Even in the theater we must listen to the actors' voices plus the sounds of the ventilating or air conditioning system.
Mechanical noises also pollute the atmosphere of concerts, outdoors as well as indoors. Noise won over music when the New York City Parks Department opened its outdoor stage at Damrosch Park. The music critic of The New York Times accepted seven jets, one four-engine prop plane, and one helicopter, all in the first fifteen minutes of the concert, as "par for an outdoor concert in the city." But he could not accept the concerto for air conditioning system which played the entire concert from the bowels of the adjacent Metropolitan Opera House, a concerto which "roars like a sizeable waterfall and never stops." Not even the amplifying system could overcome these external noises.
Kindergarten children attending a school near New York's Central Park were taken for a walk and then asked to list the outdoor sounds they had heard. The majority of the sounds they named were noises, mostly from transportation. There were few mentions of quiet sounds like birds and human voices. Transportation noises are becoming more "natural" to these youngsters than the sounds of nature.
Will society have to develop special soundproofed "museums" where people can go to hear the pure sounds of music, the spoken word, and nature?
To fully enjoy music and hear it as the composer intended, it is essential to hear the high frequencies. It is true, observes Yeshiva University music professor Dr. Edward Levy, that the fundamental tone is below 2,000 cps, but, if the ear loses its potential acuity, it loses the ability to distinguish timbre, or tone color. Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Berg, and many others carefully took advantage of the differences in timbre among various instruments. As for contemporary composers and their new electronic material, most of it is in the higher frequencies. Those with hearing loss, Dr. Levy believes, will lose contact with this new music. Of course, one may not choose ever to listen to it all, but it's nice to know one could.
The partial loss of hearing is somewhat analogous to faulty vision. Sounds are blurred, sounds are dimmed, and some sounds are not heard at all.
The transition from mild hearing loss, if we can call the loss of full-frequency hearing mild, to total deafness is like going from a sentence of probation to a lifetime sentence of solitary confinement. One hearing specialist describes the gradual loss of hearing thusly: "The humming, buzzing, rattling sounds of everyday life slip away. Friends' and relatives' diction becomes increasingly sloppy." The person who becomes deaf or "hard of hearing" lives in a world of subdued sound, or even silence. He has lost his primary means of communication and tends to withdraw from the world and live within himself, a comparative recluse.
Deafness, it is said, is more of an isolation from humankind than blindness. Deaf people, it is said, seldom smile. Unverified reports claim a greater tendency to suicide among those who become deaf than among those who go blind. Helen Keller has been quoted as saying that the world's "normal" people have never been roused to mass sympathy for the affliction. "It causes no fever, no crutches, no seeing-eye dog, not even a sneeze," she told interviewer Phyllis Battelle.
Earlier Miss Keller had written: "Deafness, like poverty, stunts and deadens its victims."