Torture is defined as something that causes agony or pain, suffering, annoyance. These are the very terms the public and our social commentators use to describe what noise is doing to us.
Noise exposure and its effects are not unlike the non-violent techniques used to torture captives since time immemorial. Dr. Zhivko D. Angelusheff, a staff member of the Speech and Hearing Center of New York's City Hospital, cites a third-century B.C. Chinese suggestion that instead of hanging criminals, "flutes, drums, and chimes or bells should be sounded without letup, until they drop dead, because this is the most agonizing death man could ever think of...Ring, ring the bells without interruption until the criminals first turn insane then die."
As man advanced up the rungs of the ladder of civilization he improved his methods of applying noise torture, and expanded their practice. The Nazis used the whine of Stuka dive bombers to terrorize civilian populations; when all else failed, they broke the will of concentration camp prisoners with an unbearable noise.
Dictatorships seem not to be able to forego noise torture. A young Greek told a news conference that he had seen a man accused of being a Communist, but who maintained his innocence, tortured for three months by excessive pressure on his extremities, and by intolerable reverberations from a bell outside his cell. The Russian Communists in turn expose their political prisoners to a novel form of modern noise torture, nothing as primitive as beating bells, or gongs. They simply place them in a noisy factory in a Siberian labor camp.
The Russian writer Anatoly T. Marchenko, himself a prisoner, told The New York Times what happened when another writer, Yuli M. Daniel, was transferred to a machine shop: "The noise in the machine shop was loud enough to split the head of even the least sensitive of men. Daniel suffered from ear trouble, and the prison staff knew this. The result was that Daniel, who was only slightly hard of hearing when he came into the camp, is now almost deaf."
In the United States and all of the industrialized countries of the world we expose men to the same conditions as the price of earning a living. What kind of a society is it that allows men to work under conditions which in a Soviet prison camp are punishment?
The classical use of torture was for a purpose: to demoralize, to force a confession. The horror of today's torture by noise is that it is inflicted on a hapless civilian population without purpose. The consumer is not the enemy of commerce and industry; why is he treated as such?
Constant, nagging noise brings out the worst in man. One of the reasons John Connell formed the British Noise Abatement Society was his discovery of "the deep widespread feelings of hatred generated in the minds of captive audiences forced to listen." Noise is seized upon as a rationale for deep-rooted prejudice, and all too frequently complaints of neighbor noise describe the offending party by ethnic background, as in: "I live in a city project, next door to nine Puerto Ricans, seven teen-agers...a loud juke-box is played all day and most of the night. There is nothing but a drunken cabaret of gaiety going on all day and most of the night...The architects who designed these projects ought to be forced to live in them."
Mayor Lindsay failed to understand the influence of noise on social relationships when he ordered an investigation of hippie riots in Tompkins Square Park. He wanted a report on why a riot should erupt out of a group engaged in what he saw as "noisy but generally harmless activity." The bongos and Buddhist love chants were not deemed a harmless activity by the old-timers living in the area. Two youths and eleven policemen were injured and 38 persons were arrested because, among other things, preexisting tensions between the resident Puerto Ricans and Slays were aggravated by an alien noise. One minister described the differing social and cultural values as creating a "powder keg." An intellectual living in the area told a reporter that the Poles, Czechs, Ruthenians, and Ukranians are a stolid type who go in for law and order in a big way, and hate the disorder of the hippies and their noise.
Fury is also generated by the legalized nuisances of society. One woman who was experiencing nighttime railroad track repair in front of her apartment on the fringes of New York's East Harlem wrote:
"I am not a violent person and have never had and do not expect to ever have anything to do with the riots in our cities. But having lived on the fringe of East Harlem for 1-1½ years I am in a position to begin to understand riots and the reasons for them, and even to sympathize with them...If I were a Negro and had I lived in Harlem always I might be more violent than they have been or ever shall be...Residents have been forced to endure the penetrating noise...and to rise or stay up all night because the noise is so intense.
"If the New York Central Railroad could be bombed with fire bombs or dynamite, or a fire started, without any loss of life, and if I were a native of Harlem, I might turn my lack of cooperation by the authorities into destructive retaliation...At times one has to take things into his own hands, when he has had enough, and has exhausted other means, and use whatever means is available to him."