The incessant hum of humanity
Just published in the Walrus is an on-line feature I recently wrote about noise and our responsibility for the soundscapes we create. The Noise Is All around Us—and It’s Affecting You More than You Think was a really fun story to research and write. Below is an earlier draft - an extended version- of it that includes some voices and research that did not make it into the published story.
Amanda Bates was quite relaxed discussing the quiet that descended across the world in 2020 – the year of the pandemic lockdowns. Normally, there would be no reason to expect a conservation ecologist to be agitated on a Sunday afternoon except that she was in transit at an airport – hardly a serene place. The difference was that she was sitting by a creek and a massive aquarium tucked inside the Vancouver airport’s international terminal. It was a little slice of nature and an oasis of quiet and quiet, Bates is convinced, is something humans crave. “We now have social science reports which show how much people love peace,” Bates says.
That data and the certainty it provided came at a steep price – nearly seven million COVID-19 deaths, millions of people suffering from long term impacts, a society divided and a global economy still sputtering in shock. The global lockdown forced a change in human behaviour and, for a little while, it created a world that felt and sounded very differently than the one we and other species on this planet are used to. “Before this event, it was impossible to shut off noise around the world, but we did this, on land, in our cities as well as in our oceans,” says Bates who works as a researcher at University of Victoria in Victoria, BC.
We now know so much more about the impacts of noise that we have introduced into every corner of our planet from cities and forests to the ocean depths. The noise is everywhere. It's hurting us and every living thing around us. This lull in the incessant hum of humanity is what Bates calls anthropause. It was a lesson in humility and, maybe, a lesson in ethics. We are oblivious to the noise we create in the world unless it impacts us as individuals. But the world needs us to listen. We make this soundscape of the planet and we bear the responsibility to listen to it so that we hear the voices of our own species we too often shut out and the voices of other species we mostly drown in our own noise.
THIS ETHICAL DILEMMA of who we hear and who we shut out is something Matt Jordan, professor of media studies at Penn State University in Pennsylvania has been thinking and writing about for a long time. He says noise is just a catch-all for any and all unwanted sound. "There are all kinds of things that teach us how to hear, that teach us what is a good sound, what is a beautiful sound, what is a comfortable sound and what is unwanted, what is jarring, what is dissonant with our feeling of how the world should be," he says.
He is talking about relatively benign sounds: the loud music you don't like from the neighbour's yard, the sound of a street hockey pick-up game under your window, or a busy street you walk down every day on the way to work. As benign as those sounds are, we don’t want to hear any of it.
"There is a discourse that is always trying to tell us that having to hear other people is an awful thing and that the only adequate response to that is to live in some sort of an acoustic cocoon," says Jordan. So we resort to all sorts of technologies that mitigate or remove those unwanted sounds because we believe "everything else is just a horrible life."
In some ways it's always been this way. In an article for The Conversation, Jordan walks us through about 600 years of history of noise complaints, mostly from well-off white guys: Blaise Pascal, Charles Dickens, Arthur Schopenhauer and Scottish polemicist Thomas Carlyle all get a mention. Poor Carlyle spent a fortune trying to soundproof his London house because, at that time, quiet meant absence of sound. That is not the case anymore. “Acoustic comfort to a certain degree comes to stand for quietness,” says Jordan. “We live in this world full of sound so what we do is we start selling the idea that you should be able to control it. You should only have your wanted sound. That’s the sound of the good life!"
Technology like noise-canceling headphones have democratized our ability to live in an acoustic cocoon of personal comfort. A lot more of us can afford to shut out benign noise with a pair of fancy earbuds than a remodeled house.
BUT NOT ALL NOISE WE HAVE TO ENDURE IS BENIGN. Some of it is downright sinister.
Tor Oiamo teaches at the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University and his work is focused on how city noise affects human health. He works with organizations like Toronto Public Health and helps them build detailed maps of noise levels and exposure impacts. When overlayed over health data those organizations have, they can determine the long-term health impacts of noise exposure in different parts of a city. We measure sound using a unit called decibel (dB) - the higher the number, the louder the sound. A normal conversation is about 60dB. A whisper is about 30db and thunder clocks around 120dB, which is about the same noise level as an average rock concert. A quiet residential area will record the sound of about 40dB and a busy highway is at about 80dB.
With over 20 years of data, Oiamo assembled a groundbreaking study that looked at long term impacts on a range of health outcomes . "We confirmed that above 53dB, we start seeing the risk of 8 percent for ischemic heart diseases for every 10dB increase. So if you are at 53dB it’s an 8 percent increase, at 63dB you have a 16 percent increase and so on," explains Oiamo. There is also a significant correlation between noise and stress, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
A prolonged exposure to anything above 90dB will permanently damage human hearing. When exposed to sounds louder than 110 decibels we experience discomfort and anything louder than 130dB will cause pain. A jet engine clocks at about 140dB and a horn on a commercial truck can be as loud as 150dB.
Victoria De La Ronde is a visually impaired resident of downtown Ottawa who testified at the Public Order Emergency Commission in October, which took a hard look at the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the Freedom Convoy protests at the beginning of 2022. During the convoy, protestors driving trucks blared their horns for hours on end, both during the day and deep into the night. "The long-term effects are loss of hearing, loss of balance, some vertigo triggered by the sound of any horn now,” testified De La Ronde. “The sounds of the horns, the sounds of the very, very loud music, the sounds of the people, with lots of voices coming from all different places, all was disconcerting and just completely eliminated my ability to negotiate my environment independently."
The use of sound was a disruptive and aggressive strategy that had profound health impacts on Ottawa residents. "The noise was used as an instrument of terror," says Oiamo. "It kept going during the night. You don’t have to go through too many nights without sleep before you start getting severely stressed out." The protests mirrored the rising use of noise as a torture and crowd control tactic. Law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies have for some time now been exploiting the impact loud sounds have on human physical and mental well-being. Since the 2000s, the use of loud sounds as an intrinsic part of interrogation and torture practice has grown rapidly.
The ethical questions of who we listen to, who we shut out and who we harm with the sound we make are complex with just humans in the equation. The ethics of sound become a lot more complicated when our activity affects the lives and livelihoods of multitude of other species.
NOISE IS UNQUESTIONABLY HARMFULl to us and other terrestrial species, but it is even more harmful to those species that make their home under water where the sound travels faster and further. Leanna Matthews is the assistant director of the Sound Science Research Collective, a not-for-profit marine conservation organization specializing in bio-acoustic research and impacts of noise on marine organisms, especially marine mammals such as whales. Most of their work is focused on Glacier Bay National Park in southeast Alaska. "Marine mammals are interesting when it comes to noise because they are so heavily reliant on sound for communication. Other animals that live in terrestrial environment have some other options - maybe they’ll use some sort of visual signal or olfactory signal like smell when an animal marks a tree, but in the underwater environment smells aren’t really going to do you any good and visual signals are not going to do you any good either when you are a marine animal that’s using space on scale that marine mammals do and in very murky and turbulent water. And sound travels really fast under water. It travels five times faster under water than it does in the air so the sound is the way to do it. There is no really other options, so they use it for everything. They use it to find members of their species, advertise reproductive status, find food..." says Matthews.
When you are that reliant on sound, noise that makes it hard to use sound affects every part of your life. And over the last 80 years or so humans have been the worst kind of a loud, partying neighbour you can imagine. We introduced a lot of noise into the world's oceans. Part of it is that for very long time we didn't even think that there is any sound in the ocean at all. "Humans are much more visually centred than acoustically centred. And especially underwater where we don’t hear very well at all. So we always assumed that the ocean is silent - there are some publications that have that in the title from the 1950s. In fact, it is not a silent place at all," says Francis Juanes, a biologist specializing in bioacoustics at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC.
The noise is an inevitable by-product of every activity we undertake in or on the ocean. "There are two types of ocean noise: short term, very intense noise – drilling for oil and gas and exploration – and then there are the long-term effects, primarily shipping," says Juanes.
To make things worse, aside from some recent European regulations, there is virtually no policies or laws anywhere regulating the noise levels of our marine activities. "It’s not really considered a pollutant in the same way that other pollutants are. It is a different form of pollution, but it is still a form of pollution," says. Juanes. Shipping is the main culprit when it comes to long term, persistent noise wreaking havoc with every aspect of marine life in the ocean.
Matthews, as a field researcher, spends a lot of her time listening and monitoring vast amounts of sound data her organization collects in the waters off the southeast Alaska. Much of that analysis is actually visual. Using spectrograms, the researchers visualize the sound data in order to analyze it - it's sort of a musical notation for whale songs and ocean sounds.
"When it’s loud, when there is a boat near hydrophone, these underwater microphones that we drop, it’s hard to hear anything but that ship. One thing that we have on the spectrogram is that the density of colour indicates [the sound] is much louder. When there is a boat nearby, that whole spectrogram is just black. It is just overwhelmingly, suffocatingly loud."
THE ANTHROPAUSE, the global hush of the public health restrictions we imposed around the world, taught us what the ocean would sound like if we were not making our usual, inconsiderate, racket.
The researchers were able to listen to humpback whales for months in what was a much quieter environment. "It was about two and a half times quieter in 2020 compared to 2019," says Matthews. Their discoveries were fascinating. Humpback whales make a variety of calls and sounds. That did not change once the oceans were quiet. What did change was the way they used those sounds to broaden the way they communicated.
"What we found is that when it’s louder they tend to dominate their acoustic repertoire with just a few types of calls, what we call contact calls, what we think are signals that say: 'I am a humpback whale and I am over here.' And then there are a few little sprinkles of more complex acoustic signals that they are making," she explains. "When it’s quiet they are making those acoustic signals more. Kind of think of it like a pie. The pie in 2019 and 2020 is all cut into 12 pieces, but in 2019 one piece of the pie is taking up like 75 percent and all the other pieces are very small. And in 2020 all the pie pieces are cut evenly."
So what are those other sounds the whales used so much more frequently?
"We don’t know. There is so much we don’t know about humpback communication," says Matthews.
We know even less about the sounds that other marine species, like fish, make and how noise affects them. Thanks to the pandemic and a large study he was a part of, Francis Juanes from University of Victoria now has a much better idea of the impacts. Fish, who are much more affected by ships' low frequency noise than mammals who tend to produce sound at higher frequencies, have been trying to compensate for it very much in the same way that we would.
"The fish respond to that sound by singing louder or singing at a different frequency and that is called the Lombard effect - described as the cocktail party effect. If you walk into a party, it’s very noisy. So what happens in a very noisy environment? You speak louder. Humans do this automatically without thinking. Fish do the same," says Juanes. The sudden drop in ship noise during the pandemic provided an opportunity for scientists to gain better understanding of how different species would behave without human-created marine noise.
"We think the animals likely responded or at least they could be heard better and they probably moved into places they were not in before. We know that happened. We know that dolphins were found in the Themes. And so it’s possible to reduce noise levels in the ocean. We know that. So, you can make smaller ships, you can make quieter ships as well. It’s possible. But it’s expensive," says Juanes.
This is where the ethics of sound creep in uncomfortably. Is it acceptable to harm another species so that we can ship things around the world a little bit faster and a little bit cheaper? What do we owe to the species we do not understand and almost never hear but share the planet with? What is our responsibility to a healthy soundscape of the oceans necessary for other species to thrive?
A PATH TOWARDS A MORE HOLISTIC APPROACHE to the ethics of sound may have to start on our doorstep.
There is an environmental justice component to noise in our cities. Wealthy neighbourhoods tend to be quieter and the low-income neighbourhoods are often much louder further eroding quality of life and health outcomes for a population that is already at a disadvantage because of their socio-economic status. And just like in oceans, there is no simple answer to our noise problems. The big difference is that we now know there are social and physical costs to living in noisy environments. Conservation ecologist Amanda Bates wonders what the future holds now that the evidence on how noise impacts life on Earth, including our life, is in. “How do we maximize what is possible,” she asks. What the pandemic showed us is that a global change in human behaviour is possible, but that it comes at a cost. “We may know it’s good for us, but we may not always be able to prioritize as a society how to get there,” says Bates.
There is no simple answer to what is that we need to do to reduce everyday noise we make.
“The simple answer is a million little things,” says Oiamo. Some of those things include enforcing speed limits, limiting traffic within neighbourhoods, regulating modified exhausts, the orientation of bedrooms, pavement type, tires, and so on. “You get into these seemingly unnecessarily detailed things, but like I said, it’s a million little things that add up to make a big difference,” he says.
Europe leads the way when it comes to noise monitoring and regulation. The Environmental Noise Directive (END) requires European Union member countries to publish up-to-date noise maps and noise management action plans. In France, Bruitparif is an organization that tracks noise in the region around Paris and provides regular monitoring, noise maps, and policy input. Germans have ruhezeit, a legally entrenched quiet time that forbids excessive noise (including from laundry machines or vacuums) after 10 p.m. on weeknights or Sundays.
In Canada, there are no national noise-prevention regulations. Noise is regulated through rarely enforced local or state bylaws, and most of the advocacy around the impacts is left to citizen groups.
Oiamo would certainly welcome meaningful policy change at whatever level, but more than that, he would like us to think about city soundscapes differently. “It’s not just about reducing noise but also recognizing that sound is a really important part of human experience. We care a lot about things looking nice. Why don’t we care about things sounding nice?”
SOUND AESTHETIC is important for another reason besides our pleasure. It might lead to a more ethical relationship with our environment and the people around us. Jordan says, once we deal with harmful, excessive noise that causes physical and psychological damage, we might want to reconsider how we deal with the soundscapes we live and work in. He thinks it would make us better citizens and better humans. Roman philosopher Seneca advocated for a more relaxed approach to dealing with everyday noise: acceptance. Ideally, one would learn to ignore the noise rather than try to silence the world. It’s something to strive toward, Jordan says, but cheerfully admits that he is so far failing miserably to live up to Seneca’s ideal. Instead, he offers another way forward, one that dates back to antiquity.
He tells the story of acousmatics. Legend has it that Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras would make his students, acousmatics, listen to his lecture from behind a curtain, without seeing him. This would go on for years. The idea, says Jordan, was to force the students to really listen to his words with undivided attention.
"Telling people to be quiet is not a good thing,” he says. “Part of the charge to us as human beings in the world is to listen to other people, right? Especially if they are suffering. Especially if they are crying out to us for help and if our expectations are 'I should not have to hear anything' and I can convince myself that the right way to live in the world is to live in this acoustically tailored environment, then I don’t have to hear all that stuff. We become more solipsistic, we hear the cry of the other a lot less and that’s okay within that framework. It becomes a part of the good life to essentially live in your own bubble. That’s the part I find the most troubling."
As the species responsible for much of the soundscape we and the others live in, the least we can do is listen.