comfitu.re/blogs/2021/2021-06-21_noise.md

Noise

Your ears and what screaming children do to them

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Noise is everywhere. Your house, the city, the roads, the beach, noise is everywhere. Even the forest has ever so much noise, coming from the forest animals, the wind as it blows through leaves and trees, raindrops as they clatter on the forest floor. But at some point, when there's enough noise, the term noisy comes to light. Straight from the cambridge dictionary:

noisy (adjective):

making a lot of noise.

• a noisy crowd of fans
• noisy neighbours

Nobody minds noise, not until it becomes noisy. Incidentally, our society is full of noisy, too. Common examples of noisy things would be traffic, booming commercial districts, factories, trains, schools, and children.

Personally I've had a lot to deal with noise and noisiness over the years. I tend to be slightly more sensitive to it than others. Additionally I suffer from tinnitus, something I hope won't get any worse. And I'm just like a cat in that I'll likely jump up to the ceiling if you so much as surprise me with a loud bang.

Mass-manufactured noise

It goes without saying that we are very good at manufacturing noisiness on the industrial level. We're packed together into noisy cities and communities, while most of our creature comforts create lots of noise as well. Phones are ringing and beeping, cars are revving, stereo sets are blastin'. Yes, there's a good chance I'm right when I say that your pc is currently being noisy to an extend as well. And now I possibly made you aware of it.

Compare this to any other living thing in nature and it comes to no surprise that humans easily take the cake when it comes to making a lot of noise. "Well of course, we have loud machines and stuff! Progress!", you might say. But really, is there any reason for a lot of the things we use to be that noisy, for us ourselves to live as loudly as we do? Creatures in nature sure seem to disagree with that.

In nature, being noisy may prove fatal. A predator might hear you and hunt you down. That's why most animals have adapted to being quiet, unless they have a reason not to. One of few such reasons might be to make a warning sound, to perhaps scare a predator off. Or as a warning sound to others of your kind, to alert them of an enemy presence.

My ears are tingling!

"So what if we make noise?" Perhaps you have a point. Our noise keeps nature out of our cities, because wild animals not adjusted to such an overwhelming human presence generally choose to walk around us. But there are many negative effects of noise as well.

The most generally well-known one of these would be hearing damage. Stand near something loud enough and you risk blowing your ears out. Sudden damage may involve burst eardrums, and long term damage usually comes in the form of hearing loss, and potentially worse, ringing ears (known as tinnitus). However lesser known for some of us would be the added stress that comes from noisiness.

Stress from noise comes from the fact that your brain has to process the things your ears hear. Generally it will filter out a large chunk of what you're hearing based on how important certain sounds are to your brain. However, that filtering takes energy, and the more sound there is to be filtered, the more tiring this work gets, eventually overloading your brain. That's why breaks from noise are so important; it allows your brain to calm down and organize itself.

This stress is even more evident in those of us that are more sensitive to input, like people with certain forms of autism or people with epilepsy. Such people are often more easily overloaded from input, with some of them literally getting seizures from it. Of course, in the lesser extremes are the group of shut-ins, introverts, night owls and such that generally live in quieter environments. For them, a noisy workspace might often lead to distractions, lack of concentration, some even get scatter-brained from it. It wears them down, and might even affect their sleep.

Turning down the volume

Above I've only just grasped some of the key points involving how much noise we make and how badly it can affect us. And sometimes it can be hard to find a solution. In my own particular problems with noise, I've frequently had to deal with people snoring. Suffice to say, solutions exist, but your mileage may vary; often the only true solution is the elimination of the source of the noise.

Ultimately, as much as with air and light pollution, sound pollution is a real issue that needs solving. However, just as with the rest, it's a daunting problem to tackle. But there are some things we can consider doing in the future:

Sound insulation

We insulate our houses against heat, but why not also insulate them against noise? This is something typical I've had the displeasure of dealing with in my life. I grew up in an old brick-and-mortar, concrete house. It was fairly well insulated against sound; thick double walls provided very good sound insulation from the outside. Likewise, rooms internally were also well insulated from each other.

But these days I live in a house that's the opposite of that; it's a hard concrete house, where vibrations generally seem to penetrate the walls; as for interior walls, they're just single-sheet plywood. So in a nutshell, it's poorly insulated from noise, both externally as well as internally. Being disturbed by noisy sounds in your own living quarters, not being able to escape from it, is hell. So we should definitely consider sound-proofing our buildings.

Ditch mechanics for electrics

This is one point where we've made the most progress. Over time, we've managed to turn a lot of our devices with many mechanical parts into simple electronic ones that barely contain moving parts anymore. Even our venerable companion, the car, now has an electric variant; with considerably less moving parts, and no noisy combustion being used, it's notably quieter than the average car.

On the flip side, we shouldn't over-digitize everything. Not everything needs to be a computer or a touch screen. Overly turning everything into computers may end up introducing new noise, and perhaps more importantly, heat.

Ditch mass-consumption

Perhaps a rather big subject, but limiting our consumption can help too. The less we need to produce, the less noise we make in our factories. Perhaps if we focus on quality over quantity, we might even find that we can replace noisy machines with the less noisy and more capable human hand. Obviously this would also bode well for the environment, cutting emissions and waste.

Be considerate

Maybe a more far-fetched one, or maybe not. Sometimes, noise is literally just your neighbour. Or maybe you are that noisy neighbour. Being considerate is one other way of helping with our home environments. This boils down to really simple stuff, like not cranking up your stereo set too much, not turning your back yard into a lumber mill, and even the simplest one; teach your kids and pets to stay quiet. But of course that last one takes effort, and we all know the one thing we're not gonna do at home. Being considerate sometimes requires a little bit of work from you. But the pay off can be big if more of us were willing to put in that little bit of effort to be more considerate.

Not all noise is noisy

On a closing note, I'd like to say that not all noise ends up being noisy. Music is among some of the things I like most about life. Music is good. But be considerate. You obviously want to listen to your music; someone else might not. Be considerate; to your neighbours, but also your ears, both will thank you for not exposing them to loud noise.