One of my favorite depictions of noise comes from Kiran Desai’s 2006 novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Desai is a master of description who can create an unforgettable image with just a sentence or two; in her hands the graffiti inside a gum-studded Manhattan phone booth becomes “the sick sweet roting mulch of the human heart.” When her character Biju, a young Indian immigrant, encounters New York taxicabs, she writes,
They harassed Biju with such blows from their horns as could split the world into whey and solids: paaaaaawww!
Obviously Desai does not require typographical gimmicks to create vivid impressions. Having those taxi horns “split the world into whey and solids” is impressive enough. Nevertheless, she chooses to break up the uniformity of her typeface and to have one nonword stand out amid scores of carefully wrought sentences, outrageously demanding our attention, because that is exactly what noise does.
Of course, noise does not have to be loud to have that effect. Harold Pinter’s darkly comic play The Homecoming contains a passage about the ticking of a clock during a sleepless night. Says his character Lenny:
“All sorts of objects, which, in the day, you wouldn’t call anything but commonplace. They give you no trouble. But in the night any given one of a number of them is liable to start letting out a bit of a tick.” It’s possible Lenny suffers from hyperacusis, a condition in which certain sounds are perceived as painfully loud, though he has other troubles to keep him on edge. It’s also possible that someone else would be reassured by the ticking. In a song by rock group Death Cab for Cutie, comfort comes from the sound of a leaky faucet.
Noise does not even have to originate from an acoustical source. If Lenny was one of the millions of people who suffer from tinnitus (50 million in the United States alone, of whom at least 12 million have symptoms serious enough to require medical intervention), he might hear a ringing or buzzing in his ears, or a sound like crickets, a constant hiss, or an unceasing roar. He might hear it even if he were deaf.
…
Some people are not satisfied with calling noise “unwanted sound.”
One of them is Les Blomberg, founder and director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse in Montpelier, Vermont. Out of his small two-person office, to which he travels each day by bike, Blomberg maintains what is probably the largest accessible noise-related database in the world. For Blomberg noise is best defined by the name of his organization: It’s a pollutant. “Do we define air pollution as ‘unwanted particulates’?” he once asked me. On another occasion, he said that if he could go back and name his organization all over again, he’d get rid of the word noise.
With degrees in both physics and philosophy, Les Blomberg is the first person who helped me to understand noise as more than an annoyance. Though Blomberg’s interest in noise began when he was awakened by garbage trucks emptying dumpsters in his neighborhood at 4:00 in the morning, he claims not to be among the 12 to 15 percent of the general population who are acutely noise sensitive. For him noise is not “personal” the way it is for many anti-noise activists, but it is serious—too serious to be defined as “unwanted sound.”
Defining noise in this way is relatively new, Blomberg told me. It dates from the early decades of the twentieth century, when scientists and engineers were developing the electronic communication devices that would determine so much of our modern acoustic environment. (For a history of this period he referred me to Emily Thompson’s fascinating The Soundscape of Modernity 1900-1933.) To these experts, noise was primarily interference, static. It was a technical problem rather than a health issue or a social injustice. Ironically, this highly technical agenda gave us what Blomberg regards as an overly subjective definition. “Do we really want desire in science?”
To make his point, Blomberg gave the illustration of a kid who loses some of his hearing at a rock concert, something people have been doing in spite of repeated warnings for well over a generation. Rock concerts can reach sound levels in excess of 120 decibels, the equivalent of a jet at takeoff. (By way of comparison, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires that hearing protection be worn by workers with prolonged exposure to sounds exceeding 85 dB.) Most of us would say that the kid in Blomberg’s example was partially deafened by noise. But can we say that he was deafened by “unwanted sound” when he wanted to go to the concert, paid a lot of money to go, and may also have wanted it to be loud?
Probably he wants his MP3 player to be loud as well, a preference that has been blamed for contributing to the hearing losses of some 5 million children in the United States. As of now, one American child in eight has noise-induced hearing loss. Effects like these are trivialized, in Blomberg’s view, when we define noise in terms of desire.
~~The Unwanted Sound of Everything we Want -by- Garret Keizer
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