Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take it Back

Listen.

Listening is one of my favorite things to do.

Maybe yours too.

It could be a favorite song or songbirds greeting a sunny spring morning, the gentle breeze whispering through the trees, or the friendly voice of someone you love.

I love you.

A ping from a device calling for our attention, the pervasive low rumble of traffic, a jet flying overhead.

We're swimming in an ocean of sound.

Some of it is pleasant and melodious, like gentle waves against the shore.

Some of it grates and annoys, demands our attention, often at an unconscious level.

It's the thrum of modern life.

Listen.

When does sound become noise, and according to whom?

Based on what parameters and how do we measure those parameters?

How does sound impact human well being and the planet we share?

What do our soundscapes tell us about ourselves and the world we've built?

In this episode of Global Warming is Real, I highlight a recent conversation I had with Chris Burdick, author of Clamor How Noise Took over the World and How We Can Take It Back.

We'll explore the often overlooked impacts of noise pollution, unraveling its physiological toll from subconscious stress to chronic health issues.

Burdick discusses the myriad ways modern noise infiltrates our environments, be it through the relatively recent and always relentless hum of data centers, the buzz of open office plans, or the unexpected challenges posed by the phenomenon of rising drone deliveries.

Burdickt is an acclaimed freelance science journalist and author whose work explores the interlinking contours of science, health, technology, and society.

Formerly a staff editor at the Atlantic and Mother Jones, Burdick's reporting has appeared in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Popular Science, Wired, Salon, Politico, and New Scientist, among others.

His other book, Mind over the Surprising Power of Expectations, was published in 2012.

Chris holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard and an MA in Journalism from Stanford.

In Clamor, Burdick examines the implications of a noisy world, what noise does to us and our fellow creatures, how we can mitigate sonic smog, and how intentional soundscapes serve our better purpose, promoting human well being and helping ease our impact on the natural world.

Let's listen in to Gris Burdock, starting with an overview of the infamous decibel and the physiological effects of unwanted noise.

It doesn't have to be loud.

There can be sound in the silence living at the edge of our perception.

I'll just start with decibels.

They measure acoustic energy intensity, basically like the brute force piece of sound.

And that's it.

And what I say in the book Is there's.

If you think of all the world's noise issues, the realm where decibels are the only thing that matter is about 3 centimeters.

That's the human cochlea, if you kind of stretched it out.

And then beyond that a lot of other things start coming into play.

And when we talk about stress, we don't need to have it be the loudest sound in the world to stress us out.

There is a whole level of noise that I would put under the umbrella of unwanted signals that are stressing us out because they are too much for our attentional resources to process and handle.

When we are trying to focus on something at work, for instance, and there's another conversation or other noise coming in to disrupt our thought process, that's stressful when we are trying to sleep.

And this is kind of where a lot of research into the epidemiology comes into play.

Noise that is pretty low decibels starting around 45 or so decibels of noise from transportation sources.

That's.

And the reason why it's that in particular is because that's what they have the data on that once it starts to hit that level, people start to.

It's not they don't wake up, but they have these disturbances in their sleep, which the sleeper surgery that I interviewed terms awakenings.

These are natural things that people when they sleep will have about 25 or so awakenings.

These are very brief changes in their physiology that bring them aroused a little bit.

Their heart rate, which is normally much slower when they sleep, will speed up again.

Their brains become more active again.

You know, just that kind of change happens.

They don't necessarily regain consciousness.

But when you have noise coming in, then you have more and more of these wakings so that the restful restoration piece of sleep is disrupted in a chronic way.

And that can over time have some serious health impacts.

What are some of the.

Other than traffic, what are some of the other low level noise stressors, if.

You will, that people have to deal with typically?

Right.

Well, so actually here's a new one.

The noise of data centers.

These things are popping up all over the place.

They're probably the biggest or fastest growing anyway piece of commercial construction in the United States.

And the thing about the noise from these places is when you're in them, it's extremely loud because there's all this.

There's cooling and air movement that they have to put on the servers to keep them from overheating inside.

You need to wear hearing protection.

It's 90 plus decibels in there, outside, it's just this constant low frequency hum that is, you know, low frequency as, you know, passes through walls.

It gets in there.

It's much harder to block out than high frequency stuff.

You can feel it in your chest.

And so a lot of these communities where these data centers are popping up are having a real hard time with the noise just because it's so continuous, it just never stops.

Right.

So that's one thing I mentioned.

The more episodic, but I think, think people will relate to it struggles with noise in an open office setting where the idea back in the early 2000s when these things really took off was, you know, everybody will be together and that will enhance collaboration and the ideas will flow.

And it was almost thought like, well, noise is a symptom of creative buzz and collaboration.

But of course, what it did create was just people putting on noise, canceling headphones and emailing each other.

So it kind of backfired a little bit there.

And noise is a real big complaint.

I mean, a lot of offices now, you know, a whole new market has cropped up for these little booths that people can get into and they actually, you know, can't get out of the scrum of their real office.

So that's another one.

Sound is often seen as the last consideration when designing the built environment.

Chris discusses how this is slowly changing with advances in acoustic modeling and a growing realization that sound is a critical component of healthy and sustainable buildings and environments.

Yeah, well, I mean there's, I think there's a technological change that has allowed this to happen and also a sort of backdrop of motivation that has also been pushing it along.

And the technological piece, there's an increasing ability to create immersive, three dimensional acoustical models of an indoor environment before it's built.

So you take the impulse response and you build up a model of what this restaurant or what this office or whatever you're building will sound like given the inputs of the expected sound sources.

So whether it's 500 people having lunch or the commuter rail passing by outside, or whatever major sources of sound you'll have, and then you play that through the choices of your materials, the layout, and then you can tweak it as you listen to say, no, this is not what I'm after here to kind of add sound absorption, take it away, you can.

Because I think with restaurants a real challenge is it's not just one directional.

You, you don't want to sit and eat in a place that's too quiet.

When you get into that situation.

You hear every slurp of soup, you hear everybody's private conversations and they hear yours, and nobody wants that.

So you're trying to hit this balancing point, which you're not going to nail it, but it's much easier to try to do it beforehand than to fix it after the fact.

Another thing that I think is pushing this is I think there's a real, and this has been sped up by the pandemic, a real desire to have healthier indoor spaces.

There's a whole program of healthy buildings that's come up alongside green building and sustainable building.

And when you look at what makes a building healthy, there's lots of components to it, but the acoustic environment is definitely one of them.

And so I think people paid attention to it as part of trying to make their indoor spaces, where we spend 90 plus percent of our time, healthier.

Places to be.

And what of our fellow creatures?

Animals depend on sound to hunt, avoid being hunted, and to generally make their way in the world.

How do human soundscapes impact their ability to live and thrive?

Animals, unlike us, they need to listen.

When we are bothered by noise, quite often we are able to protect ourselves.

We can put on our noise canceling headphones, we can shut our windows or drive somewhere quiet, or who knows what else we have as our defense mechanisms.

Wildlife, they can't do that.

They have to listen for possible predators.

They have to listen for their own food when they're foraging.

They have to use their hearing to find their way from here when they're migrating to there and to find mates.

The sort of essential pieces of an animal's life are really dependent on hearing in many ways.

And this is especially true in the ocean where as you get to depth, there's less and less light.

So the acoustic information becomes more important and it varies from animal to animal.

There's a term called umwelt, which is from a 19th century German zoologist named Johan Jakob von Oekskull.

Very good, thank you.

The basic idea is that every animal has its own sensory world.

Some animals will be very sensitive to sounds in certain frequencies, or others will be totally oblivious to those same frequencies.

We humans are no different.

There's all sorts of sound going on that we know about, and some of it's very loud.

And so to understand how our noise impacts the natural world, you understand that the natural world can't escape our noise, but also you have to understand what pieces of our noise are really impacting which species.

It gets very complicated.

We all endure sonic smog.

The animals all of us, at least occasionally, but just like a thick blanket of ozone hanging over an inner city.

I asked Burdick if there was a similar environmental justice aspect to sound pollution.

Yeah, there is.

If you think about the major infrastructure type sources of noise like highways and industry, these are predominantly put in communities of least resistance.

And so along with the other pollution they produce, they emit quite a bit of noise.

And when you couple that kind of increased exposure with increased vulnerability, which is kind of like a lot of the same communities don't have green space, the houses don't have the same kind of construction and insulation that would protect them from the sound.

They don't have air conditioning.

So in the summertime they have to have their windows open that it's in all the sound at night.

So there is, there's an environmental justice justice piece of, of the broader noise exposure.

Is there a regulatory model for planning soundscapes and mitigating sonic smog?

Look to the European Union, where the largest cities are required to produce five year noise assessment plans and, and designate or at least identify quiet areas with noise levels of 55 decibels or less.

Since this approach is still based solely on decibel readings, it doesn't account for the full psychological spectrum of sound perception.

Some louder sounds are pleasant, some quieter ones not so much.

Researchers like Antonello Rodi advocate for a more holistic approach to sound planning.

And what of the United States?

The European Union has since I think around 2002, required cities of certain size to create five year noise plans.

And those are basically noise reports and noise plants.

So they basically have a map.

Again, we're talking about major sources of noise from infrastructure, from infrastructure and transportation.

Where they map out, oh, here, here's where we're having an issue with quite a lot of road noise or the overflights from our airport.

This area is potentially endangered because we're planning some major building infrastructure improvement every five years they do this.

Some of these cities, if they are the biggest ones, are also required to have to point out anyway, where they have quiet areas.

Now, these are all decibel based.

So the quiet areas are places where the average noise is 55 decibels or below.

And just having this as a priority is, I think, very positive.

But a lot of people have pointed out that when you are designating quiet areas as the places that have lowest, the lowest decibels, you end up finding a handful of places that are in these massive parks somewhere on the outskirts of your city where no one goes.

And if your purpose is to find and hopefully protect the areas that give people some restoration during their hectic busy days where they can go and find some restoration.

Then pointing out a handful of areas on the outskirts of the city, deep, deep, deep in one of the big parks has limited utility.

There's been some movement to try to come up with everyday quiet areas that are not simply defined by decibels.

There's a crowdsourced app called Hush City, and a researcher behind that named Antonella Radicki, who is trying to say, well, how can we understand the purpose of these quiet areas and define them as beyond just what the decibel meter tells us?

So that's going on in European cities that, you know, I. I spoke to the noise guru, I guess you could call him, in Limerick, Ireland, who is facing a similar issue like what Antonella Radicki was facing in that he now is.

Limerick is on that verge of needing to have a quiet area designation.

But their most restful, quiet areas, it's a very small, compact city.

Their most restful, quiet areas are along the river.

And the river in Limerick is pretty noisy.

It's going over small dams and rapids.

And so even though the decibel meter might say different, people actually find a feeling of quiet and restoration in the areas by the river.

And so he's trying to make that argument in his most recent noise report that's required by the EU over here.

We have nothing like that.

Yeah.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

The United States used to have an Office of Noise Abatement and Control that was run through the epa.

It was actually one of the founding offices in the EPA when Nixon started it up in the early 70s.

And they did their work for about eight years or so until Reagan came in office.

And so what happened when Reagan came into office was that they basically cut off all the funding for the office, but they kept it in place.

They kept the law that had established it in place.

So it still exists, but just nobody's home, you know?

Yeah.

And that's kind of where we are.

An empty desk.

That's right.

Imagine your latest Amazon purchase comes whiz whiz whizzing up to your front porch clutched in the claws of a delivery drone.

Now, how futuristic is that?

Now imagine all your neighbors and the rest of your town receiving their packages with the whiz whiz whizzing of an armada of delivery drones crisscrossing the skies, buzzing around like enormous bees looking for porches to drop their loads.

Could this be coming soon to A porch near you.

Right.

Well, all indications are that the major retailers and their distribution networks are gearing up for a lot more drone delivery.

I don't have the stats in front of me here, but there was a McKinsey report talking about, you know, most recent data had 2 million drone deliveries, and that was going to go up in an order of magnitude within 10 years.

Right now, as you say, like, I don't have drones delivering stuff to my neighborhood that I know of.

We think about it like, oh, yeah, like, you know, robot butlers or something else that's sort of fanciful in the far distance.

But the fact is that you've got Amazon, one of the biggest delivery outfits in the world, piloting drone delivery in different cities.

One in California, one, I think in Texas.

You've got independent retailers like Walmart having, trying to set up their own delivery via drone.

And you've got a number of, like, sort of independent operators working with, like, restaurants.

So if you want your burritos delivered at midnight, then certain restaurants who are contracted with these places will buzz it right into your front yard.

It's one of those things that is just sort of like percolating and coming, and it's hard to imagine it right now, but if you look at the number of people and number of big industries and retailers that are moving on it, and if you look at some of the research that is being funded by the industries because they know that the noise is going to be a problem.

So they're funding a lot of research now into kind of how can we put some material on the rotors to quiet things or make the rotors larger or something so they don't have to spin as fast?

Even the research that I read about, trying to figure out what the best routes might be for taking these drones so they disturb the fewest number of people or something like that was funded by industry because they know that where they have piloted this, like in Australia, the capital city, they had a pilot there where people got so up in arms that they were threatening to shoot the machines out of the sky.

And they know that this is going to be a hurdle.

But the cities, by and large, where a lot of these drones are going to be flying, just, they haven't really started paying attention to it.

They haven't started asking those questions about, well, how are we going to license these things?

Are we going to have periodic checks like we do with vehicles, about how much noise or other emissions they're producing?

Where are the routes going to be?

Where are we going to Put the depots where these things are going to pick up their packages and you know, that's going to be the busiest, noisiest piece of this.

None of that.

So I think there's lots of time, but also not a lot of time.

Les Blomborg, who is like the, he's the head of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, this is his big ax that he grinds about drone delivery and air mobility as being the thing that we need to start paying attention to, noise wise.

Yeah.

And it's not just noise.

I can just think of all sorts of issues with a bunch of drones buzzing around in the sky.

Yeah, safety for one.

Safety, exactly.

Airplanes, birds.

Anyway, I don't know, I'm fine to have the truck deliver.

I, you know, I'm old enough to remember when I went to a store and got stuff.

No, exactly.

But I mean it's been a Achilles heel of sorts for the sort of anti noise cause over the last century or so that it's always been step slow, it's always been reactive.

Les Blomberg, who I just mentioned, he pointed out to me that one of the most famous noise battlers was a woman named Julia Barnett Rice in New York.

And this is around the turn of the last century.

And her big cause was the tugboat whistles on the Hudson.

They were disturbing her in her mansion there on the Upper west side.

But she turned it into a much broader anti noise crusade through New York City to quiet down areas outside hospitals and schools.

But you know, in the same decade when she was battling tugboats, the first Model T was rolling off the assembly line in Detroit and the Wright brothers had their maiden voyage at Kitty Hawk.

So these noise issues that now dominate our lives, nobody sees coming until suddenly they are an entrenched part of how we live.

So where does this leave us?

I concluded my conversation with Chris Burdick, author of Clamor How Noise Took over the World and how he can take it back with the big question, why?

What motivated him to write this thoroughly engaging and well researched book?

What is the potential of sound that we have at our disposal?

Where is it lacking?

How can we get it better?

And how can sound and focused attention on creating intentional, purpose driven soundscapes improve human well being?

Okay, big question.

Let me see.

I'll start with the motivation because that kind of speaks to the larger theme you mentioned.

It changed a bit When I first started writing this book.

It was based off of some curiosity that I had from a magazine story I did about a public health researcher in Boston who was focused on noise and reading all the health impacts, these major harms about, you know, cardiovascular disease and the hearing loss and, you know, even mental health problems and dementia, all these major implications public health wise.

But this is a.

From a source that nobody could really agree on what it was.

And that sparked my.

My interest.

But then it changed a bit when Covid hit, because as you remember, when the cities shut down and the businesses shuttered and everyone stayed home and the roads emptied and people stayed away from one another, it got quieter in many places.

And when you ask your average noise fighter what they want, they'll say they want a quieter world.

And so there we were in a quieter world.

And yet you couldn't escape the fact that it had required a global catastrophe to get us there.

And I started to think about what is this quiet that we want?

And do we want something more than quiet or in addition to quiet, when we talk about fighting noise?

And I started to read about people that are saying, well, let's start with thinking about what is the purpose of, say, the places we make?

And each place has a different purpose.

So if we're making a park, what's the purpose of that park?

We're building a school, what's the purpose there?

And can we think about sound as helping to serve that purpose rather than getting in the way of it, like noise might?

And what's that involve?

And so you start to broaden how we think about sound.

And my takeaway from doing this work is just, you know, we'll never be free of noise, and I don't know that we should even aspire to be free of noise.

But if we take a broader, proactive approach to thinking about how the sounds in every environment we have a hand in can support rather than detract from our larger endeavors, then we can not only make our world sound less bad, but maybe in many ways make it sound better.

A better sounding world.

Now, doesn't that sound nice?

But how does all this tie into a podcast ostensibly about climate change?

Which is a fair question.

First, I've always been keen on sound and its impact.

I've had a long career as a sound engineer, mixing live shows, and I felt the power of sound to move humans to joy, myself among them.

I've also been traumatized by the relentless grinding of unwanted noise.

We're talking ears, with the accompanying anxiety and depression.

Second, climate change, man made, anthropogenic global warming, whatever we want to call it, is, in my mind, a symptom of how we are in the world, how we relate to it.

So is the noise we make, be it the ghostly rumble of another data center beating the algorithm that we consume, a fleet of drones buzzing overhead, or maybe a favorite song or happy children playing with intention, we can reduce sonic smog, create beneficial soundscapes and protect our neighbors, human and non human, from clamor.

Check the show notes for more information on Chris Burdick's work and his book How Noise Took over the World and How We Can Take it back.

That's it for this episode and thanks for listening.

And keep listening.

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To learn more and do more, visit globalwarmingisreal.com thanks for listening.

I'm your host Tom Schueneman.

We'll see you next time on Global Warming is Real.

Sa.