Noise is all around us
thewalrus.ca
Noise is all around us
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Re: Noise is all around us
#2The Environmental Noise Directive (END) doesn't stop countries permitting houses to be built along motorways, next to fire stations or near airports/flight paths or trains. Once the houses are built people will live there.
What we need is some good tech to make our homes and gardens more peaceful and quiet.
Re: Noise is all around us
#3> “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. 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. . . .
I think the writer here is confused, they very likely mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense not the literal sense, since it's obvious there are real world scenarios where it's physically damaging to actually listen.
But if they mean 'listen' in the metaphorical sense, as in perceiving another's mental thoughts through any medium, then the noise levels of everyday environments has little to nothing to do with it.
Re: Noise is all around us
#4[deleted]
Re: Noise is all around us
#5The developed nations have known exactly how to build structures that ACTUALLY reduce noise for 70+ years, but they didn’t care enough to mandate such construction techniques into the building codes at our own peril.
Re: Noise is all around us
#6I think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it'd cost you to get freedom from your neighbor's lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person's brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity.
I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.
Re: Noise is all around us
#7I'm always surprised that we tolerate so much unnecessary noise. We let people fly helicopters around and run leaf blowers. We even allow trucks to go beep beep beep and alert everyone within a kilometer that they are backing up, even though we have rearview cameras, like it's everyone else's responsibility to scurry out of their way.
Re: Noise is all around us
#8I'm always surprised that we tolerate so much unnecessary noise. We let people fly helicopters around and run leaf blowers. We even allow trucks to go beep beep beep and alert everyone within a kilometer that they are backing up, even though we have rearview cameras, like it's everyone else's responsibility to scurry out of their way.
Re trucks beeping - that’s partly legal responsibility isn’t it? I mean, we have had the ability for trucks to beep as they back up for far longer than we have had the ability for them to realistically have functioning rear view cameras. And since the normal expectation is that vehicles go forward, it makes sense to alert when doing something unexpected, like backing up. And so the laws we have mandate and expect beeping noises from large vehicles because the idea that laws would mandate rear cameras hasn’t caught on yet.
Re: Noise is all around us
#9Of course this is completely anecdotal, but I was walking around a zoo in a city I'm visiting today and couldn't help but notice how much noisier the zoo was, both in terms of how much traffic and city noise breaches the walls, and how much noise the visitors make (yelling after each other across the zoo, talking loudly, just generally not attempting to keep their own noise down) when compared to visiting zoos in my home country.
I also observed that the animals seemed to be a lot more likely to shy away, and (in my completely not zoological/biological opinion) perhaps even slightly more on edge or distressed in some cases. This also meant whenever an animal was doing something interesting, the visitors would all be interested in that one exhibit, which caused further noise and commotion.
I couldn't help but think how much nicer the zoo could've been for both guests and the residents if more of a focus was placed on reducing the noise levels.
It was also quite a culture shock to me that smoking was allowed throughout the zoo as it seems to me that a ban would be easily justified on the grounds of animal comfort/welfare (not to forget all the children walking around, too).
Re: Noise is all around us
#10I'm always surprised that we tolerate so much unnecessary noise. We let people fly helicopters around and run leaf blowers. We even allow trucks to go beep beep beep and alert everyone within a kilometer that they are backing up, even though we have rearview cameras, like it's everyone else's responsibility to scurry out of their way.
Re trucks beeping - that’s partly legal responsibility isn’t it? I mean, we have had the ability for trucks to beep as they back up for far longer than we have had the ability for them to realistically have functioning rear view cameras. And since the normal expectation is that vehicles go forward, it makes sense to alert when doing something unexpected, like backing up. And so the laws we have mandate and expect bee…
More modern trucks use white noise instead of a beep anyway, it's both much easier to tell direction from a broad spectrum sound, and significantly less annoying at the same time.