I guess it also helps getting people to eat and leave faster, which enables restaurants to seat tables more frequently.
How Restaurants Got So Loud
11–20 of 319 posts
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#12Restaurants in Germany I've been to are usually pretty quiet. This excludes fast food places, bars (restaurants that serve cocktails are included in that), low-end non-German places (I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places) and all 3 American(-style) restaurants I've been to.
For normal restaurants, I can actually have a conversation. But when I go to some club or bar, I need to align my ears carefully and have the speaker talk directly to me, otherwise, I'd have no chance of understanding anything.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#13I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
Traffic makes a big difference. I was in Venice recently, and the only noise I could hear was suitcases rolling over the cobbles. It really brought home how much noise traffic makes.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#14I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded.
The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1].
What is the endgame here?
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#15Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year. It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the build…
I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.)
What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains have added quiet carriages.
I don't know which libraries you are meaning, but it sounds like their study rooms are broken, rather than the whole concept is broken.
So, lets fix the study rooms! :)
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#16I thought I recognised this title. Did some digging, Vox wrote an article [0] with the same title a while ago.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-lev...
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#17Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year. It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the build…
I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.) What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains ha…
Libraries are not playgrounds.
This idea that the primary functional purpose of an important space should be some kind of afterthought is rather depressing, but I guess is follows from the entertainment-centric culture we live in. The purpose of a library is to read, not to entertain your kids.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#18I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
Not sure about that, in particular herding animals into the centre of towns and cities to be slaughtered must have been noisy. Also iron horseshoes on stone paving/cobbles were apparently very loud.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#19I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded. The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apar…
I agree with cars being the problem. I only thought about that when I learned that laws were drafted to force electric cars to make noise - for a brief couple of seconds I realised how different the world would be if all cars were silent... and then I got my hopes crushed.
I truly cannot picture what life would be like without car noise and light pollution.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#20It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.
I try to find the quieter places... I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones. It completely throws me off the conversation I'm trying to have with the person I'm with.
> I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones.
I can't even reliably pick out one voice in a largely empty room if there's other sources of noise (ie music playing in a pub, etc.) It makes things like meetups impossible and working in an open plan office a nightmare.