In Pursuit of Silence (15 page)

Yet the crowd is not just tens of thousands of spectators howling, clapping, stamping, and pounding.
It’s also every electronic
and nonelectronic device that adds to the noise they can make with their own lungs. Some stadiums give out noisemakers like cowbells, maracas, and clackers. Barkers sell whistles, megaphones, handheld sirens, air horns, stadium horns, sports horns, and “super loud air blaster necklaces.” And then of course there are the endless official stadium noise amplifiers generated by PA announcements, PA music, PA advertising, PA fireworks, PA applause, and general PA crowd incitement.

As for the athletes whom all this noise bombardment is intended to energize—they are playing in conditions that exceed by hundreds of percentage points what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration states is safe for the roughly three-hour duration of a game. Not only do extended balconies and enclosures beam whatever sound the crowd can make directly onto the fields, the roar is, as former Colts defensive tackle Larry Tripplett put it not long ago,
“right in your ear
. With the helmet that sound gets in there and rattles around.” To prepare for these conditions, NFL and college players now regularly practice with rock music played at earsplitting levels as well as with noise machines parked along the sidelines that mimic the noise of a coliseum full of bloodthirsty spectators. While these machines are designed to help teams adjust to the distractions of fan noise, they are also used at the players’ request, according to New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin, because players believe the noise helps them keep their energy level high. Between the noise of the games and the artificially generated noise of the practice field, many of today’s professional athletes will suffer premature hearing loss.

Sounds Like Noise

A German friend who lives part of each year in the United States told me recently that when he was first getting acclimated to the States, noise was one of his biggest problems. Not the noise in the streets, the stores, or the restaurants, but the actual word “noise.” He could not get used to the way that people would use the word “noise” to signify a loud, offensive sound (as in, “I can’t stand the noise here!”) and also to refer simply to the sound something made (as in, “Don’t you love the noise of that fountain?”). People might have thought him hard of hearing when he kept asking, “Do you think we’re hearing a noise?” German, with its
geräusch
(sound) and
lärm
(nasty noise), preserves a clear distinction between creating a sound and emitting an unpleasant one.

The word “noise,” as we know by now, derives from the Latin root
nausea
. How did that notion transfer to sound as such? The neutral usage crops up in late Middle English in England—around 1400. It would seem plausible that the switch occurred
in the acoustical equivalent of a population explosion: too many disparate sounds heard together make for an experience of noise.

But that’s not the whole story. What about noise-canceling headphones? These work by analyzing the waveform of background noise then generating an equivalent counter sound wave. Active noise control actually involves making
more
sound so that we hear less noise. And even without technology we all know that sometimes it’s much harder to hear a person we’re speaking with when there’s one person with a
penetrating voice
standing next to us than when there’s a whole group of people chattering in our vicinity.

“We’re pattern recognizers
,” Wade Bray, an acoustical engineer with Head Acoustics, remarked to me. “When you’re driving a car and there’s a low-level rattle somewhere, even if the engine is making a loud, steady roar, the rattle is going to be the thing that bothers you. If you wanted to mask that sound, you’d be doing something so that the peaks weren’t as high or as low. Total pattern always trumps objective level of sound. That’s where human impressions and the loudness meter disagree.” As an example, Bray asked me to imagine a quiet neighborhood in which two or three cars go by every ten minutes compared with a busy neighborhood where twenty cars might pass in the same time period. “There’s going to be less peak value and less modulation in the quiet neighborhood.” For that reason the two cars are often going to be more disturbing than twenty.

This is not, of course, a phenomenon unique to the human brain. There’s an ancient evolutionary basis for the preference. We can see it in action today in the red-eyed tree frog, a creature that uses acoustical pattern recognition to perform the extraordinary
feat of fast-forwarding its own birth to escape death. The normal hatching period for these frogs lasts four to seven days. A group of biologists and engineers
affiliated with Boston University
has spent the last several years in Panama studying how it happens that when the eggs sense that they’re about to be attacked by a predator, embryos can expel themselves from their jelly capsules ahead of time and start doing their best to survive as preemie tadpoles. The answer, they’ve discovered, lies in their ability to recognize patterns in vibration or sound. Snakes are the biggest threat to the eggs, and when a snake strikes at the clutch, its rippling vibrations start the embryos firing out into the water. That may not be surprising, but the biologists discovered that raindrops and wind produce vibrations on exactly the same frequency spectra as the snakes. So how can the eggs tell the difference? As it turns out, the vibrations made by the snake produce a regular on-off pattern as the reptile reaches for an individual egg, withdraws to munch its frog caviar, then reaches in again. The gap between the vibrations makes for a pattern that tips the eggs off: hit the ejector button and get the hell out. The random pattern of raindrops and wind is a sign to eggs that they can mature at their leisure. (Maybe there’s a clue in this phenomenon as to why we’re often soothed by sounds of falling water.)

J. Gregory McDaniel, the Boston University mechanical engineer who explained all this to me, is a big man with a rockcracking laugh and a jaw off Mt. Rushmore. He is now using the pattern-recognizing tree-frog eggs as a model to create “biologically inspired” sensors for the U.S. Army. Soldiers will scatter them like tiddlywinks every meter or so across areas in Iraq and Afghanistan where they want to be able to monitor the history of
patterned vibrations, like mine burying, before they drive through.
“The army told me
the sensors had to cost less than a dollar a piece!” McDaniel repeated more than once before giving his cliff-breaking laugh. “Now we’re starting to make them so you can put ’em in water to detect patterned vibrations there. Just like the eggs!” Vibration-monitoring devices based on frog embryos may soon be saving troops and ships around the world.

Just as we’re instinctually predisposed to be disturbed by sounds that stick out from the ambient flow, when we hear lots of different sounds simultaneously, the result can be not just less jarring but actually more calming—closer kin to the family of silence—than even low-level sounds we hear separately. Hence the sleep-inducing patterns produced by white-noise machines that bring together all audible frequencies at once. Or the musical productions produced twenty-four hours a day by the infrastructure of our great cities.

At a meeting
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931, Dr. William Braid White, director of research and acoustics for the American Steel and Wire Company, created a nationwide stir when he proposed that the roar of cities actually had a musical undertone. Dr. White encouraged every member of his audience to go to the twentieth story of a New York skyscraper, open a window, and lean out. “Let him then listen carefully to the noises that float up to him from the street below,” Dr. White instructed. “After a while he will notice that the crashes, bangs, and clatters that, upon the street level, come as a succession of shattering blows upon his ears, now begin to blend into a
single continuous roar.” Having reached this point of higher acoustical consciousness, the fellow hanging out of the window was commanded to concentrate still further until he made out “a low bass hum below the main roar.” This, Dr. White argued, was the “ground tone” of New York, based on innumerable small elements, which, while individually disagreeable, together made for a genuinely musical tone. (New York’s, he said, was pitched between A and B flat in the low bass.)

Every city in the world, Dr. White claimed, has its own special ground tone. Chicago, for example, though filled with people who are just as noisy as New Yorkers, seemed to Dr. White “more lighthearted.” Though the Loop was “crowded to suffocation,” the lake acted as a damper—all the more necessary because the streetcars were noisier and the sound of the elevated “far more pervasive.” All in all, Dr. White was inclined to place Chicago’s ground tone at E flat. London, on the other hand, had “a heavy hum” close to the lowest C, because it was a city of “low buildings, wood paving blocks, moist atmosphere”—and a “law-abiding population” not prone “to displays of excessive excitement.”

Dr. White confessed that his discovery might not carry overwhelming scientific relevance, but he contended that if we listen for the particular character of music made by our respective blendered city noises, we might achieve insights into both the innate psychologies and environmental influences acting upon residents. There were also, he implied, benefits for the listener: all you need is a little distance in order to begin receiving something of the concertgoer’s pleasure from an experience of sound that might otherwise strike the ears simply as noxious clamor.

I thought about frog eggs, snakes, Dr. White’s experiment, and about sound and offensive sound. When does a multiplicity of noises add up to a musical undertone as opposed to a galling cacophony? If a mall roof was stripped off, and Dr. White was elevated to a point high above it, how would he characterize the nature of the place from its sound?

But the phenomenon in question goes far beyond the mall. The sound designer DMX lists restaurants, hotels, entertainment complexes, health and fitness centers, and a handful of prestigious universities among its clients. Supermarkets, hospitals, building lobbies, parking garages, public restrooms, and most airports today have sound streamed through their waiting areas and corridors. Even the depths of our swimming pools are now sometimes amplified with music, as I discovered when a conference on noise took me to Foxwoods Casino. It’s very, very loud everywhere you turn at Foxwoods, and the blanket of green trees beyond the casino confines are off-limits to guests. The only “escape” permitted is gambling. I consoled myself that once I dove beneath the water of the pool I would steal a break for as long as I could hold my breath. To my shock, when I dipped beneath the water I found that speakers were playing there as well. Muzak, at the height of its popularity, used music primarily as a backdrop to visual displays. Today, so-called foreground music, which is played at higher volumes and features original artists with vocals, bass, and percussions intact, is the soundtrack of choice.