In Pursuit of Silence (21 page)

One day in 1994, Tim Maynor, with Jonathan Demuth in tow, showed up at a bass competition. At that time sport participants were required to compete playing a song the match sponsors had chosen for them, which happened that afternoon to be the first song on the
Flashdance
soundtrack. Maynor and Demuth had analyzed the first track of
Flashdance
pulse by pulse to find the frequency at which it peaked and where the peak occurred. By abandoning all pretense of playing a recognizable snippet of the song, and instead hitting a button at the exact second
when the music was loudest and playing only that one tone, they immediately gained three decibels of sound. The crowd, which Demuth told me numbered in the thousands, went wild.

Their discovery opened the floodgates. Everyone started converting their cars into “one-note wonders,” or “burp vehicles.” Soon thereafter, McKinnie related, “dB Drag Racing got out of hand. Everyone lost the highs, lost the pretty stuff, the pretty-looking stuff, and it was all about how loud can you make your car be.”

The dB Drag Race cars can’t even play music. If they do, they will break their speakers. (Sometimes destruction is the goal. The world finals occasionally include a Death Match class, in which competitors run head-to-head for five minutes. The last car standing wins, and both cars get buried in smoke from frying audio entrails.) Indeed, the vehicles themselves, let alone the audio systems, cannot withstand the pressure exerted by the burp button. It’s not coincidental that Maynor and Demuth were also the first team to replace their vehicle’s factory-installed windshield with a steel plate.

And yet, Demuth told me, in putting too much “scientific-ness into it,” they took out the fun—and began losing sponsors as well. That’s when the organizations approached McKinnie and told him they’d come up with a new format—the Bass Race—and wanted him to compete. There was to be no more “burping.” Contestants had to play music for thirty seconds and remain within a certain decibel range the whole time.

For all its musical appeal, the Bass Race is not appreciably quieter than SPL. Last year McKinnie broke thirty windshields. (He told me, regretfully, that in Florida insurance would only
cover three a year.) In fact, while current peaks of the Bass Race may be closer to 161 than the 181-plus top scores of dB Drag, the bodily experience of Bass Racing for everyone involved may actually be louder. This is because, in the modified cars of the dB Drag Race, materials like three-to six-inch windshields and special reflection panels guide the energy wave to the exact spot on the dashboard where the judge’s microphone is grounded. Recent changes in regulations have begun to factor in the catastrophic consequences of car-audio showdowns for the hearing of participants. The dB Drag Race competitors in the classes of 140 decibels and above are required to operate their cars from outside, remotely. “Adequate hearing protection” is required if you remain inside at lower decibel levels. Similar rules have come into play for the Bass Races. But I didn’t see any Bass Racers standing outside their cars the day I was at Explosive Sound and Video—and they were hitting some seriously high numbers. The windows and doors were left open. The protection-free crowd got to “feel the vibe,” to merge with the full blast of music.

A little while after we had spoken, Tommy, the King of Bass, at last demoed the Loch Ness Monster, playing his signature song, Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” I was standing about twenty-five feet away at the time. In the first few seconds, I had the uncanny experience of knowing that I was listening to music but being unable to hear the sound
as
music, to experience it as anything other than pure vibration. This is like hearing music if you’re deaf, I thought to myself. My pants legs and shirt suddenly
felt loose and began fluttering wildly free of my body—somehow as though the agitation was coming from inside me. I had a cell phone in one front pocket of my jeans and my recorder in the other, and they both began massaging my thighs like mini-vibrators. It was extraordinary: not exactly exhilarating but electrifying. I saw the opaque panes of glass in the hair salon—covered with decals reading
PERMS, TANNING, COLORING
—begin flapping like black sheets. Someone pointed up at the floodlights on poles probably twenty feet overhead—the bulbs appeared to be unscrewing from their sockets. It was like standing on the lip of the apocalypse.

After the demonstration, Buzz Thompson told me with a chuckle that employees from the drive-through McDonald’s more than fifty yards away were storming into the parking lot to complain that they couldn’t take any orders from customers because of the sound of Tommy’s truck. I asked him whether the natural development of the technology combined with the power of the Internet to accelerate that development meant that the decibel levels competitors hit would just keep getting higher.

Thompson reminded me that there is a problem with the dream of perpetual progress in the sport, since it is approaching a realm where the physics of sound begins to create threshold limitations. Already, he said, when you’re in one of these cars and they’re doing 163 or above, there is so much pressure inside the cars that the air molecules cease to behave like air. The air becomes so thick that you feel as if you are moving underwater. Come to think of it, much of the music I’d heard sounded as though the speakers were submerged. Essentially, Thompson said, at 163 and higher the air has ceased to be air. Competitors
today were already hitting in the low 180s. But once you hit around 194 decibels, sound ceases to be sound. Basically sound crunches the air and then releases it as it travels. At approximately 194 decibels, the pressure is twice the pressure of the atmosphere. That means there are no more air molecules to disperse. There is no more back-and-forth cycle. There is no more sound. There is only a forward-driving force of further compression. If SPL or Bass Race competitors one day hit 194 decibels, they will succeed in creating a shock wave. This is the realm of sonic booms and earthquakes.

Even after all of the explanations I’d heard of why people were drawn to the sport of loudness for loudness’s sake, I was still missing something. I got that there were more rules and regulations to car-audio competition than I would ever have dreamed possible, and that competition—however arcane the terms—was driving the amplification. But I pressed Thompson to give me his take on what lay at the core of the obsession.

“It’s just so sensual!” he moaned. “It’s sound! It’s feeling! It’s the attention you get! There’s so much to what you’re doing when you add a subwoofer to your car! And once you do it, you always have a taste for it. You find someone with louder, and you say, ‘Wow that louder is better than my louder.’ Every single guy out here wants to be louder. Nobody out here says, ‘Wow, that’s loud enough.’”

That made sense. Yet of course this sensuality, the sensuality of “hair trick” or “balls to the wall,” was not, to put it mildly, everyone’s sensuality. And, to an extent, Thompson’s analysis
amounted to saying, “These people are just born this way.” True enough, but I craved an answer with more reverb. I was standing next to Thompson sucking on the beer I’d been offered by Big Red’s Lady, pondering what, if anything, it would mean when scientists identified the genetic marker for “noise fetish,” when Thompson, who’d been waxing on about the feeling of 150 decibels inside an automobile, abruptly cried, “The entire state of Florida is designed to be driven around in! You can’t walk anywhere! You need a car to conduct your life down here. Every sixteen-year-old in Florida looks forward to getting a car! The car is your
life
.”

And suddenly the click came. What was that sixteen-year-old listening to before he got into his first boom car? When his headphones were off and his ears were naked to the stagnant air, I mean.

Let’s leave the boom-car drivers demoing that special something in the egg-frying parking lot. We need to find somewhere quiet where we can think about this a little harder. Thompson’s last throwaway lines point deep into the sound of our age—all the way to the realm of acoustical weapons. And even to the blessed white inner sanctum of the iPod. Another way to think about the noise we make today is as an effort to immunize ourselves against the noise pain we’re all suffering from anyway. Another way to view our new noisiness is as a diverse global initiative in soundproofing.

Freeway to Noise

A recent European Environment Agency
report estimates that within the European Union alone, traffic noise regularly exposes upward of 67 million people to decibel levels exceeding safety recommendations in terms of both hearing and cardiovascular health. (The United States has been slower to track this problem.) Traffic is the most pervasive noise on the face of the planet. While we might have mentally habituated to its depredation, as we now know, we will never physiologically acclimate to it—and our behavior, unconsciously or no, reflects that bodily failure to adjust.

When I thought about my time in Florida, I thought about traffic and noise. Whether in my hotel off the roaring ribbons of I-75, or on any one of my innumerable, interminable driving expeditions (since it was impossible to go anywhere without driving), what I heard was traffic. Oh, and any interior I entered was either playing loud music or blasting me with televised information. No wonder people who live in this kind of sonic
environment want to boom through it! At least then the noise you’re subject to—that low-frequency, vertebrae-vibrating bass earthquake punched up on your special something—buries the sound of your surroundings.

Indeed, much of the “unnecessary” noise people make is responding to existing sonic pain. We instinctually try to turn the tables on the sound that’s playing havoc with our equilibrium. A neat example of this can be found in the history of the Mosquito™.

A few years ago, a diabolical English inventor by the name of
Howard Stapleton developed
a product called Mosquito Teen Deterrent to disperse young people engaged in antisocial behavior. The device emits a sound near the upper end of the human hearing range—around 18,000 cycles—that almost everyone over the age of twenty has lost the ability to perceive. The Mosquito’s promotional literature describes the product as “the solution to the eternal problem of unwanted gatherings of youths and teenagers in shopping malls, around shops and anywhere else they are causing problems.” Thousands of Mosquitoes have been ordered and installed in Europe and North America. Demand seems to be on the uptick—along with outrage among various civil-liberty groups that have tried to legislate against the device for infringing on the rights of the teens, not to mention small children who are unwittingly blasted with sonic repellant. While the selectivity of the pain dealt out by the signal may be a factor of the pitch, the pain itself reflects the fact that the sound is being played at levels hitting ninety decibels—louder than standing next to an idling bulldozer. Stapleton says it’s not loud enough to cause hearing loss, likening it rather to
“a demented alarm
clock.” But here’s the thing: almost immediately after the Mosquito began to catch on, the high-frequency tone was co-opted by U.K. adolescents to create
Teen Buzz
, a cell-phone ringtone that would go unheard by teachers and anyone else old enough to object. The sonic weapon became one more acoustical device youth could turn back on those trying to silence them.