In Pursuit of Silence (22 page)

If you’re used to thinking of punishing sound as a good thing, it’s natural that you start thinking about how to share the pain. When I spoke with my boom-car aficionados, one name kept cropping up as a kind of idol of the car-audio competition world: Tom Danley. He was described, with a kind of awed chortle, as the individual who took subwoofer fever to its extreme. Danley was the inventor of the Matterhorn: the largest subwoofer in the world. “You’ve gotta hear about the Matterhorn!” Buzz Thompson told me.

Danley’s company, Danley Sound Labs, which is based in Georgia, features on its Web site a biblical “verse of the day.” When I first looked at the site the scripture reading was from the second book of Samuel: “How great you are, Sovereign LORD! There is no one like you, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears.” Danley traces his own fascination with low-frequency sound to the time when he was nine years old and his grandfather let him go into the pipe loft in a church.
“I didn’t know whether
to run or stay—but I stayed!” he recounted. And he began building his own speakers shortly thereafter.

His colleague, Michael Heddon, told me that Danley had been considered
“the Guy”
for subwoofers since the glory days of the mid-1980s to the 1990s. “Journey, U2, Bon Jovi—all those guys used Tom’s subs,” Heddon said. “The Michael Jackson
Thriller
tour had all Tom’s subwoofers doing the heavy lifting.” Cirque du Soleil uses his products in several venues in Las Vegas. IMAX is a customer. Danley has built loudspeakers for the home theaters of Bill Gates and George Lucas, and for many houses of worship.

It is not surprising, then, that when the military wanted a new weapon comprised of a massive subwoofer, Danley was their man. Hearing about this from Heddon, I tried to remember the food chain: Car-audio competition inspired the development of more powerful audio for everyone. More powerful audio inspires more powerful audio-based music. Ultimately we realize that what we’ve made to punish ourselves is virtually a weapon. Take this one notch further and it can be an
actual
weapon.

The Matterhorn boasts forty subwoofers powered by forty thousand-watt amplifiers. By deploying this speaker, the military would be able to create a sound wave to conceal the noise of a stealth aircraft launch. Another use, Heddon told me, would be to back the Matterhorn up to the entrance of a cave. “I’ll assure you that no one is staying in that cave, because they can’t.” The monstrous energy of the weapon’s sound would remain almost completely intact as it thundered forward great distances. “The Bible says all creation sings, but all creation
vibrates
,” Heddon noted. “This kind of sound—let’s say 150 decibels at 10 or 15 hertz at the mouth of the cave—that messes your eustachian tube up. You can get vertigo—all kinds of weird stuff.”

Indeed,
as Hillel Pratt
, a professor of neurobiology at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, has reported, the simulation of the vestibular organ by frequencies below audibility induces a discrepancy between the visual system and the
processing systems for everything from temperature and body position to the sense of touch and the activity of the heart. The soundtrack and the images of our film of the world are knocked violently out of sync. Once more, we’re back in futurist country. The vestibular organ, assaulted by powerful low-frequency noise, signals an experience of intense acceleration—of speed. The individual subjected to the Matterhorn becomes overwhelmed with motion sickness even when standing dead still.

“There’s really nothing like it in nature,” Heddon said. “There’s just nothing that emits massive amounts of continuous, low-frequency energy. When you get into big amplitude, low frequency and continuous, then you start to get into stuff that’s scary. If I hit you with a blast, I can stop you because your heart is knocked out of rhythm. Let’s say you hit a cave with the Matterhorn—you could create a cave-in.”

Abruptly, Heddon stopped. He’d begun by saying most of the data on the Matterhorn was classified; now he suddenly seemed to hear himself, and with no transition, switched course. “We’re just helping people have a good time with IMAX,” he said. “They’re blown away by what we do. We’re fortunate. We’re just blessed.”

I hung up the phone feeling pretty vertiginous myself. As I was listening to Heddon, I’d recalled a report I had read on the use of amplified noise at Guantánamo Bay. The report contained some interesting details about dissonant harmonic changes along the lines of Andy Niemiec’s work (in this case, dubbing Meow Mix commercial soundtracks over the sound of crying babies). One
line stood out. When James Hetfield, co-founder of Metallica, heard that U.S. interrogators were using Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as an instrument of torture on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, he laughed.
“We’ve been punishing
our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music forever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?”

When I think of the iPod, I think of Audiac.

In 1960, Dr. Wallace Gardner, a dentist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, collaborated with one of his patients, an acoustical expert named Licklider, to develop a new technology for pain management. Audio analgesia, patented under the trademark name of Audiac, purported to transform dental treatment into relaxation by way of loud sound. To be given Audiac, dental patients donned a pair of giant, heavily padded headphones like the ones worn by navy pilots. Then they would lie back on the chair and choose from one of eight musical selections (“Bali Hai” was a favorite) that had been mixed into a tape of
“masking sound”
similar to a waterfall. Whenever the dentist approached a sensitive spot, the patient twisted the knob to increase the volume of sound. The worse the pain, the louder the noise. According to Gardner’s research, 90 percent of patients said that Audiac reduced the pain of filling a cavity to the level of a mosquito bite. A couple of thousand were in use in dental offices across the country less than a year after Gardner got his patent. Soon Audiac was being brought to hospitals
for use in childbirth
and minor operations.

Audiac was actually invented to deaden the pain of noise itself. Because of a punctured eardrum, Dr. Gardner was tortured by the sound of his own dental drill. Licklider developed a way of diminishing the suffering by creating a louder, masking noise; the pair realized that the “controlled sound” of Audiac would “overlay the pain message to the brain” no matter what the source.

It’s not quite clear what scuppered the bright future of Audiac. The American Dental Society of Anesthesiology
mounted a hostile campaign
against the product—whether out of genuine concern about the side effects of the device (not just potential hearing damage but reports of patients entering into a hypnotic state) or from a desire to save their own investment in drug-based anesthesiology, it’s difficult to say. Obviously, the pain relief of Audiac came at a cost. But at least one contemporary firm,
Sound Pain Relief
, is now trying to resuscitate audio analgesia, invoking more fashionable explanations for its effects, like cross-sensory masking.

Reading back through newspaper reports of public response to the release of the Sony Walkman in 1979, the precursor of the iPod, it’s striking how often devotees of the device praise the Walkman as soundproofing against painful noise and the afflictions of modern life in general. This feature got as much attention as did its ability to supply music “wherever you want,” which Sony had focused on. Users claimed the Walkmen made commuting tolerable and provided relief from “the
awful sounds of the city.”
Anthony Payne, a New York TV producer interviewed
by
Time
magazine in 1981, declared,
“There are buses
, airplanes, sirens … You have to replace them with something louder, by force-feeding your own sounds into your ears.” A Manhattan computer executive called the Walkman “a great way of snubbing the world.”

We also come once more upon the connection between noise and speed. The Walkman’s very name contains the notion of motion. But the association went beyond walking to encompass any movement that enhanced the sense of personal freedom. Howard Bogaz, a carpenter
Time
interviewed while he was roller-skating in Venice Beach, summed up the appeal: “I take it when I ski or on long drives. I’m into my music! The sun is out, the wind is blowing, and you’re on your wheels!”
When Sony initially
released the Walkman in Tokyo, the launch centered on demonstrations of people listening while roller-skating, riding bicycles, and jogging.
One of the popular
television commercials for the product presented the Walkman as an instrument to make your body “fleet.” A woman in a leotard is shown engaging in graceful, dancer-like stretches in a light, airy room; after a few seconds, a male voice announces, “Now you can lose inches off your waistline effortlessly”—the woman pauses to switch the cassette player at her waist for a smaller model—“thanks to the new Super Walkman from Sony; the world’s smallest cassette player.” She resumes her motions.

Sony’s Walkman was sold as the ultimate portable music device, but it also used sound to transform the experience of mobility.

The iPod upped the phenomenal success of the Walkman to the point where people speak of an iGeneration. The iPod appeared in 2001. As of the fall of 2009, Apple announced that
220 million had been sold
worldwide. By way of comparison, sixteen years after its release, Sony had produced
a total of 150 million
Walkmans. Part of the explanation for the iPod’s extraordinary success may lie in the way that it amplifies the idea of personal sound as a surrogate for motion. With its enormous capacity for storage, the iPod is no longer about taking music anywhere you want; it’s about letting the music take you anywhere that processed sound goes.

In the same years that the iPod was taking off, and one began seeing cords dangling from more and more ears like bits of cranial wiring come unstuck, my own walking habits changed. My office is only five blocks from Central Park. When I first began working in midtown, at the end of the 1990s, I could get to the park in six or seven minutes. Today, at lunch hour or the end of the day when gridlock is at its height, it can take me fifteen minutes to walk the distance. The park is no longer an easy, quick break from the urban grid. It’s a thirty-minute back-and-forth commitment, and I walk there far less now than I used to.

It’s difficult to get statistics on the increasing congestion of pedestrian movement in major cities, but indubitably walking in any of the world’s major cities has become a more choked-up affair.
New York City population
growth began declining in the 1960s, with the largest drop, a whopping 10.4 percent, between 1970 and 1980. Then, between 1990 and 2000, the city grew an astonishing 9.4 percent—a figure you have to go back before the Second World War to approach. Though the numbers aren’t
quite as high,
the population of inner London
falls and returns to growth in close parallel with New York’s trajectory.
Tokyo, which also saw
a steep decline in population for several decades, has seen growth every year since 1997.