In Pursuit of Silence (23 page)

Perhaps the iPod took off when people’s actual freedom of movement became compromised to a degree never before experienced in history. We might go one step further and speculate about a larger overload, a mounting congestion of stimuli that drives us to try to recapture the lost sense of untethered acceleration through sound.

Even if we hesitate to tabulate precise correlations, I think it’s fair to assume that part of the iPod’s appeal is that it allows people to interpolate inside their headphones a sense of speed and motion that’s clogged up one way or another in the outside world.

Those who love the iPod are keen to sing the praises of the device. And what they have to say about their passion is remarkably consistent.

When self-professed “heavy users” are questioned about what makes the device so addictive, they often mention access to endless great tunes, but very quickly the argument shifts. For many people, it seems that iPods are less about the individual pieces of music they allow one to hear than about the overall sound they weave—the acoustical superhighway they open. People talk about how the iPod provides continuity through sound, stitching together experience through music. Over and over, people describe the iPod as providing a soundtrack for their lives. “It
makes everything harmonic,” said one fifteen-year-old. “Everything that was confusing it makes smooth and flow together. It gives the perfect soundtrack for your life. It makes everything become clear.” Stitching together fragmented experience and feelings, the iPod injects a new sense of flow into everything we do. It drives
us
. The iPod covers over the gaps, the silent holes in our day-to-day being, as nothing before in history. The iPod gives the user 24/7 access to audio analgesia.

In my own conversations and in interviews I’ve read in which people talk about why they love their iPods, one no longer hears, as one did with the Walkman, about the need to block out awful city sounds. Instead, what comes up again and again is the ability of the iPod to
“filter out distractions
,” including people talking on cell phones, playing digital games, and playing music too loudly on their own sound devices—as well as the magnetic pull of Internet noise on users themselves. The iPod is touted not for its ability to mask over old infrastructure sound but for the way it blocks out the discretionary din that got plastered on top of that layer and defines the new noisiness of the digital age. Based on how people speak about their iPods, it would seem that today the nexus of pain is not so much any single loud noise as it is our diffraction between multiple stimuli engaged in a continual “boom-off.” Rather than ranting about the “alienation of the iGeneration,” we have to ask ourselves what we did to make our larger soundscape so disposable that it became the sonic equivalent of fast food.

And still, as with the Audiac that tried to end dental pain by increasing noise, the cure in the end may be worse than the disease.

If you poke around the Internet, you’ll find numerous stories about people on foot or riding bicycles being hit by cars, purportedly because they were wearing iPods and couldn’t hear the approaching machine. Swinton Insurance, a large U.K. firm, recently declared that
one in ten
minor traffic accidents are now attributable to “Podestrians,” pedestrians listening to personal sound devices. Most of the time, the Podestrians aren’t hurt themselves, according to Swinton, but cause rear-end collisions when one car slams on the brakes to avoid hitting the walker wearing headphones.

We haven’t quite evolved beyond the need to take the acoustical measure of our environment.
When Dirksen Bauman
, a professor of Deaf cultural studies at Gallaudet University, began telling me about a group of people who’d abruptly lost their hearing, I assumed he was going to describe the psychological experience of being suddenly cast into silence. In fact, each person in this group, recounting their initial shock at having gone deaf, commented that they did not think to themselves, “Oh how terrible—I can’t hear anything.” Rather, what they experienced was a deep sense of “
Where am I?
” “Their whole sense of place, the cues they use, the foundation of how they situated themselves in the world around them, were gone, without them even having realized until then what that foundation had been based on,” Bauman said.

Our ears may have been more sharply attuned to this problem when sound devices first became popular. Shortly after the Walkman’s release, the dangers of blocking out the soundscape
occasioned a number of legislative initiatives to restrict their indiscriminate use. Within two years of the Walkman’s appearance,
nine states banned the use
of headphones while driving.
Woodbridge, New Jersey, went further
, passing a law forbidding pedestrians from listening to headphones when they stepped onto the street: $50 or fifteen days in jail was the penalty for violating this law. A member of the New York City Council tried to have a similar bill passed there. But what seemed a growing movement soon trailed off. Enforcement was too difficult. The allure of noise in motion was too great. Some people would say we all became more nimble at gauging where we are in space without hearing the world around us. I suspect we just got habituated to being more clumsy and collision-prone.

But what about the more obvious problem of losing the ability to hear at all? There have now been multiple studies indicating that the use of personal sound devices at sufficient volume poses the risk of hearing loss. What has been far trickier to ascertain is the number of people who regularly listen to their MP3 players at levels that threaten hearing. By and large, what studies have reported is that there are young people who regularly listen to their iPods too loudly; but the numbers, while significant, are not alarming. That, of course, depends on your definition of alarming.
The most authoritative
recent study, a joint undertaking by the University of Colorado at Boulder and Children’s Hospital Boston, places the percentage of teens who listen to iPods at dangerous levels somewhere between 7 and 24 percent of the population.

More interesting than the parade of statistics on high-volume iPod use are the findings about how young people react to learning about these hazards. The UC Boulder/Children’s Hospital Boston study found that teens who are told most forcefully by their peers and others about the dangers of loud iPod use respond by … turning up their iPods. The more these teens were made aware of the damage they were doing to themselves, the more damage they did.

It’s a poignant finding. The teens’ response points toward the built-in limits of antinoise activism. At a certain point, whether out of evolutionary aggression or our general cultural predilection for challenging whatever threatens our right to make some noise, we react to being told to turn down the volume by doing precisely the opposite.

What, then, should we do? Educate people less about the dangers of noise so that they won’t feel that their right to be loud is being threatened and will keep noise levels lower of their own volition? Perhaps when it comes to certain teenagers, yes. This would be a version of the legalize-drugs argument. But the noise problem may be even more complicated than the drug problem—on many levels.

For one thing, we don’t really have a handle yet on the ways the new noisiness is damaging our hearing. For another, the whole debate about safe levels of sound may be basically moot. According to Jim Hudspeth of Rockefeller University, who studies the biophysical and molecular bases of hearing, even lower sound levels that are tolerable for a short period can be damaging over the long run. “Living in New York City, we’re very aware of noise all around us that’s not immediately painful, but the question
is whether spending hours and hours with that exposure causes permanent damage,” Hudspeth said. “Remember when the Walkman came along and it was a big deal? Now we have the iPod, and it’s ubiquitous. With the iPod, people have something stuffed in their ears all day long—at work, while commuting, even while exercising and having meals, they have those wires stuck in their ears. Well, even if their level of sound exposure is moderate, it’s not clear that sufficient duration of exposure won’t cause real damage.”

Once again, the issue may be less about literal loudness than about constant inundation. It might prove to be that surprisingly few hours a day at a surprisingly unpunishing sound level is enough over time to dramatically degrade our hearing. If you thought it was hard telling your teenager to turn down the music on their personal sound device, try telling them to turn it off altogether. “Turn off your iPod at least eight hours a day or ten years from now you will not have any high-frequency hearing!” I can just see the volume dial spinning smoothly round and round to drown out the sound of
that
warning.

Home Front

At this point I thought that I understood a little better why our world sounds the way it does. For a combination of evolutionary, commercial, infrastructural, and sociocultural reasons, there’s more continual, inescapable noise than ever before. And the new noisiness that’s tipped us over the edge into the land of loud may be the hardest to mitigate of all. Why? Because we ourselves crave that noise to keep us feeling energized, youthful, focused, free, fast—and protected from all the other noise we can’t control. But that doesn’t make the need for silence any less profound. How can we opt out of the world of noise? What can we do in practical terms to soundproof our lives other than by just making more masking noise?

In a summer of a thousand bass-heavy thunderstorms, I traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, to attend
Noise-Con 2008
. The conference billed itself as an event “facilitating interaction among a
wide spectrum of noise control professionals.” I listened to lengthy papers on subjects it had never occurred to me anyone had ever given the slightest thought to, such as “The Effects of Wear Estimates and Prediction Practices on the Production of Planetary Gear Whine” and “The Influence of Body Cavity Acoustic Modes on Booming Noise During Acceleration.” Some of the essays sounded as if they could have been lifted from a poem by John Ashbery, such as one from NASA entitled “Vibration Response Models of a Stiffened Aluminum Plate Excited by a Shaker.” Others smacked oddly of lines cribbed from a 1950s etiquette book: “Ceiling Performance Is Best When No Touching Is Allowed.” Then there were the more cocktail-party-minded presentations, like one on mitigating noise from a private racetrack. (Its author told me he had recently done a study for a major theme-park operator on roller-coaster noise in response to complaints from surrounding communities. The main thing this study discovered was that by far the most annoying noise at the theme park came not from roller coasters but from musical concerts.) The event also boasted many, many papers on airplane, airport, vehicle, and road noise, along with a special session by a somewhat mysterious body known as the Noise Control Foundation. I learned a great deal. What I was most interested in, however, was not the papers but the vendors.