In Pursuit of Silence (24 page)

The conference brought together just about every major player in the soundproofing industry. I wanted to learn what was happening at the cutting edge of the business and came armed with a simple question: What could we do—more precisely, what could
I
do—to shut out the world and create a reasonable approximation of complete quiet?

Scores of vendors packed the mega-ballroom exposition hall at the Hyatt Regency Dearborn. Many of them were sloshing back drinks and seemed to be enjoying the kinds of uproarious conversations that would have been equally appropriate at Noise-Pro 2008. There were snake-oil-style soundproofers in loud suits manning booths arrayed with tiles and slabs of peculiar layered materials, canisters of sprays and foams, odd metal bits, rubber mats, door panels, as well as over-magnified, bleached-out photos on poster board of function venues, housing developments, cement blocks, trees, and pretty, pigtailed girls with their fingers to their lips above the word “QUIET.” Men and women who looked as though their products had been concocted for late-night-TV sales spots jostled up next to earnest northern Europeans dressed like influential architects and standing before black boxes projecting gray needles, faceless heads wearing headphones, and laptops in suitcases with screens displaying sharp, dancing green lines and complex spectral grids. Though there were exceptions, by and large Americans seemed to be making the stuff that actually got glued to, hammered on, or squirted into walls, floors, and cracks to cut sound down, while the Europeans were the sound-measurement jocks—devising ultrasensitive decibel counters, vibration analyzers, and software systems to figure out exactly what kind of noise problem you were dealing with.

I paused a second before a neat display of rough, pasty tiles at the booth of the International Cellulose Corporation. A bald, tan guy bent forward to read my name tag.

“How are you doing, George?” he asked.

“I’m doing well,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “If I was any better, there’d be two of me. And you don’t want that. Even I can only stand one of me.”

“So, listen,” I said. “I’ve got noise problems all over my home. What can you do for me?”

“George,” he said regretfully, “we only sell through licensed applicators, architects, and acoustical engineers. But … are you familiar with our new SonaKrete?” I shook my head. “It’s our new premium acoustical finisher and probably the product we’re most excited about right now. Unbelievably effective. George, they’re using this everywhere. Courtrooms. Restaurants. They’re putting it in the Freedom Tower. It occupies the niche between textured sprays and European-type plaster finishes that might sell for $35 a foot. Whereas this is $8 to $12 a foot.” And what exactly was SonaKrete? I asked. It was, he replied, an extremely smooth, “architecturally acceptable,” acoustical treatment that was “getting famous for doing custom, integral colors that soak right into the material.” It looked good to me, and I could just hear the commercial: “SonaKrete: The Krete That Made the Freedom Tower Fall Silent.”

I moved on to the Material Sciences Corporation. The written material I read on this company explained that “Whether it’s cars, dishwashers or computers, we live in a world where quiet equals quality in the minds of consumers.” Was that really true? There are stories about how, when quieter vacuum cleaners were introduced into the market, customers wouldn’t buy them because the sound suggested feeble suctioning power. “Put simply,” the promotional literature concluded, “at MSC we manufacture quiet.” While I tried to figure out how I felt about the idea of
manufactured quiet, the booth team approached saying that they wanted to talk about Quiet Steel™ roofing. Quiet Steel has been a successful product for years now in the realm of automobile manufacture, where it’s described as one of the company’s “family” of NVH damping products. (NVH: noise, vibration, and harshness—I love the idea of getting rid of harshness along with noise and vibration. The reverse would be a QSC product. Something offering quiet, stillness,
and
compassion.) MSC’s booth displayed little steel plates hanging on chains from stick-and-post arrangements in the manner of Chinese gongs. The salesman explained that it was “basically laminated steel, two layers, with polymer in between.” It can be used, he said, “wherever there’s radiated noise. Automobiles. Washing machines. Driers. Vacuum cleaners. Now roofs as well!”

He gave me a little wooden hammer and invited me to strike an untreated steel plate, and then give a whack to Quiet Steel. I did. The first plate, of regular steel, made a nice, reverberating cymbal sound. Quiet Steel made just a little, discreet, dent-thud. I half expected the Quiet Steel plate to say “Excuse me” after its polite little sound emission. The vendor excitedly told me that he had a washing machine treated with Quiet Steel and had recently left coins in the pockets of his pants. “My wife could barely even hear them clattering around inside the machine!” he marveled.

The danger, of course, with such effective noise, vibration, and harshness damping is that you might not hear sounds signaling that you’re in the process of demolishing your product. At another point in the conference I heard about what happened
when John Deere proudly
introduced soundproof cabs into its
agricultural machinery to combat the very real problem of farmers suffering noise-induced hearing loss. The machines were a hit—until farmers realized that they could drive across an entire field in their air-conditioned, stereo-equipped cabs dumping engine parts without realizing anything was wrong until they’d totaled the machine. That put a damper on silence as a selling point for heavy farm equipment.

At the 3M booth, a big guy with a flat face and a loud bang of a voice told me that the hottest new thing in soundproofing was microperforated film. It’s a new film that has holes in it that you can “tune” for absorption, I was told, and should be commercially available for large-volume usage (“like carpeting all the systems under an automobile hood”) in the next couple of years. When I asked where microperforated film could go, I was told, “Where can’t it go might be a better question. It absorbs all sounds anywhere you put it. And you can print on it.” What exactly does it do? I asked.

He told me that while most sound absorbers today are fiber based—using materials like fiberglass, polymeric foams, and materials based on polyurethanes and acoustic tiles—there are “environmental implications” for many of these substances, since they release particulate matter into the air. Micro perforated film, on the other hand, is a thin flexible sheet that can be stretched over anything with no loss of particulate matter. The sound hits these micro holes (you can control the cavity depth, which influences the sound-absorption spectrum) and the undesired frequencies get sponged up while other frequencies vibrate in a “free span” portion of the cavity.

Microperforated film might have been, as the 3M man told
me, “as hot as nanofibers were a few years ago,” but there was one word I heard whispered over and over in the Hyatt ballroom. Actually, two words: “Green Glue.” With all the high-tech products being flogged at Noise-Con, nothing was as omnipresent as this
“viscoelastic material”
(a gunky green plastic ooze that’s a dead ringer for the substance in the Dr. Seuss masterpiece
Bartholomew and the Oobleck
). It comes in tubes and buckets and can be squeezed in between just about any two surfaces to make a sound-killing oobleck sandwich. The noise waves pass through the first material, hit the layer of oobleck, and, as the company’s diagrams reveal, turn into a series of hapless red lines squiggling any which way they can in order to flee the oobleck. As Green Glue puts it: “the vibration energy” is “dissipated and gone.” Green Glue is probably the top-selling soundproofing product in the world today and was acquired last year by the massive French multinational construction materials firm Saint-Gobain. As Green Glue reveals, soundproofing doesn’t have to be all that state of the art in order to be pretty impressively effective.

Indeed, until very recently the art of soundproofing, even at its most sophisticated, boiled down to a handful of principles: blocking sound through mass or distance; reducing or damping sound by absorbing the waves in some kind of material, like heavy curtains; and decoupling the sound source so that it can’t transmit sound waves. Soundproofers may quibble, but basically from an end user’s point of view you’re either trying to knock out the noise or to suck it up. Dan Gaydos’s description of sound as a “brute force” might have been lifted from the annals of soundproofing; many of the basic tactics have the ring of military phraseology. Soundproofers speak of “isolating the noise,” “flanking
noise paths,” and “neutralizing or deadening sound vibrations” before they ever manage to invade your home. In broad outline, at least, these principles have also been known for a very long time.

We began soundproofing by blocking the entry of sound into our own heads. Probably the earliest literary reference to soundproofing occurs at the moment when Odysseus ordered his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax as their vessel approached the Sirens. True to the snake-biting-its-own-tail relationship between desirable and undesirable sound, this first-ever mass soundproofing event was not dedicated to protecting the sailors against obnoxious noise but to safeguarding them from a sound so enticing that it might tempt them to their deaths. Odysseus himself exchanged silence for stillness—getting roped to the mast but keeping his ears free to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime serenade.

The Greeks became adept at all manner of acoustical techniques in the process of navigating sound problems in their theaters. We still don’t fully understand how the interplay between sound and silence worked in these structures. Exploring the astonishing acoustics at
the giant theater of Epidaurus
, which enabled some 15,000 spectators to make out actors’ lines without a single subwoofer, researchers recently found that the stone seats actually serve in part as sound
blockers
. By tracking the way in which voices carry from the stage up through tier after tier of limestone seats, scientists found that natural corrugations
in the rock filter out lower frequency sound (such as the distracting noises of an audience stirring) while bouncing the higher frequencies, within which most human speech transpires, all the way to the back of the space. In its early iterations, soundproofing was less about creating quiet than about ensuring that the noise we wanted to hear wouldn’t get lost in the crowd.

There were, of course, many improvements in soundproofing methodology over the next hundreds of years, but the ability to mute a room really took hold in the muffled interiors of the nineteenth century. By the early 1800s, the soundproofing profession had grown enough to have its own jargon. It was then that the definition of “deafening” came also to mean rendering a floor or partition impenetrable to sound
by way of “pugging”
(packing empty space with materials ranging from earth and sawdust to hair and cockleshells). There were still kinks to be worked out in soundproofing technique, to be sure. The writer Thomas Carlyle discovered these, to his hair-tearing regret, when he tried to build a quiet study in his home.

Carlyle was a vociferous Victorian pursuer of silence. He often dissolves into raptures on the subject, as he did to one correspondent in 1840, writing
“SILENCE, SILENCE
: in a thousand senses I proclaim the indispensable worth of Silence, our only safe dwelling-place often … This shallow generation knows nothing of Silence: that is even the
disease
of it; will be the death of it, if not cured. ‘Self-renunciation’ too, that is
Silence
in one of its senses.” He is less uplifting on the subject of noise. In the midst of a rant against a
“vile yellow Italian”
organ-grinder who plied his street and ruined his summer, Carlyle wrote, “The question arises, whether to go out and, if not assassinate him, call the police
upon him, or to take myself away to the bath-tub and the other side of the house.”

Carlyle was not alone in his struggle for quiet. Rather, he was part of a surge of intellectual professionals in Victorian London who were making their homes their principal place of employment—and requiring a new standard of silence outside the walls in consequence. Street musicians were often their biggest complaint. Some did, indeed, station themselves before the homes of people they knew hated their sound, demanding money in order to leave. But many of them were also indigent immigrants desperate to make a little loose change. This was not the production of noise for noise’s sake. And the foreign-born status of many of these musicians triggered ugly racial profiling. The
City Press
described street musicians howling “like apes and baboons escaped from the Zoological Gardens, and looking much like these creatures too.” The mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage became so fixated on shutting down street music—he called it an “instrument of torture”—that he provoked an uprising. His neighbors grew so weary of his loud pursuit of silence that they broke his windows, shadowed him in a screaming mob, dropped dead cats across his doorstep, and threatened his life.