In Pursuit of Silence (27 page)

Indeed, if there’s nothing else to hear, at a certain point our own ears will often begin to make sound. When I talked with Jim Hudspeth about the dominant role played by the ears’ built-in amplifiers in the hearing process, he remarked that 85 percent of normal ears can produce one or more tones continually in a quiet environment. “Our own ears make noise?” I asked, incredulously. “Yes,” he said in his own unflappable tone. “That sound is typically over months, or years. They aren’t interrupted and the signals don’t change over time.”

These so-called “spontaneous auto-acoustic emissions” (perhaps the swankiest of our bodily emissions) are, in fact, currently a major area of study for Hudspeth and others because they shed light on how our ears amplify sound. In a quiet place, the ears of many vertebrae become unstable and start sending off tones. The notion is not, Hudspeth told me, that the tones are useful in and of themselves but that they represent a situation similar to that of a PA system in an auditorium. Ordinarily, the PA system is turned up enough that it will be able to amplify a voice, but not so excessively high that it begins to oscillate. The amplifier of the ear, also, constantly adjusts itself to deal with ambient sound. In a quiet environment it turns itself on. “In a really quiet environment,” Hudspeth went on, “the amplifier keeps turning itself up in response to the lack of input until it goes unstable, starts to oscillate, and begins to emit sound.” If we were really able to soundproof our lives, we might have to start dealing with regular feedback noise from our own ear amplifiers as these cranked higher and higher to try and make out something to hear.

Granted, in the current aural climate, the prospect of mass outbreaks of spontaneous auto-acoustic emissions is nothing to
lose sleep over. For most people, as Hudspeth explained, a far more likely scenario is that “overstimulation from a loud environment will damage the hair cells enough that they can no longer contribute effectively to the active process at all.” In layman’s terms: we’re frying our amps, dude.

By the time I’d gotten through speaking with a slew of soundproofers and exploring dozens of products, I realized that, yes, if you have the money and the time—but mostly the money—you can find a way to soundproof just about anything. Yet I’m uneasy with the notion of quiet as a consumer good. Jeff Szymanski, an acoustical consultant who took part in the Noise Control Foundation panel, described how he’d recently gone to purchase a dishwasher and got caught up comparing the noise output of different machines. In the end, the issue he had with buying a quiet product, he said, was that
“the quietest products
are also the most expensive. So right now it’s seen as a premium, as in—if you’re into luxury you can buy noise control.” I rankle at the thought of silence as a rich man’s reward.

There’s a further problem, one that pertains even if state-of-the-art soundproofing were one day to be made as cheap as subwoofers. I definitely think everyone could use more soundproofing in their lives. But—as I said at the outset of this book—I don’t actually want to hear as few sounds as possible. The opposite! I want to hear as
many
sounds as possible. What kind of soundproofing is going to help me with that?

Once again, the new noisiness is a problem both because of
the silence it destroys and because of all the other, flickering sounds it takes away. The further I went in my research, the more I found myself forced to reckon with how often I liked hearing the noises of people going about their rounds of domestic being in the same way that I liked listening to birds. I like the
tings
of glass and tableware, the pastiche of voices, swinging doors, and lifting blinds. Of not necessarily brilliantly played instruments being practiced. And of impish children streamering gales of silliness over even my most solemn ponderings. That unpredictable panoply of unprocessed sound—when not too loud and when
sometimes
broken up with something like silence—is part of why I continue to live in a city.

Yet if so much of today’s noise really is discretionary, what better solution than to distribute automatic quiet kits to everyone, enabling them to manufacture their own discretionary silence? Arm us all with Silence Machines and we can go around zapping every noise we find obnoxious in our vicinity—creating “personal sound shadows” right and left and not having to worry anymore about how much noise our environment may be making. Free choice of whether to zap or zazz for everyone!

You’re right, but … I have a confession to make. When I really think about it, I don’t actually feel much better about a world in which everyone has their own personal Silence Machine, sealing them in private silence cones, than I do about one in which everyone is walking around with their iPods turned up loud. Soundproofing, after a certain point, is just another way of cutting oneself off, and I don’t want to feel cut off. More than that, I don’t want to feel like I
want
to be cut off. More than that,
I don’t want other people to want to be cut off, either. Here we all are, after all.

Soundproofing is terrific like bulletproof flak jackets are terrific. But wouldn’t it be better still if we didn’t have to worry about getting shot all the time?

If the technology on display in the grand ballroom isn’t a magic bullet for the pursuit of silence, what
is
the answer?

Before I left Dearborn, by chance I experienced an hour of almost total silence. One of the perks of attending Noise-Con was that its organizers had arranged a special tour for us of the Ford Rouge Factory and Application Research Center. We were to be given behind-the-scenes insights into, among other things, the way in which the latest line of Ford S-150 trucks had managed to reduce noise, vibration,
and
harshness so that they ran more smoothly and quietly than ever before.

As matters turned out, the summer of 2008 coincided with the moment when the crisis in the auto industry came home to roost. When my busload of Noise-Con conventioneers got to the plant, we discovered that Ford had suspended production of all 2009 trucks for at least ninety days. The vast, vast factory was dead. Looking over the factory floor from an elevated observation deck that laps the perimeter of the space was like looking into a white metal forest, crisscrossed here and there with orange bars and yellow girders. Hundreds of black hoses hung motionless from the ceiling. The conveyor belts were frozen, conveying nothing: “Little town, thy streets for ever more will silent be.”
Massive clean saurian machines loomed soundless and still. Every fifteen minutes or so, a little plant vehicle would emerge from somewhere, swirling off into the depths of the white forest for who knew what purpose. It was an awesome and terrible sight, even if, like myself, you hold no particular affinity for the car industry. No form of soundproofing for the auto industry could ever approach the efficacy of bankruptcy.

I stood there a long time. At last, a heavy, forlorn woman in her fifties—some kind of official Ford tour guide—appeared next to me, sighing, gazing down at the floor. She waved her hand vaguely toward the massive machinery just beneath us. “Here, in the chassis area, with all the parts being brought in—door holders going back and forth, drills and guns—I imagine all the workers would be wearing earplugs,” she said. And then as inexplicably as she’d appeared, she slowly drifted away.

I remained for a time, and then slowly orbited that great space. The only sound in the entire factory came from video screens planted at regular intervals. These were playing loop tapes on which faces would suddenly appear announcing, for example, “Welcome to steering-wheel installation! I’m Don.” Or: “Hi! I’m Bob. I’m a windshield installer. Welcome to windshield installation.” The chipper voices of these spectral workers floated up like soap bubbles in the deserted Rouge Factory, then popped into true silence.

On the bus back to the Hyatt, I stared out heavily filtered windows at endless, multilane highways—the Great Horizontal
Wall of America—while the air-conditioning roared around me. What’s the answer? I asked myself again.

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? If the key isn’t to soundproof one’s personal life—because one cares about sound in the public sphere—the true road to silence must lie in a change of public policy. We must all go out as good, concerned citizens and support enlightened legislative reform to combat noise. We have to steel ourselves to fight small battles and big wars—taking on individuals, corporations, politicians. We have to drive home the damage noise does to everyone and demand our right to live lives that are noise free just as we have a right to smoke-free environments. We progressives must hold vigils and marches and take back the night from the Loudites! Let’s all stand up right now, cup our hands to our mouths, and start making a noise about noise!

I had to stop myself before I got not only carried away but carried off. Spoiling for a brawl, I headed out to see what the hell was going on in terms of noise policy.

This Is War!

The pursuit of quiet through policy certainly makes for lots of loud headlines. The moment I plunged into the subject, I came across a huge front-page article in the
New York Times
titled
“Clamor Against Noise
Rises Around the Globe.” Noise, the article announced, is now recognized as “the most ubiquitous and most annoying” of all forms of pollution and is “under new attack on many fronts.” At stake are “countless billions of dollars and possibly the mental and physical health of millions of people.” The article describes a new movement to combat noise pollution involving the United Nations; federal, state, and local governments; science and industry; the legal profession; and private citizens. It cites a study in which rabbits and rats subjected to urban noise for just 10 percent of each day gave birth to defective fetuses at a rate
twenty-five times
greater than that of rats living in quiet. In addition, it reports a huge spike in mental illness around Heathrow Airport. In the United States alone the cost of noise is upward of $4 billion a year “in compensation payments,
accidents, inefficiency and absenteeism” due to noise trauma, according to the World Health Organization. On the upside, an environmental conference at the United Nations has identified noise as a vital area for “international study and control.” Congress is introducing a host of new federal noise-control measures. The signs of progress come none too soon. Dr. Vern Knudson, an internationally renowned acoustics expert and chancellor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, predicts that if noise levels continue to increase the human race will go the way of the dinosaur.

The only problem is that this article was published on September 3, 1972. Attempts to defeat noise through policy have been breaking on the horizon for more than a century.
On October 1, 1935
, when Mayor La Guardia officially declared war on noise—particularly that produced by traffic, cabarets, and loudspeakers planted on the sidewalks in front of stores—150 leading city organizations backed the initiative, and within the first four days of the drive the police issued
a total of 5,317 warnings
. By the end of the month, this figure had
ballooned to 20,546
, along with 175 summonses. Thousands of letters from citizens poured into La Guardia’s office applauding the campaign. New York’s Finest went the extra mile to investigate complaints as unusual as one from a woman in the Hotel Pierre who reported that she was going mad because a seal was keeping her awake all night. Instead of giving her the flipper, the police tracked down the offending animal in the Central Park Zoo and arranged for it to be transferred to Brooklyn. The war appeared to be a success. Yet a few years later, with the battle still raging, the press pronounced it a “brave but pathetically ineffective anti-noise campaign.”