In Pursuit of Silence (31 page)

Somewhere in the course of my tour, I was handed a glossy
B&K company profile. I flipped back the cover and on the opening page saw a big photograph of a burly man wearing a suede jacket, standing before a blurry barrage of urban neon. He might have been a rough-around-the-edges detective. In fact, he is Svend Gade, of Brüel & Kjær University, a mostly online course platform run by the company. Above his head runs the following quote: “Sound and vibration is all around us. It penetrates every aspect of our everyday world. Our challenge is to keep it from affecting the quality of our life.” The point, the brochure explained, is that we are increasingly aware of the myriad effects of sounds and vibrations on our health and happiness; there is no object or environment that couldn’t benefit from B&K’s techno-silencers.

Even if we are a long way from soundscaping entire cities, B&K presents a vision of how the future war against noise will be waged: with an arsenal of new, officiously harmonizing noises that can be projected over the gap where silence used to be.

A famous story by Jorge Luis Borges describes a land where, Borges writes, “the
Art of Cartography
attained such perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” Eventually even these maps failed to satisfy the cartographers, and they created a map that corresponded at every point with the empire itself.

I thought of Borges’s story when Doug Manvell finally gave me a crash course in noise mapping. Noise maps, he explained,
had actually been around for a long time. In response to an EU directive from the late 1980s, big employers began mapping factory-floor noise to identify zones requiring hearing protection. Then, in the mid-1990s, several German and Dutch cities launched broader noise-mapping projects of their own. In the late 1990s, John Hinton of the Birmingham City Council created a noise map that “was
very
well described—not only in terms of the map itself but in terms of the whole process,” Manvell explained. It became the predecessor of the maps eventually mandated by the END.

But what are noise maps? I cried.

To create a noise map, Manvell went on, “you need building heights, then all the road aspects—speed of vehicles, road-surface characteristics, and so on. A whole series of databases.” In fact, Manvell observed, while the information is presented in the form of an actual map, the true strategic document is a mass of statistics. The calculations required are so colossal that they were beyond earlier generations of computers. By way of example, he outlined B&K’s work noise-mapping Thüringen, Germany. Thüringen, he said, “which is a bit hilly, has 20,000 square kilometers of road-noise networks. We did it on a 50 meter grid with 600,000 individual road objects where the road changes over 5 million topographical data elements. It took 10 hours to do the calculation on 4 PCs, using the fastest software on the market. Buildings were ignored as, if included, their vast numbers and impact on calculation complexity would have exploded the calculation time. That’s the danger of pressing the start button. Data costs. A strategic noise map is not an acoustic problem but
a data-handling problem. We’re making strategic noise maps and they’ve got nothing to do with maps and nothing to do with noise.”

However much this might sound like a Zen paradox, the END requiring member states to produce them—and to meet tight deadlines to avoid massive fines—makes them very real in monetary terms.

After a couple more hours of tutoring, I began to grasp that noise maps basically chart all human movement, transportation infrastructure, major manufacturing, building types, and land contours within a given geographical area. Or at least that’s what I thought I understood—until I got more of the story when I talked with Colin Nugent, the EU project manager for noise, who is based in Copenhagen.

Colin Nugent is a young, handsome man from Belfast with a gentle brogue and an unflappable command of acronyms, an essential skill, given the labyrinth of agencies, committees, steering groups, studies, networks, and centers he must allude to in the course of describing the European pursuit of silence through policy.

In a therapeutically soothing voice, Nugent explained that the first phase of the directive mandated that by June 30, 2007, all member states should have completed noise maps that would chart noise levels during the previous calendar year for all towns and cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants, for all roads on which there were more than 6 million vehicular passages per year, for all rail lines on which there were in excess of 60,000
train “movements” per year, and for all airports with 50,000-plus air traffic movements.
“All in all
,” Nugent observed, “these are quite large sources, but there are a great many of them.”
In 2012, member states
are required to carry out the same procedure for agglomerations of 100,000 and above, doubling the number of cities involved.

But what about actual noise reduction? I asked. Where does that come in?

“Well exactly,” Nugent said. “There are also action plans.” The END required that no later than July 18, 2008, based on the first noise maps, “competent authorities” would draw up action plans “designed to manage, within their territories, noise issues and effects, including noise reduction if necessary” for all the sources charted in the maps.

In practice, things haven’t quite worked out like that. As of spring 2008, eleven member states hadn’t reported anything—let alone begun their action plans. Expired and unmet deadlines have continued to pile up ever since. “Plus,” Nugent said, “the directive states that if there is a significant change to any transport sources—like a major airport that extends a runway for another 1,000 flights or an extension of a major road, that would need to be included in the noise map.”

But aren’t roads and runways being built all the time? I asked.

They are, Nugent concurred. “So in essence the noise maps we’re producing are already out-of-date because the major road network is changing all the time.”

I asked whether what had been done so far at least provided the basis for the real business of reducing noise as mandated by the action plans.

“Well, noise reduction is not ‘mandated,’” Nugent said. “Member states are required to produce noise maps and action plans, but they’re not required to take any actions.”

“There are no requirements for any actual actions at
all
to reduce noise?”

None at all, Nugent calmly affirmed. That is left up to individual member states. All that the END requires them to do is to map and produce plans of things one might do to decrease noise based on what those maps show.

I was again experiencing vertigo. If these Borgesian cartographical extravaganzas, which were out-of-date before even being completed, carried no statutory power beyond their own colorful borders, why were they considered so important?

Because, Manvell and Nugent explained, with all their flaws they are yet a powerful tool to persuade politicians to take action. Hence the decision to present all this data as maps to begin with rather than just data streams. Presentation is key, Manvell said. “The visuals are what people want.”

Manvell explained how a politician armed with a noise map showing that his district was being exposed to unhealthy decibel levels could go to a national or EU body to argue that the area was entitled to a grant of so many euros for noise reduction. This is why, Nugent explained, his agency worked closely with the World Health Organization. The WHO is revolutionizing our assessments of the disease attributable to noise.

In 2009 the WHO issued a series of reports containing some of the most robust data ever compiled on
specific health hazards
of
noise. These reports are providing the basis for development of a new,
stringent set of noise
guidelines. They present devastating findings about the impact of traffic noise on the cardiovascular system, in particular. For the first time, such studies have been able to factor for socioeconomic differences that might influence lifestyle health issues. (Previous efforts to gauge the effects of noise pollution have been plagued by the difficulty of filtering out other health risks that are often part of the life package for someone residing near a major roadway or airport.) The studies also pinpoint the effects of noise on different zones within a single house.

It sounds promising. And it would, of course, be foolish to assume that, just because it’s never worked in the past, this won’t be the time that medical findings about noise translate into a public uprising. Nugent is thoughtful, hardworking, and dedicated. Rokhu Kim and his team are savvy and driven. But there’s a long road to travel. To date, as results of noise mapping begin trickling in from Europe and the United Kingdom, it seems clear that the maps are accurate at identifying high-noise-level areas—the kinds of areas that teams of college students like Rice’s tootometer scouts might be taught to identify with great accuracy by the naked ear alone. Middle levels are proving more difficult. The identification of low-sound-level zones has barely begun. Mostly, areas are designated quiet by default—points where the maps do not indicate exposure to high or middle levels of sound. Yet many of these areas, Nugent told me, were you to visit them, “would actually seem very noisy indeed.” The END introduces the concept of quiet areas in language suggesting that it’s been tacked on as an afterthought: states are required only to “aim to
preserve” them. In consequence, undeveloped quiet areas can get treated as noise-dumping locations to keep population centers from getting louder. Case in point: a recent plan by British authorities to reroute planes away from the city of Southampton by directing them over the New Forest, a picturesque region where people go for quiet recreation.

One certain result of this report will be funding for new studies, and a rededication to the noise-mapping efforts already under way. This will mean a lot more money spent on noise measurement and modeling for companies like B&K and for the agencies, like Nugent’s European Environment Agency, that work with member states to encourage compliance with the END. None of this comes cheaply.
The cost of noise mapping
Birmingham, England (a city slightly larger than San Jose, California), would run about £100,000 ($165,000). If the contractor is asked to obtain and “clean” much of this data, that figure could easily double.

In October 1931, Professor Henry J. Spooner, a highly regarded pioneer of the noise abatement movement, gave an address to a society of engineers on the progress of the movement to date. After noting the great success in recent years of devising new instruments to measure sound, Professor Spooner extended a note of caution.
“Important as the measurement
of noise is for so many purposes, there is a real danger that too much attention may be focused on it, and the suppression of unnecessary, devastating, harmful din neglected,” he said. “Happily, Sanitation Inspectors, when they take action against foul-smelling matter
or a faulty drain, have not to use a ‘yardstick’ or the like, to measure it.”