City Sounds Are Alienating And Welcoming

On the A Line headed downtown from Harlem, four teenagers yell their conversation over the clatter and squeal of the decrepit subway car. One of them shushes the others, but they laugh in her face. We make noise. The machinery around them agrees. When I get out at Columbus Circle, I check the reading on a sound meter. These are sound pressures loud enough to damage inner ear hair cells. More than a few hours of exposure can permanently impair hearing. The teenagers’ voices were loud but dwarfed by the power of wheels, brakes, and metal boxes jolting at speed along uneven tracks. Cities are indeed noisy places, but it is not only loudness that distinguishes their soundscapes. The ambient sound level in many tropical and subtropical forests often approaches or exceeds seventy decibels. Some tropical cicadas are as loud as the subway, blasting at one hundred decibels. When visitors from the city come to rural Tennessee in late summer, they complain that they cannot sleep for the insect racket, a reversal of the usual narrative about noise in cities and the countryside.

Let There Be More Light

The notion that nature is quiet is a product of expectations and experience in northern temperate regions. In Japan, Western Europe, or New England, the forest is indeed much quieter than the city, especially in the colder months of the year when insects, frogs, and birds are soft voiced or absent. The same is true in polar regions or the mountains where quiet reigns in the calm between windstorms. But it is often clamorous in places where plant life abounds and animal diversity is high. I take a walk across Midtown Manhattan, sound pressure meter in hand. Just south of Columbus Circle, workers are cleaving the street’s concrete. Like surgeons, they incise the skin to reach the arteries and nerves below. Only two of the crew of five wear hearing protection. A young girl scrunches her face in pain and clamps her palms over her ears as she passes. Adults walk past, unflinching. A block north, a bus lets off its air brakes right as it draws level with me, startling a passing snowy canine puffball so that it jumps forward and yanks on the leash. Two blocks on, construction workers drop a metal pile of scaffolding tubes.

The Way That It Goes

The clatter breaks the stoicism of a couple of suited walkers, causing them to twitch, then dart their heads around. Loudness is stressful and sometimes painful, but so, too, is immersion in a soundscape where explosions and poundings arrive seemingly at random. I feel as if I’m walking through a dark space where unseen hands sporadically reach out to slap and shake me. In places where humans do not dominate, sudden loud sounds are rare and are usually cause for alarm. The sudden appearance of a stealthy predator. Each sound stabs us with a surge of adrenaline. In the rain forest, the raucous cries of toucans and macaws flying in pairs over their vast domains taper in and out as the birds approach then depart. The chorus of cicadas and frogs also waxes and wanes in rhythms that, although sometimes overwhelming in their power, do not arrive as shocks to our ears. Vigorous ocean waves are soothing in their regularity. We see, feel, or hear the storm approaching. It is the rare thunderclap that comes out of nowhere that is alarming. Now human nervous systems that evolved amid forest and savannah sounds find themselves unprepared for the city.

Flip The Switch

In a day walking around Manhattan, I hear more unexpected bursts of loud sound than my ancestors likely experienced in a lifetime. Loud sounds can lead to hearing loss, whether the immediate damage caused by jackhammers and other ear busters, or the slow erosion of inner ear hair cells brought on by years of exposure to subway stations, construction noise, or busy traffic. Hearing loss then leads to other problems, such as loss of social connections and an increased likelihood of accidents and falls. Noise not only assaults the hairs in our ears. When unwanted sound hits us, whether from an airplane, passing trucks, or clatter in our homes, blood pressure spikes, even when we are fast asleep. Noise also fragments sleep and increases stress, anger, and exhaustion during waking hours. Our hearts and blood vessels suffer. Heart disease and stroke increase with exposure to noise, likely because chronic exposure steeps us in stress hormones and high blood pressure. City noise can also disrupt levels of fats and sugars in the blood. Children bear an especially high burden because noise disrupts cognitive development. Exposure to chronic aircraft, traffic, or rail noise at schools leads to difficulties with focus, memory, reading, and test performance. Laboratory experiments on unfortunate rats and mice confirm that noise both changes physiology and impairs brain development. Sound’s nature makes it an especially problematic source of distress. Unwanted light is easy to block by closing our eyes or with a curtain. Noise, though, moves through solid matter, finding ears that are always open, always listening. Few other regions have measured these effects with as much precision, but the costs of noise may be even more severe elsewhere than in Europe. Measurements of noise in African cities, for example, often exceed European urban sound levels. In general, these effects are worsening as roads and skies get busier and industrial activities expand. The burden of city noise is unequally shared. Sound pollution in cities is a form of injustice. Yet we are also a species that loves the soundscape of home. We not only adapt to and tolerate city noise, sometimes we bond to it as a signature of culture and place, the sonic vibe of our neighborhoods. City sounds, then, can paradoxically be both alienating and welcoming, sources of harm and of belonging. The contrast between the soundscape in West Harlem and Park Slope is a result of more than 150 years of unjust city planning. In New York City, the sonic manifestations of power inequalities sometimes also extend to wealthier neighborhoods.