the eloquent delinquent

What to do about all this noise?

Have you ever thought to yourself during a typical day in the urban jungle: why is my environment so unnaturally loud? As long as I can remember I have had very sensitive hearing and as I have grown older I have become keenly aware of their inevitable degeneration. Last year for the first time in my life, I had a thorough auditory exam at MIT following concerns that I might be suffering from tinnitus. I was made to sit in a soundproof room and identify a range of tones at a multitude of volumes in both ears (thankfully, I was deemed to have perfectly normal hearing). My love for language & music necessitates that I keep my auditory range as robust as possible & I aspire to maintain the high quality of auditory sensory perception that I have been genetically endowed with well into old age. More recently on my daily commute to campus, a brisk 10 minute walk across the main traffic artery linking Cambridge to Boston -- the (in)famous Massachusetts Avenue -- I have become increasingly attune to the harsh, booming sounds made by a never-ending assortment of tractor trailers, buses, honking automobiles and the perennial construction. Unnaturally loud sounds bother me in many ways: in addition to damaging my hearing & jolting my thoughts, they give me nasty headaches. When I was in Europe a couple of months ago, I learned that the European Union has very stringent labor codes that prescribe maximum noise levels in the work place. To my knowledge, there are no such standards in the United States at the federal & state levels. Responsibility in this libertarian minded society lies with the individual & so I took it upon myself to start thinking more seriously about this issue. I am convinced that today's iPod generation will be suffering from widespread hearing loss in a few decades owing to the ever increasing volume of music from sources placed within the ear canal. I am sure we all have experienced sitting next to someone on a bus or walking past them and hearing the booming music from their ear buds at a distance (nevermind the raucous automobiles that are fitted with the highest wattage speakers that blare trite music). The problem here lies in our tendency to increase the volume above the natural limit to dangerous levels without realization so as to overcome ambient noise. The ubiquity of portable electronic devices, cell phones and MP3 players in particular, have placed increasing strain on our hearing system to cope with unusually high volumes placed at very close distances to our ears for prolonged periods of time. I gave up listening to music on headphones several years ago because I was alerted to this issue by a roommate of mine in my junior year at the University of Toronto whose mother was a professor of speech pathology (at the University of Western Ontario) who had advised her son never to wear headphones (rather austere, but nevertheless beneficial in the long run). I now wear ear plugs whenever I walk to campus or go running outside & have noticed that they have immeasurably enhanced my enjoyment of being outdoors. Some might think it strange to wear ear plugs while engaged in strenuous physical exercise, but I highly recommend it for you will be listening to your pulsating heartbeat and can better assess your workouts (try it if you haven't). I have experimented wearing ear plugs wherever I go and have discovered that I can have normal conversations and still hear necessary sounds (perhaps a tribute to my ultra sensitive hearing). Lately I have begun to wonder whether I could design a device that can selectively attenuate acoustic frequencies. My dream is to be able to stand in an airport runway and have a conversation at normal speaking volume with someone standing next to me. In other words, what if you could remove certain frequencies (like the bassy, rumbling sound of a jet engine) but admit vocal frequency ranges? Perhaps this can be done, but it would have to be manufactured cheaply to compete with inexpensive foam ear plugs which identically attenuate all frequencies. This is an interesting idea that I am pursuing.