Noise pollution (or sound pollution) is a modern day era problem, and if I dare say disease. It’s getting more and more difficult to isolate ourselves, especially in urban environments.
It never ceases to amaze me that blocking noise/sound (one of the weakest forces) is very difficult, whereas blocking light (being fastest and more “powerful”) is very easy.
It might sound futuristic, but I expect noise canceling force fields to become an everyday household thing in a few years ;-)
I suspect you don't appreciate how much quieter modern devices are growing to be. The hum of electric lights is mostly a thing of the past. As we move to larger electric motors, the roar of gas motors will become a thing of the past.
Obviously, some things are just loud. My kids hate how loud the frogs are next to our house. And blowers will remain loud. As are fast cars.
But, I really believe the future will sound vastly different in most cities. Would be neat to hear the differences through the years. Moving from horses to pully based carriages to gas cars. Now to electric cars. We have moved really fast.
Past ~20mph-30mph, tire noise matches engine noise.
In the US, at least, this means that the vast majority of streets will not see much benefit from EV transition, at least with regard to road noise. The quality of the noise will change, but not the total volume.
As an anecdotal reference point on road noise, I live within a couple miles of an interstate, and the noise I tend to hear does not have discernible engine noise. This is, of course, from vehicles moving at a very different speed than any within a neighborhood.
This is true in a scientific, not practical sense, in any American city.
Engine noise always dominates, because 1% of cars are simply purposefully obnoxiously loud, and you need to be powerful and well connected to get enforcement of existing laws about vehicle noise in your neighborhood.
Yeah I don't mind the traffic noise outside of our house - it's mostly road surface noise which is dampened to white noise, and most petrol engines aren't that loud at those speeds. But it's the occasional sports car or moped that is the most annoying. Those are getting replaced by electric models too, but I wish they did something about the noise decades ago.
For me, while I find the 1% of purposefully obnoxious engines to be annoying, the thing that grates on my nerves is anything more constant. So for me, road noise dominates in what gets under my skin, not engine noise.
I cannot speak for you or anyone else, except to say that you have no right to speak for anyone else, either, who has not granted such right to you.
Devices with constant hum getting quieter can actually make noise annoyance worse! The brain is good at filtering out constant noises, so they are usually less bothersome. But their sounds can actually help masking out more annoying sounds (variable/unpredictable in loudness and/or pitch). This can be used as (part of) a mitigation strategy for noise annoyance.
My point with the hum was that even lights have lost the sounds they used to make. My gut is our future is far quieter than the current world.
Again, there will still be loud things. But a lot of the noise of the modern world will go away. It is kind of startling how much of the modern world is gas motors running.
Agreed for consumer products. We are generally much better at noise in product engineering than before, solutions are lower cost, the know-how more widespread. Electric motors with electronic control can be very quiet. Engineering plastics with complex geometry accommodates advanced acoustical designs at very low cost. And many consumer products are in rather late stages of refinement, where manufacturers are looking for added qualities to try to keep prices up.
or a revamp on aesthetics with gardens full of fruit trees and other cute flowers than a bunch o grass dating the time where lawns were a symbol of status [0]
Way quieter, but still noisy because of the whine of the engine and air. But also, for anything but small backyard jobs, they don't last enough or you have to end up with a backpack battery model. I'm sure that'll improve over time but for professional use, the energy density of petrol won't be beat.
This is mostly an engineering problem I think. The new Dewalt DCBL777Y1 leaf blowers are so quiet that even on loud I can use it in my garage without feeling like it’s loud or my watch triggering a sound alert. With my gas leaf blower, even outside it’s deafening and my watch immediately triggers. And the electric one is 2x more powerful than the gas one (in CFM, no bs about a smaller nozzle and “high mph”, the thing BLOWS). It also works upside down and doesn’t dump exhaust so I can use it inside as well as upside down when drying my car. No shill, I paid full price for mine and have no affiliation with Dewalt, just surprised and happy. I expected to return it because I didn’t believe it would be better than my gas blower. That gas blower has been on a shelf for the last 3 months. I’ll probably just sell it, there’s no use case where it’s better than the Dewalt except for long runtimes, which I don’t need.
Totally possible. I have the Ego blower and it is much much quieter than any gas blower I ever had. Even better, I'm not worried about the fumes I'm breathing in from it. I'd still hesitate to say they are quiet, though.
To your point, with gas blowers, I know when one is in use in the street. With the electric, I tend to know if in the yard. So, huge improvement. I'd expect if you really hate the sound and are in an apartment complex, you will still hear them some.
I find that with blowers the worst is the amount of dust the throw back in the air. If someone happens to have an air quality device check it the next time there a blower working near
We have people who deliberately modify their cars, trucks, and motorcycles to make them even louder. If EVs really caught on to the point most people had them, I would not put it past them to mod theirs to play loud vroom-vroom noises over speakers to match the volume level of ICE cars.
Noise pollution (or sound pollution) is a modern day era problem, and if I dare say disease. It’s getting more and more difficult to isolate ourselves, especially in urban environments.
This feels true to me, but I suspect it’s not. Victorian industry was _loud_, and cars now are quieter than ever.
But no one drives cars any more. They drive trucks. And motorcycles. And anything with engines designed to tell everyone how powerful they are.
I appreciate my friends/neighbors with electric cars. They do not offset the neighbors with F150s, Silverados, Tundras and other behemoths with v6/v8 gasoline engines.
Cars are a very big carrot for hard work. They are the modern status symbol and toy which is available for entry to all budgets. Generally, big cars are luxorious, loud cars are fast. No one is gonna work their ass off to move from a 2003 Prius to a 2025 Prius. Plenty of people work their ass off to get a sexy car and to keep it on the road.
So, hypothetically of course, those people would be less stressed out if those cars were not available, as it would be one less attainable status symbol? No downside there I think.
The carrot isn't necessarily stress because you do it because you want to, not because you have to. Without shortish term goals work is often just a chore you do to survive and so your parents don't nag you. Maybe so you can own a house by the time your entire life has elapsed one more time in the wage cage.
Edit: Missed the status symbol itself being stressful. I don't think so. There's a lot of pride in just your status moving up. You get a 90s 7 series, you're happy as hell because it's yours. Moved from daddy's money to self sufficient. Your first car. Then you get a nice 00s 5 series, we moving up in the world. Then you get an old Jag as a weekend thing, oh shit, we getting fancy. It just gives you a pleasant feedback loop every year to couple years.
1. consensus on what is "big" and what is "loud" is politically impossible.
2. In the US at least, all is allowed except for what is explicitly forbidden. 3. So you're going to have to define what is too big and what is too loud to make it forbidden. go back to #1
As long as something is measurable, you can define it, even politically.
"Loud" can be defined as dB, perhaps a distance from the source of the sound or from a neighborhood/business etc. Ex. Any sound you produce much have adequate dampening or distance such that school zones and residential zones do not recieve greater than 75dB from any singular source, nor 90dB from the combination of all sources. Then legally concerts must use different venues, planes must take a more difficult path to avoid the nearby airport neighborhoods, etc. Maybe walls erected next to speedways.
"Big" would probably need greater specification. One that already exists is lane width, so you can base things off that. Ex. Single-axle vehicles may not have a height greater than its width, where width is measured as the distance between lugnuts in the tightened position of the left and right wheels, the greater distance if the front and back wheels are at different distances.
For the purpose of the conversation, I would say Victorian era classifies as "modern". It's a vague word with different possible meanings, but in many contexts "modern era" is taken to mean "since the industrial revolution" (give or take).
It's not a continual rise in noise levels – there are ups and downs – and for some things volume levels may decrease while for other things noise may increase. But by and large, there seems to have been an upward trend for quite a few decades now.
Possibly. But no cars, no AC, industry built away from housing. Of course there were horses, trains, loud people.
One place that can be quite eye-opening in this regard is Venice. It's really quiet, even when you hear people talking, there are no cars at all and in the evening it's very peaceful, more than any other city I have visited.
"Victorian industry" noise was only a problem at the locations themselves though, before cars and outside of cities it would have been a lot quieter than it is now.
I too hate noise. That said, if you've ever spent some time far from human cities, you will notice there's plenty of noise out there, especially at night. There's probably some sort of evolutionary explanation about white noise vs startling noise etc. etc. but the main point is that it's noisy out there! In a very different way than city noise.
I used to go out to the mountains to stargaze, so pretty out there but people still lived there. Frequently there would be something like a dog barking for hours. I realized you really can't escape human bs noise.
> It never ceases to amaze me that blocking noise/sound (one of the weakest forces) is very difficult, whereas blocking light (being fastest and more “powerful”) is very easy.
How is sound weaker than light? Light is stopped by some thin cardboard, whereas sound will just breeze through walls.
1. We evolved to spend 50% of the time in the presence of a 1 kW/m^2 light source.
2. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_intensity, sound intensity is 10log₁₀(I/I₀) dB, where I₀ = 1 picowatt/m^2, which means 1 kW/m^2 is ~150 dB, which is about what you get from standing 1 meter away from a jet engine (Wikipedia cited a book for that claim, and doesn't itself say which jet engine).
The other side of this is that light (EMR) attenuates exceedingly rapidly in matter. Much (though not all) of it will pass through a few tens or hundreds of kilometers of atmosphere, but a distressingly thin piece of solid matter (or many liquids) will block or scatter it beyond all detection save residual thermal noise. (The fact that we can transmit light through hundreds or thousands of kilometers of solid glass is worth marvelling over.)
Sound, being a vibration of matter itself rather than an electromagnetic field, actually often travels better through matter, particularly those low frequencies which are transmitted through structures or the ground itself.
But yes, the far more energetically intense electromagnetic radiation is generally far more easily addressed than far weaker sound eminations.
In terms of energy, sure, light is much more energetic, but the problem with sound is that it can reach your ears with orders of magnitude less energy than light can.
Exactly my point, we can easily block the light from the sun (roughly 1400W/m2) but we can't easily block the TV/radio (50dB) from the neighbor living above :-)
In my mind I've got this "silly" analogy that noise is like the strong electromagnetic force, very powerful but only in relatively short distances ;-)
The tiniest amount of vacuum stops sound as abruptly as non transparent matter stops light. furthermore, there was no amount of sound which can overcome the vacuum, whereas enough photons at enough energy will destroy the matter in its path.
edit: yes, an explosion will expel matter through a vacuum, so in some sense enough noise will travel through a vacuum, but you are probably not going to be complaining about the "noise" if you are showered with enough matter to hear it from a massive explosion as your sudden disassembly will (briefly) capture your full attention. Whereas light trivially crosses the universe, as well as through some matter.
If you take that into consideration, loads of animals have even more sensitive hearing. Noise pollution is known (suggested?) to have a huge impact on nature as well, although iirc that's more about sudden noises, fireworks and the like.
Silence is unnatural anyway. If you move to a rural area with no neighbors or traffic in sight, you'll still hear plenty of noises inside your house. Rather than rage about distracting noises, just turn on the radio or something to drown it out.
Complete silence may be unnatural but so is Fall Out Boy played so loud the lyrics can be heard a block or more away, for 24 hours a day.
Some sounds are loud enough to be impossible to block out. If police aren't interested in enforcing noise ordinances and your landlord isn't interested either because they're too busy trying not to repair the $12K a month water leak in the basement of the restaurant you live on top of, your only option is to move.
It's all relative, that is, your hearing and brain will adjust to how much ambient noise there is. Up to a point anyway, people go a bit mad if there's too much ambient noise (hence the article).
Likewise when ambient noise goes away though. There's a challenge in a sound studio somewhere that blocks out pretty much all sound, challenge being how long you can last in complete silence. Supposedly you can hear your own blood flowing in there.
It's also why people experience noise cancelling headphones as applying a 'pressure' when they first put them on; there is no pressure as such, but just the sudden absence of ambient noise their ears/brains are used to.
It never ceases to amaze me that blocking noise/sound (one of the weakest forces) is very difficult, whereas blocking light (being fastest and more “powerful”) is very easy.
It might sound futuristic, but I expect noise canceling force fields to become an everyday household thing in a few years ;-)