We live with lots of noise. What’s that doing to us?

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Jordan Heath Rawlings If you live in a city of any size, you live with more noise than you realize. I’m not talking about airplanes or police sirens, though. We deal with those too. I’m talking about the kind of things that you’ve probably gotten good at tuning out, the cars going by the hum of the streetlights, summer construction and winter snowplows, the patio down the block, the kids in the park, the neighbours music, the lawnmower or the weed whacker. A couple of backyards over your own dishwasher or washing machine. And hundreds of other things that are always the background to our daily existence to the point… where you notice them when they’re gone. We are learning right now about what that kind of noise exposure does to us in the long term, and there are already some startling results and thanks to that month or so back in April of 2020 when so many of these things vanished, we have some really interesting data points to compare. And not just on land, but in the water, where with almost all traffic vanishing, something very strange began to happen to creatures like whales who use sound to communicate.

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Bojan First is a writer and photographer based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He explored the world of noise for The Walrus. Hey, Bojan.

Bojan Furst Hello.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I wanna start by asking you what seems like a basic question, but I realize I’d never tried to define it either. What is noise? What’s a good way to define what we are talking about here?

Bojan Furst You know, it changes through time. What we consider noise today is, Matt Jordan, who is a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, defines it as unwanted sound.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So give me some examples of what that might entail? In our everyday lives?

Bojan Furst Yeah. So it can be anything. It can be, you know, kids playing soccer under your window that you don’t want to hear. It can be loud neighbours, it can be traffic. It can be, you know, the construction noise from roadworks, literally anything right now in St. John’s. I’m not sure. It’s a pretty quiet room, but you may hear a foghorn because it’s very foggy.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Right. And I guess, this goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. One of the people you talked to had done a little bit of a history of famous people complaining about noise.

Bojan Furst That’s correct. And, we’ve been complaining about noise for very long time. Especially people who made the living thinking about things. So you have everybody from Blaze Pascal to, Thomas Carlile, the Scottish polemicist complaining about noise. And one of the anecdotes, Matt Jordan shares in that piece he wrote is about Thomas Carlile paying a fortune to remodel his house in London, I believe, to actually, cut out all sound from the interior. It didn’t quite work because it never does. But yeah, people would go to quite extremes to get rid of the unwanted sound.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What kinds of noise would they be complaining about back then? Just, people in the street maybe, I guess you weren’t revving your motors. You’re revving your horses.

Bojan Furst Maybe. You know the clip and clap of the horses on the paving stones? The wooden wheels without rubber. I don’t know, I, I, you know, maybe hawkers out on the street, right?

Jordan Heath Rawlings So, I mean, all that is to establish that this is something humans have been living with as long as we’ve been living in cities, at the very least. And there have been all sorts of ways to try to tune it out or complain to get it, get it shut down or whatever it is. But now, tell me about what one scientist that you spoke to is calling the Anthropause. What is that?

Bojan Furst It’s a real interesting concept over the last century maybe, I think it’s fair to say since the Industrial Revolution, in some ways the noise that humans introduced to into the environment has grown dramatically. And this is not only noise that we introduced on land, like the traffic and construction and all of these things that we can think of when we live in a city. But we have also introduced noise in our oceans from a whole range of activities that we undertake on the ocean and in the ocean. So you can think about, hear about shipping, as a long term continuous noise. But also things like seismic testing for oil and gas exploration, or we use, sonars to detect all sorts of things from fishing to you know, military purposes. So we have introduced the tremendous amount of noise in the environment. And that noise has an infect on other species, not just us. So when the pandemic hit and well, we are still in the pandemic, but when the lockdowns were initiated, much of that activity stopped. And for the very first time in a very long time, scientists were able to observe natural environment, especially oceans for a prolonged period of time in a condition that was much, much quieter. One of the scientists that I talked to who works with, sound Research Collective in Alaska, said that by some of the calculations they did, the oceans were half as quiet as they normally would be during that period of lockdowns because the shipping slowed down. Cruise ships were completely gone and so on. Dr. Amanda Bates from University of Victoria in Victoria, BC worked with a team that called that, that pause in human activity that dramatically reduced the noise in natural environments, Anthropause.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When we look at that pause, what happened that that wouldn’t have happened otherwise?

Bojan Furst Oh, so this is fascinating. First of all, for very long time, right into the fifties, sixties, even seventies, we thought of all oceans as silent. Oceans naturally are anything but silent. In fact, many animals that live in the oceans, both mammals like dolphins and whales, but also fish, use sound extensively for all sorts of purposes. Now, they tend often to use sound beyond our range of hearing, which is the human range of hearing is very limited. And when you think about it, of course they use sound. The sound travels much faster and much further under the ocean than it does, in the air, and they use it for all sorts of purposes. From communication to echolocation, to coordinating, feeding, mating, habits, all sorts of things. So one of the fascinating stories that Dr. Matthews from Alaska shared with me, so they were able to study Humpback whales for this long period of time that the ocean was much quieter than it normally would be. So what they noticed is that normally the most common sound that they would record hum whales make, about 75% of the time was this particular sound that they called whoop. And what it basically means they think is, hi, I’m a humpback whale and I’m over here. When the oceans got quiet, what Humpback whales started to do is they reduced the amount of time they used that particular calling sound, and they dramatically expanded the frequency of other sounds that they would normally make. We have no clue what the rest of that complex communication entails. But we now know that should the oceans be quiet from our noise, they would sound very different because the other species that make their home in the ocean would probably use a very different way of communicating than what they’re doing now. Because what they’re doing now is exactly the same thing we do when we walk into a party. You walk in, it gets very loud. You are not trying to have a deep conversation with anybody. You raise your voice, you change the frequency you talk at, and you try to have a very basic conversation.

Jordan Heath Rawlings All of that is fascinating and I want to turn to how that applies to us. Because to your point, we just live in this noisy world now and we’ve adapted to it. So before we get into some of the research on, what noise does to us, let’s start with a little primer on how we measure noise, with decibels. So just give us sort of the base level sets of, what some of the typical noise we encounter in our day might be?

Bojan Furst Sure. So we measure noise in a unit called decibel. So a whisper is about 30 decibels. A normal conversation like the one we are having now is about 60. Your leaf blower is 85. Rock concert or a jet engine is about 120, 130. And these are measured at certain distance from the source, right? And anything above 85, if humans are exposed to that noise for a prolonged period of time, it will damage our hearing. One interesting complete digression to this story is that a colicky baby. Can hit 130 decibels with its cry. And humans are apparently primed for that particular noise. The crying baby and the, our psychological and physiological response to it is absolutely astonishing. And it takes milliseconds for us to kick in.

Jordan Heath Rawlings It’s so funny. I can feel that right now. Just remembering those cries. I can feel the, the anxiety in me when they hit. Forgive me if I’m mispronouncing this. You spoke to a researcher named Tor Oiamo who looked to study kind of what this prolonged exposure can do to the rest of us. Can you explain a little bit about that research and what we’ve learned?

Bojan Furst Yeah, so Dr. Oiamo is a scientist at Metropolitan University of Toronto. He is a geographic information systems specialist, so he is a very contemporary, modern map maker, if you will. He can make these very detailed maps of urban areas. So he worked with Toronto Health Department and he was able to create noise maps of Toronto and then overlay historical health data, overdose maps. And in that way, they were able to assess a long-term impact of noise on the health of humans living within those environments. So what they found out is that once you hit 53 decibels of at a sort a sustained level, that people are exposed to, for every additional 10 decibels that you are exposed to, your chances of heart disease, of stroke, diabetes all go up. Some of them go up quite dramatically. So schemic heart disease, I think it goes up by 8%, I believe for every 10 additional decibels. So that was in itself very interesting. But what it also showed is that there is a social justice component to this because the richer neighbourhoods tend to be quieter, and the poorer neighbourhoods tend to be significantly louder. So people who are already experiencing health impacts because of their social determinants of health, their income, their employment, on top of that, also experience additional health risks. Because they live in neighbourhoods that are noisier than better off neighbourhoods.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So given all that, and we’ve already talked about noise complaints, which I think is typically how, somebody would react to specific episodes of unwanted noise. What about overall, governance of a general noise level in a neighbourhood or a city or anywhere? Do we have any regulations as to like what is acceptable? I know other than, you know, don’t overpay for a home near the airport.

Bojan Furst Correct. So it’s really interesting in Canada, the noise is largely regulated by municipal bylaws, which are very poorly enforced for all sorts of reasons. In other places that’s not necessarily the case. Europe is at the forefront of this. So European Union has a very specific noise directive, and each member country is under the obligation to create noise maps to monitor noise and to report on what they’re trying to do to limit the noise exposure of its citizens. Paris, for example, has an organization that is dedicated specifically to that task, and they have made some great strides, in reducing the noise levels. In Germany, it is, actually unlawful to be noisy between I believe 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM and that would include what, you can’t do laundry or run a dryer during that period of time, right? So there are rules around what kind of noises allowed at certain periods of time. In Canada and in North America that is left to local governments that are ill-equipped to monitor the noise, and force those bylaws or even have them in the first place.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And you touched on this in your piece, but I have to say, when we started talking about local bylaws and noise ordinances, the first thing I thought of was the convoy in Ottawa and some of the testimony that we heard from people who lived in the area of just how it impacted their lives. Not even necessarily the protesters themselves, just the noise.

Bojan Furst Just the noise. And there is, there is the testimony of an Ottawa Citizen who is visually impaired. So the way she navigates the world as an independent citizen is much more acoustic than it would before you or me. So she relies heavily on sound to get around for her. During those four weeks, it was absolutely impossible to get around. She has experienced a range of health symptoms and so have many other, many other people. The problem of course, is that that protest was so long that the noise exposure was so long that it impacted sleeping patterns and a whole bunch of other physiological processes in people. and Dr. Oiama actually refers to it as a, as sort of basically a terror tactic. Then if, when you get into reading all this research around noise and how it’s used, law enforcement and intelligence services have now for some time been using noise, for both crowd control as, acoustic weapons. But also in, in torture because we, the, physiological response, we have to prolong the exposure to noise is is really profound.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Is this why as our cities and urban landscapes get noisier and noisier, we’ve seen such a rise of like noise canceling headphones. You mentioned the gentleman hundreds of years ago who redid his entire house. This is just few hundred bucks to Apple, right?

Bojan Furst Right. Exactly. And here you go. You have your own tail world, little acoustic cocoon, right? Dr. Jordan from Penn State actually has this great history. I mean, the first one of those devices, and actually if you look at those old commercials from the eighties was Walkman, right. For the first time, you could have your own acoustic bubble that you live in. Because the sound that you choose is the sound of good life and you should have control over it. Right? So it’s an in, it’s an interesting approach and absolutely a great marketing technique and selling points to get people to hear only what they want to hear. But of course there are, there are downsides to that as well.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Such as?

Bojan Furst That’s where this whole notion of ethics of sound and noise come in, right? Decisions that we make, who we are going to hear, what we are going to cut out, that has impact on what, how we engage with the world. It has impact on what kind of a citizen we are potentially. You know, if you can cut out the, the voices of those you don’t want to hear, who are maybe less fortunate, or maybe those who don’t agree with you and live in a sound cocoon of your own making, well, that maybe is not the greatest thing in the world, and maybe we shouldn’t be telling people to shut up. But we should be better at listening to others and engaging in conversations. Right? And that goes that, that’s an interesting argument when you extend it not just to us as humans and, and other humans and our neighbours, but also extend it to other species, as the species that’s the most responsible for the noise that we introduced into the world. What is our responsibility to other pieces whose lives we are interrupting and making heck of a lot more difficult? Right?

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well that’s the last thing I wanna ask and to bring it full circle. How can we think about noise differently? I mean, we started this conversation with you defining it as unwanted sound. That can encompass a lot and should we only be listening to things we want, actively want to hear?

Bojan Furst I think the answer to that second question, should we be listening to only things we want to hear is no. We should hear things that make us uncomfortable. Now that doesn’t mean that we should subject ourselves to physiologically and psychologically damaging sounds. We should absolutely try to minimize those. But there is something to be said for being able to listen to others that we don’t necessarily agree with, right? In terms of what we can do to reduce harmful noise. And, and we are talking here about noise that is a health problem. Right? That’s a really interesting question. So we actually do have a range of options. There is no one single thing you can do to reduce noise in the city, for example. As Dr. Oiama said, it’s million little things. So the orientation of bedrooms in the new buildings. The kind of tires that, we install on vehicles, can actually have significant impact on noise that cars make bylaws the drag eight exhaust tailpipes bylaws that, regulate what kind of noise can be made at what time of the day. So there’s a, there’s a lot of options that we have, but. These are policy options and they also need policy enforcement instruments. And how do we actually do all that? It becomes very complicated, very quickly because there is so much that we could do. Situation is, just as complicated on the oceans. There is no international body that regulates ocean noise. There are now starting to be individual ports and municipalities that are starting to pass roofs around the noise as well as the emissions. We do know that if ships slow down, they get significantly less noisy. Interestingly enough, that has all sorts of other repercussions, for example, with drastically reduces collisions with whales and other mammals. But it also improves air quality and the emissions from those ships. But there is a cost. Your shipping is slower. Switching to different kind of propulsion systems that maybe use some combination of fuel and wind and electric power, would also further dramatically reduce the noise in the oceans. Again we have a long way to go.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Boian, thank you for this. A fascinating conversation and a fascinating thing to think about as we walk around outside.

Bojan Furst Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, just listen to the world around you. It’s actually more fascinating than we give it credit.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Bojan Furst writing in The Walrus. That was The Big Story. For more, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca and you can find us as always on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn. If you wanna suggest a topic, hit us up at hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, or just call and talk into the phone for a minute. (416) 935-5935. Joseph Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Robyn Simon and Ali Graham are producers this week, Ryan Clarke, Mark Angly and Robin Edgar handled our sound design. Saman Dara is our research assistant. And I’m Jordan Heath Rowlings. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk on Monday.

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