99% Invisible - Sound and Health: Cities

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic environments have serious, long-term impacts on our mental and physical health. This is part one in a two-part series supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about how sound can be designed to reduce harm and even improve wellbeing. Sound and Health: Cities Learn more about Sonic Humanism

Thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for underwriting this special two-part series about the power of sound to affect and influence our health and well-being. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is working alongside others to build a culture of health for everyone in America. Learn more about them at rwjf.org. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Nearly everywhere we go, we're bombarded with human-made sound. It's especially bad in cities.

Cities in the past think about where you'd have horses and Buggies, you know, you hear clopping, you'd hear banging of wood against stone. Very noisy experiences. That's Joel Beckerman. He's a composer and founder of a Sonic Branding and Design Company called Manmade Music. Then cars came along and were sharing the road with these horses. And so not only did you have the horses at one rate of speed, the cars at a different rate of speed, so lots of honking of the horns, it must have been a cacophonous mess.

But things got even worse when cars came to dominate the roads. If you fast forward to really what the soundscapes were, let's say in the 50s. So in the 50s, it was all about muscle cars. It was all about the loudest car you could have, Mustangs, Corvettes that were really, really loud. We might not have muscle cars anymore, but our cities are still noisy places. We're pretty good at tuning it out, but our sonic environments have serious impacts on our mental and physical health.

So, is the blaring modern soundscape slowly killing us? This is part one of a two-part series, all about how sound can be designed to create more well-being and reduce harm. We really respond to sound quicker than any other sense. It really becomes the arbiter of all our senses. But many of the sounds we hear are created with very little thought for how they interact with each other. They could be a byproduct, like engine sounds or the home of a computer, or they could be made intentionally

like alarms or cell phone pings. Add to that the sound of overhead planes, air conditioning units, patios and stores pumping out music, sirens and people talking loudly to be heard over the rest of the noise. You have trucks, buses, other kinds of transit, and then mechanical things like construction. And of course, there are cars. The sound of cars is kind of inescapable, which is depressing if you think about it.

That's Kate Wagner, you might know her from her fantastic blog, McMansion Hell. She's an architecture and design critic, and she cares a lot about sound. Cars tends to drown out other things, like bird song, human speech, the rustling of leaves, conversation, things that maybe are more personal or like that we hold in it higher like aesthetic value. Joel Buckerman says we need a new approach to sound. One where we decide what we hear in our everyday

environment. It's really about how do we use music and sound to make people's lives richer and simpler. Joel wants sound to be something we're thinking about all the time, but while cities have more noise laws than ever, over half of the world's population live in urban areas experiencing way too much noise. The sound is measured in decibels, the louder the sound, the higher the number, areas experiencing way too much noise. Sound is measured in decibels. The louder the sound, the higher the number, a quiet library is around 40 decibels.

Car noise can be anywhere from like 65 to 80 to even 90 decibels if you're really close to the highway. The decibel scale isn't linear. That means 80 decibels isn't twice as loud as 40. It's actually 10,000 times louder. If you've ever had to pull over on the side of the highway, because maybe you have a flat tire or something, get out of your car. The sheer noise that you hear is quite startling,

just like the sheer mass of sound that is an 8-lane highway. The average level of car noise in a busy city is about the same as having your TV on at top volume all the time. Of course, some city noises are designed to be loud. Police sirens and ambulance sirens are 120 decibels. We might try to escape all this by sticking in a pair of headphones and cranking up the volume, but depending on what you're listening to, headphones can be over 90 decibels. Prolonged exposure to anything over 80 decibels will lead to hearing loss.

So, before we go any further, while we're talking about the idea of sound and health, do yourself a favor, get into a little bit quieter area, and turn this episode down a couple of notches. Your ears will thank you. When it comes to city sound, volume is not the only thing hurting us. It's not just how loud the sound is, it's the character of the sound, it's whether or not you have control over the situation. That's Erica Walker. She's a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health

and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grantee. For Erica, the impact of sound is all about context. I lived in an apartment building and above me were these neighbors, and they had two small kids. And the kids used to run across the floor 24 hours a day. The sound wasn't more than 50 or 60 decibels. That's the same volume as the background music and a coffee shop, but Erika could feel that sound

every moment of every day. I think for different people, it's different things, but for me, it was the rumbling. It's that low frequency sound. You can't hear it, but you know it's there. And you don't know where it's coming from, but you can feel it. Living so close together, we're going to make sounds

that will cross over into other people's spaces. And that's not always bad. In fact, it's one of the reasons why I love living in city. Some communities say that they appreciate the sound levels like they like hearing their neighbors at the barbecue because it makes it feel like a sense of community. So there is a positive aspect. But when we don't have control, that's when health problems start. Matthias Basner is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

He studies how noise affects our sleep. So noise is stress, especially if we have little or no control over it. And so the body will excrete stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that lead to changes in the composition of our blood and of our blood vessels, which actually have been shown to be stiffer after a single night of noise exposure. People who are a relevantly exposed for prolonged period of time have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure and myocardial infarction,

but also in some studies, a higher risk of stroke. A myocardial infarction, by the way, is another term for a heart attack. Although the risk increases are relatively mild, you know, relative to other exposures like smoking, for example, this still constitutes a major public health problem because so many people are exposed to these different noise sources. The World Health Organization published a report on the burden of disease by environmental noise, and they basically showed that in the Western European

member states alone, 1.6 million healthy live-years are lost every year due to the exposure to environmental noise. There's a study from the University of Michigan that looked at the effect of low-range sound exposures by five decibels. That could save 3.9 billion dollars in health care costs, and it would also save lives. There are so many other ways that noisy environments are bad for you. Think about a loud restaurant. There's the sound of the open bar, thumping music. You're shouting at your friend, and everyone else is shouting at their friends too. It's pretty stressful. And when we get stressed, studies show we reach for comfort food and alcohol.

Noise also hurts our academic performance, it screws up our mood, it hurts our concentration, basically we are being killed by noise, and some of us are being killed faster than others. More after this. Support for this special two-part series exploring the power of sound to influence our health comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is working to build a culture of health that ensures everyone in America has a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being, which includes exploring how our current or future environments will impact daily life.

Learn more at rwjf.org. We know noise causes health problems, but they can be especially pronounced if you live in a less affluent neighborhood. If we live in a place, for example, with lots of environmental noise, as do many people in American cities, especially people of color and low-income families, then we have to deal with essentially this mechanical sound that can shave off sort of the high frequencies just through repeated relentlessness. Neighborhoods near factories, highways, and flight paths are the loudest, and usually they're at the least expensive places to live.

This is a noise equity problem. We should have the choice of living in a space that is not doing damage to us. Without having to move, we should have the agency to good health, good hearing health, and we should have agency over the things that could harm us essentially. The most obvious solution is to make laws.

Some cities carve out quiet hours. You can't run a noisy leaf blower or practice drumming in your garage at night or else you'll get fine. But there's a couple of problems with noise abatement loss. For one thing, they're often used to target vulnerable people. Noise abatement loss sort of always singled out, powerless people, people whose livelihoods impeded the sort of middle-class vision of a quiet or orderly or bustling city, etc.

Sort of like what this sort of bourgeois idea of what the ideal soundscape would be for the city. The very first restrictions on city noise came in the early 20th century in New York. A rich woman named Julia Barnett Rice campaigned to silence the horns and whistles from tugboats in the nearby port. All these noises were bothering her and her Riverside mansion. It's not hard to see the threat of connection from someone like Julia Barnett Rice and someone like Barbecue Becky, the white woman who called the police on a black family having a barbecue last year in Oakland. It was the beginning of what we call gentrification, which is pushing out those who rely on the city

for work in order to satisfy the sort of aesthetic tastes of the wealthier people whose opinions were more of a concern to those in power. This is very much both a literal and a sonic displacement. The other problem with noise laws is that they aren't very effective. So the way we currently regulate and measure sound in our communities is by using this decibel. That's Erica Walker. Remember the decibel measures how loud something is, but most sound meters only listen to a specific range of frequencies, the kind that we hear with our ears. That's called an A-weighted system.

This A-weighted system that tells us that it's only the sounds that we process through the auditory system that are important. But there are some sounds we don't process with our ears. Once the pitch gets low enough, we no longer hear it, but feel it instead. It's completely vibrational, so it's just essentially that feeling. So when you're in a community that's in a flight path and you say it's 65 a-weighted decibels You're subtracting out the components that come from the lower frequency sound So you're leaving out a huge part of the story

Not only is it a flawed metric they're using this metric to determine who's eligible for sound proofing criteria material. Erika is working on a project called the Community Noise Lab, and she hopes that by taking a much wider range of frequencies into account, we can get a better grasp of how sounds are affecting our neighborhoods and our health. In the meantime, Kate Wagner says that there are steps everyone can take to make things sound a little better. You can make acoustics changes to the spaces you're in. There are sort of architectural and design choices that we can make to make our spaces a little

bit quieter. You can always choose to sort of beef up the insulation or have a floating floor, any other sort of expensive solutions that are more structural to isolating noise. You can also hang thicker curtains, which is cool because velvet is in. Velvet curtains might be a solution to noise problems in our home, but addressing the noise from cars and industry requires a fundamental change to the way we live.

Often, the things that are making the most noise, especially sort of industrial noise, are the things that are perhaps not exactly the healthiest. For the environment, for example, it takes a lot more noise to have a natural gas plant or drill or do what have you for any kind of sort of extractive purposes than it does to have a solar farm, which is almost entirely silent.

The quietest city I've ever been in that was a major city was Helsinki in Finland. I was astonished because the metro or the subway trains and the buses and not their silent. The train stations are very quiet. That's partly because the majority of their trains are electric, but it's also down to the design of their stations. From a mixture of materials, sound absorbing materials, and also psychochistic tricks like

pumping in noise that has this weird reverse effect of making things seem quieter, which is a technique used in offices as well. The fins are able to make spaces quieter, and the idea that they should be quieter seems to be more popular there. Perhaps the quieter public spaces play a small part in making Finland reportedly the happiest country in the world. It's a country that is so taken into account the public good from all aspects, things like healthcare, childcare, social services, a robust welfare state, and things like their outlook on sustainability.

So cleaner, quieter vehicles make you happier. And when things are less noisy, there's a great opportunity to create a richer and more useful sonic landscape. Electric cars don't naturally make a sound. So if you've ever had one creep up on you, it's a really, really scary experience. Joel Buckerman says this silence of electric cars can actually be a drawback. Total silence is not

a good thing. In fact, Joel says that electric cars need to make noise, or else they won't be safe. It's not for the people in the car. It's for the pedestrians to know that the car is coming. the car, it's for the pedestrians to know that the car is coming. But the opportunity is also to create a personality for the vehicle, for the electric vehicles. He actually worked with Nissan to create an identity for their new electric car. Here it is, coming right at you. In this case, what we were looking to do was create a car that had a personality, which is really an association with clean energy. One of the things we knew is it's going to be frictionless.

When you hear a car accelerate, if it accelerates very quickly, let's say, and there is a sense of really smoothness, lack of friction, there is almost a natural ambience to it. We actually used natural sounds, but it still sounds like a car and it absolutely had to, because we don't have pedestrians to hear it and say, oh, what's that, and get hit by the car. Joel wants a future city dominated by natural sounds, but also sounds that we've consciously chosen.

Some cities are already taking a more thoughtful approach. In the Tokyo subway station, each station has a little tune associated with it. And if you know anything about the Japanese subway system, it is packed. So if you're in the middle of a car, and you miss an announcement because it's noisy, you're sunk. You're gonna miss your stop.

The Tokyo trains have a short jingle unique to each and every station along the line, like this one for Ekebu Kuro Station on the Yamano Te Line. These little tunes that show up at each station helps you understand where you are, and also they're pleasing. They're not a screaming announcement. We could live in cities full of intentional sounds, with soundscapes that we've chosen. You might find some of these new sounds really pleasant, or really annoying. But the nice thing is, you'll get to decide that for yourself, because you'll be able to hear them all. This special episode of 99% Invisible was produced by Laila Batasin and Dallas Taylor, with

help from Sam Sneepley, edited by Chris Baroubaix, sound design and mix by Colin Devarnie, music by Sean Real. Special thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and man-made music who contributed as executive producers and providing the soundscapes in the show. the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Manmade Music, who contributed as executive producers in providing the soundscapes in the show. Joel Buckerman, his written book, it's called The Sonic Boom, How Sound transforms the way we think, feel, and buy, go check it out. You can learn more about these stories and other topics related to Sonic Humanism and sounds effects on our health by visiting info.sonichumanism.com.

Thanks also to our guest, Kate Wagner, Erica Walker, and Matthias Bassner. You can find out more about Erica's Community Noise Lab at communitynoyslab.org. Thanks again to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their underwriting support of this special series. Learn more about their efforts to help create a culture of health at rwjf.org. Foundation for their underwriting support of this special series. Learn more about their efforts to help create a culture of health at rwjf.org.