Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Listening to Noise

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

As decibel levels continue to rise, threatening human existence we turn to two listening experts for help. George Prochnik and George Foy both investigate listening, silence and noise. 

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Listening to Noise. I was on a subway platform in New York City. The subway station was 79th Street and Broadway, and you get the one, two, three lines coming through all at the same time to express to local. And four trains, in fact, came through at the same time, creating the maximum amount of subway noise you could possibly have, at least in that station. And there was a lot of other noise going on in my life, sort of mental and psychological, as well as my kids were there and making a fuss. And it all kind of just coagulated at that point, just became way too much for me. I had a mini freakout just saying to myself, I can't deal with this.

After that moment of sonic overload on the 79th Street Broadway subway platform, author George Foy began asking questions about his oral existence, like how loud is it and how loud is too loud? Then he went and bought a portable decibel meter. Decibels are a way of measuring the sound pressure against your ear. The lowest sound that we're apt to hear is somewhere around 20 decibels, which is like a feather hitting a tabletop. 100 decibels is a jet, maybe a few hundred meters away from you. You get higher than that, and you're talking about lethal levels if you're anywhere close to that kind of sound. And it's an

exponential measure in that it doubles the level with every three extra decibels. In other words, 43 decibels is double 40 decibels and so on and so forth. The actual spectrum of sound waves between 120 and 0 decibels is roughly a trillion times. In other words, it's a trillion orders of magnitude greater than 0 at 120 decibels. So anyway, I went into the subways,

and I measured the sounds that the subways were inflicting on me, and they were way over 100 decibels, which is actually physically damaging to your ears. But even within the subway car, the noise levels are fairly high, and if you're subjected to these on a constant basis, the tests and scientific studies have proved that, in fact, your physical hearing is going to deteriorate over time. When George Foy measures the soundscape of his existence, he discovers

that not only is the volume too high, but that the noise is everywhere. People think of hostile sound as loud, but it doesn't necessarily have to be high volume. What it is, it's pervasive. It's everywhere. It's useless information. It's radios, TVs, iPods. It's marketing calls. It's the recorded messages in airports. It's elevator music, NPR, it's marketing calls, it's the recorded messages at airports, it's elevator music, NPR, your kids playing video games, the information that's coming at you from all levels, including when you're online. All this stuff kind of comes together into what I feel anyway, and I think a lot of people do feel as being an overload of sensory input of different kinds,

and they all feel the same, and they all feel like noise, actually, which is why they're called noise. They're called often white noise, even when it's visual, even when it's coming at you through different senses. After George Foy discovers how loud his life is, he sets out to find some silence. He decides the antidote to all the noise is zero decibels. Zero decibels is actually the level at which a sample of 100 people without hearing loss stop hearing anything.

But in fact, that doesn't mean that there's no sound waves in the air at that point. It just means that we're not really aware of them. I never, I think, totally psychologically lost hope that I was going to find absolute science. But obviously the science was indicating that there's no such thing as no input. Even if you go into the farthest reaches of space, particles exist, even in deep space. And sound is particles rubbing against each other, creating waves. So then, in fact, you get all our universe apparently is suffused with actual measurable music, although we couldn't possibly hear it with our ears. And even on Earth, the places that I was measuring were not totally silent.

In his book, Zero Decibels, George Foy documents his quest for absolute silence. He tours the catacombs of Paris. He talks to astronauts. He even visits the quietest place in the world, an anechoic chamber in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's apparently the most perfect soundproof chamber in existence in the world. In fact, the Guinness Book of World Records rates it as the quietest place on earth. And you can look that up. And apparently, I mean, to go in there and to experience perfect sound, you need to turn off the lights. Of course, there's no sound. It's three cubes, two of steel, one of concrete, nestled within each other on springs. They're absolutely sheathed in

sound-damping material. It's a really impressive kind of science fiction place. And apparently, to a lot of people who go in there and try it out, it is very, very scary. It freaks them out. Because you are used to having senses, your senses registering something at all times, and all of a sudden, there's nothing there. You can't see anything, by definition. Total darkness.

And in human terms, at least, pretty much total silence. And for a split second, I had this sense of of like this bubble that was in my ear and it was surrounding an emptiness. There was just nothing there. It was the most perfect silence that I ever had or ever will probably hear. And then, of course, I realized immediately that I was making noise. My body was making noise. I could hear my pulse.

I could hear the skin rubbing over my scalp, rubbing over my skull. In fact, my own hearing system was actually making noise as it turned out, or that's a probable explanation. But in that split second, I did feel something, and it was kind of a wonderful feeling. And what was even more wonderful, actually, was the corollary of all that was that having found that split second, having done all this research and traveling in search of this and understanding more and more about both relative silence and sound, I was just reveling in the complexity and the beauty of sound and all its different spectra and all its ability to make us crazy, to make us happy, to make us understand the world we live in. I mean, sound is such a basic, it's the alarm medium.

It's the primary sense that tells us how safe we are in the world. And as such, it's capable of giving us great security, great pleasure through music and so forth. And also, of course, great fear and great anxiety when it's misused or when it signals danger. The idea that quiet and the democratic process go together is an inspiring one, but I can't say it completely assuages the anxiety

associated with sensitivity to sound. George Prochnik is very sensitive when it comes to noise. Once he called the cable guy because the DVR unit was clicking off too loud. He's also written a new book about noise. It's called In Pursuit of Silence, Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. When he suggested we meet in Central Park, I said, sure. I figured since he's so obsessed with silence, he must know all the super secret quiet spots in the park. But well, I figured wrong. Well, I mean, I think that we can postulate genetic predispositions to louder and quieter

environments. Certainly, I fall on the side of silence and I think my predilection for silence is really a desire to see and feel and hear as much as possible. We're about to hear a noise right now. Oh the Brinks truck has shown up. Huh. And... We're walking through Central Park here, and we've got kids screaming, airplanes going overhead, and I'm trying to hear, I'm trying to follow you somewhere quiet. Well, you know, I think when you say that,

it leads me to bring up one thing that I think is really important for everyone to do, which is to spend some time in the environments where most of your day passes. Try this. Close your eyes wherever you are and just remain absolutely still for a couple of minutes. Don't try to meditate. Just become aware of what you're hearing. And I remember I had an experience a few blocks from here when I was with a peculiar group of people who do engage in this spontaneous street meditation where they all walk around and drop down, sit cross-legged,

close their eyes and meditate for a couple of minutes with someone watching over them. Well, I did this. We walked around Columbus Circle several times. And by the second time I did this—and I walk by Columbus Circle four or five times a week— by the second time I did this, when I sat there, what I was hearing sounded to me like the soundtrack of a horrifying, horrifying horror film. It was so extraordinarily painful and grating.

And I, who am reasonably sensitive to my acoustical environment, had no consciousness of how intense it was. The positive side of that is it shows us how little it takes to sensitize ourselves a little bit more to the sound world that we actually live in. And I think if we were all to do that very simple experiment of spending a couple of minutes with our eyes closed, not moving, in the places where we spend time, we would have a great desire to change the sound of a lot of those places,

to subtract a number of the noises that are just sheer battering forces. And the airplane that's about to drown you out once again. Maybe the biggest problem of all we face right now. I mean, that's what we really don't know how to get away from. We don't know what to do about it. It's extremely hard to soundproof yourself against them. New York is particularly wretched. Doesn't New York seem to be maybe the wrong city for a guy like you?

Well, you know, I have a long history in the city, so I'm here partly because of that, and also, I mean, you know, I don't think it has to sound like this. I think we can't despair and feel that this is the only way it can be. I think that for a long time now, we've ghettoized the idea of silence along two tracks. First of all, there's the older religious track,

where people associate silence with meditation, with being closer to God, with all these things, which is fine and true for those people who have faith that promotes the idea of silence. But as we know, large numbers of people do not, and ever greater numbers of people don't have that religious option as a vein for silence. And moreover, many of the megachurches now and such are some of the loudest places around.

So even the traditional associations between the pursuit of God and silence, I think, are diminishing. And then on the other hand, you have commodified silence. You have the ability to buy very expensive soundproofing and go on quiet retreats that can be exorbitant in cost. And to do all those sort of private modes of self-pampering that can be associated with sound. I think the weed whacker guy is coming. Go for it. Sorry.

You know, I think that the key thing about this moment in time is people feel the noise is inescapable, you know? We're certainly not going to get anywhere, I think, by just shouting, be quiet. And in fact, one of the most poignant experiences for me when I was researching my book was speaking with kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods who literally have no experience of silence in their lives.

Their homes are very loud, filled with different kinds of entertainment devices and people shouting and all sorts of problems in the domestic environment. Then they go out onto loud streets. The stores are loud. The restaurants are loud. Often their schools are very loud as well. These kids literally have no moment of quiet in their lives. So to tell them you have to shut up is really meaningless, and in fact is callous to the reality of their auditory existences. I think rather than that, what we've got to begin doing

is broadening people's sense of what silence can mean. So what we have to accept is that we're not going to be able, particularly now with fractured faiths and fractured lack of faiths, to really come up with some dogma of silence. But what we might be able to do is come up with a consensual effort to produce experiences or access to experiences of silence for large swaths of society in which people then could discover what they will. And for many people who have no experiences of silence, I think this is vital if we want to ever change the way the world sounds. Why should people not only be quieter, but why should they care about silence if they don't

know what it is? And it's because it's not something we can talk about, it's only going to be experiential, we simply have to make those experiences more broadly available. It seemed that one of the things you learned, though, while working on this project was that there might not be so much a hatred of silence, but almost that a lot of people who are really into loud noises are actually trying to drown out other loud noises. Exactly. I think that I saw this again and again, including among some of the biggest noise aficionados that there are, these people who are involved with car audio competitions, who I went down to see one group of them in Florida. And, you know, these people have boom cars that are so powerful, they crack windshields and tear the metal of the hoods of their cars.

But really, when I spoke with them about why they made so much noise, what their traction was, on the one hand, it was clear that they just, you know, there's that sensual appeal of loud bass, which everyone, to the extent that they're willing to open themselves to it, is going to experience. I mean, it's just a very powerful thing, that sound that gets inside you and shakes your organs around. But the other thing is, the environment in which they live is just a noise dumping ground.

I mean, it's nothing but crisscrossing highways and awful malls blasting all sorts of cacophonous tunes that you... There's nothing worth hearing. And I think, you know, there's so much worth hearing in an environment that hasn't been polluted in that way by just a completely neglectful, wasteful, sonic fill of one sort or another. Environments where we let ourselves get back to that more natural human layer of sounds. It's going to be conversations, it's going to be birds and wind and all those things that in some ways we have now shown, again, through lots of quite rigorous scientific research, that these have beneficial psychological effects on us. And

we can speculate about the reasons for that, but it just seems to be the case. And I think we now, in this sort of wasteland of mechanical and electroacoustic noises, we're not getting what we need in our acoustical diet. For most of us, the acoustical diet that we ingest on a daily basis is very heavy in fat, in sonic junk. We have extremely few nutritious multi-polyvalent sounds in the course of our day, and we have very little silence in our diet. I think if we were to try to imagine a sonic pyramid of what might be healthy, that large portions of quiet in the course of our day interrupting the constant wave of noise that we're involved in

would be seen as something really beneficial and wouldn't involve us having to try to turn down the overall decibel level of the world around us. I think that's a really important point. It's not that we need absolute quiet, but we need to interrupt this constant besiegement. We need to find ways of doing that that aren't just private ways. I don't think it does any good to preach to the converted, you need to find 20 minutes

a day where you go and you sit in quiet. Yes, but we also need to make those options more available and more obvious in our urban fabric. We have an addiction right now to overstimulation and noise is a big part of that. You know, I was very struck, I will say one more study, I was very struck by a study that was done on rats a couple of years ago in Italy, where they took a group of rats, divided it into two,

put one group of rats in a typical quiet laboratory setting and another in a room that had a sound level typical of a discotheque. And they administered to both these groups of rats low doses of ecstasy. And they found that the rats who were given the drug in the relatively quiet environment. Do we need to pause for a second? Yeah. Wow, it feels great though. Yeah. And...

One more gust. There it goes. Perfect. Okay. There's a study. So there's a study done with two groups of rats. They administered low doses of ecstasy to one group of rats in a quiet laboratory setting and to another group of rats in a room that had a sound level of a typical discotheque.

The rats who were given ecstasy in the quiet room, their brains straightened out in less than 24 hours. The rats who were given the drug in the loud environment took more than five days for their electrocortical parameters to straighten out. What that means is that the noise actually increased the toxicity of the drugs. Not to endlessly be bringing up studies, but there's been research done on the ways that people drink more in loud bars. So there are different reasons for this. On the one hand, people can't talk, so maybe they drink also to make up for the fact that they're not having conversation.

But also, I'm convinced that the intoxicant is going to be that much more intense with noise. So until we try to look for other forms of stimulation that basically ask a little bit more of us, ask us to reach out with our own powers of imagination and perception and experience the wealth of sensory possibilities in our world, not just be stuffed with them, we're really going to be damned. By dialing it down, I think what we're going to get is the kind of discovery that archaeologists made when they uncovered fantastic tombs in Egypt, where suddenly they find rich mosaics of sonic possibilities,

where before there was just sand and blasting desert browns. When we take back the kinds of stimulation which we have come to accept as the norm, and extraordinary levels of hyperarousal as the norm, I think what we're going to find is just a mosaic of different sorts of sounds, a kind of richness that is going to have the potential to enlarge our awareness of the natural world, of the human world in terms of being able to hear more of what's going on around us, and ultimately, even for people who aren't spiritually inclined,

of a sense of possibility of something larger than the self. Noise nails us back down on our own body. And when we ask for the volume to be ratcheted up and ratcheted up, we're getting it inside ourselves. We're feeling ourselves absolutely, you know, in a robotic sense, one with that sound. But we're not feeling ourselves, we're not feeling anything ultimately but our own bodies and our own relationship to that mass pulsing. We're not feeling anything like the actual spectrum of sonic wonders, that the world, sonic inter-sensory wonders

that the world presents us if we can only have the opportunity to hear it. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Listening to Noise. George Foy's book is called Zero Decibels, and George Prochnik's book is called In Pursuit of Silence. Both listening exercises come from the Theory of Everything archives. And the episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.

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