WHEN NOISE ANNOYS

"A STENCH in the ear," wrote Ambrose Bierce, fulminating against noise in the long tradition of sensitive and thinking men. Marcel Proust was so fastidious about noise that he had his study lined with cork. Juvenal bemoaned the all-night cacophony of imperial Rome, observing that "most sick people perish for want of sleep." To Schopenhauer it was clear that "the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it."

Now noise-hating has suddenly gone democratic. Whole communities are treating noise as a public problem. Cities are passing ordinances to control it. Sound engineers and acoustical experts are waxing fat fighting it. And a growing consensus holds that modern man must attack noise in the same way that he attacks the contamination of his air and water. "Noise pollution" is the latest thing to worry about.

Never, insist the worriers, have the hairlike sensors of the inner ear twitched to such a range of roaring, buzzing, beeping, grinding, howling, jangling, blaring, booming, screeching, whining, gnashing and crashing. And it seems to be getting worse all the time. The more militant anti-pollutionists blame racket for such woes as heart disease, high blood pressure, stomach ulcers and sexual impotence.

A lot of this noise about noise seems unnecessarily shrill, considering how much mankind loves the stuff. Italians put Alfa-Romeo horns on Fiats, and sometimes honk until the battery goes dead. Long before the chuffy steam engine, the average town was anything but a hushed haven of peace and quiet; one need only sample the nonstop bell ringing, banging and conversational yelling that still goes on from dawn to dark in any little Spanish fishing village. Men make noise as a way of showing their vitality, and they welcome the noises others make as tokens against loneliness.

Moreover, much of what irritates modern man is simply new noise traded in for old. The ear that flinches at the diesel blat of a bus might recoil as much from the clang-rattle-crash of the old trolley. The whine of rubber tires replaces the bang and screech of unsprung cartwheels on cobblestones; the backfire supplants the ringing hooves of dray horses.

The Sound of Breathing

The most-used unit to measure sound is the decibel, named in honor of Alexander Graham Bell, and defined as the smallest difference in loudness that the human ear can detect.

On this scale, according to LIFE Science Library's Sound and Hearing, normal breathing measures 10 decibels, leaves rustling in a breeze score 20, a quiet restaurant 50, busy traffic 70, Niagara Falls 90, machine-gun fire at close range 130, a jet at takeoff 140, and a space rocket 175.

The best definition of noise, most experts agree, is "unwanted sound." What is most indisputably unwanted about noise is its capacity to cause deafness. And this seriously limiting disability is far more insidiously acquired than most people realize.

So delicate an instrument is the human ear that at certain frequencies it can discern sound that moves the eardrum a distance only one-tenth the size of a hydrogen atom. The close-up roar of a jet engine amounts to one million billion times this threshhold level; this causes actual pain and soon brings on permanent deafness. Sound vibrations are transmitted by the eardrum and ossicle bones to the inner ear, a bony and membranous structure lined with tiny hairs that connect to the brain's auditory nerve. It is these hairs that are damaged most in noise-induced deafness. The ones that pick up the high frequencies are the first to wear out, and as the noise bombardment continues, the destruction creeps inward to nerves of lower frequency--all without the hearer being aware of damage. About 18 million Americans suffer total or partial deafness; among working males two out of three cases of deafness are caused by noise.

Heavy industry--especially drop forging, steel pouring, metal cutting, riveting, drilling, air blasting, sawing and highspeed paper shredding--has deafened countless people over the years, but nothing much was done about it until 1948, when the New York Court of Appeals awarded $1,661.25 in compensation to a partially deafened drop-forge worker. As a result, most companies engaged in noisy work have started noise-abatement measures and regular tests of workers' hearing. Three states--California, Oregon and Washington--have legal limits to industrial noise; in California, for instance, ear protection must be issued if the noise level reaches 95 to 110 decibels, depending on frequency and duration. Compensation claims for industrial hearing loss of varying degree are currently being settled for around $2,500 to $3,500 across the country.

Ringing in the Ears

But industrial workers are not the only people who are literally being deafened by the din of the technological age, Dr. Aram Glorig, director of the Callier Hearing and Speech Center in Dallas, believes that most Americans are all too blissfully ignorant of the hearing hazards in everyday life. "I wear earplugs when I mow the lawn," he says. Country living, he contends, is just as hard on the hair nerves as city life. "Take a group of skeet shooters who have been at it for five or ten years; every single one has got a severe high-frequency loss." Glorig tested the Marine Band and found that about half of its players had damaged hearing. Hi-fi can be a hazard with earphones, which can easily develop 135 decibels with the volume turned up all the way; but the living-room listener is safe. Ear-fearful citizens can tell when to start worrying by three Glorig rules of thumb. If a noise is loud enough to make people shout into one another's ears, or if it causes a slight temporary hearing loss, or if it brings on ringing in the ears, it can cause damage.

By contrast, quietness seems to save the ears. Dr. Moe Bergman, of the Hunter College Speech and Hearing Center, and Dr. Samuel Rosen tested hearing among the Mabaans of Sudan, a tribe so primitive that they do not even beat drums, and found it pin-drop sharp.

The danger of deafness is thus real and definable. Psychological damage, if any, is mostly in the ear of the hearer. Not a man exists who has not suffered what the experts call "auditory insult"--annoyance or irritation--but all too often, for purposes of definition, one man's sour note is another man's lost chord.

An old tongue twister says that "a noise annoys an oyster, but a noisy noise annoys an oyster more." Human beings respond in more subjective ways. Living near the end of a jet runway, for example, does not bother airport employees nearly so much as airplane haters, whose complaints about noise rise sharply just after crashes. Typewriters may irritate nearby people, but typists need some clickety-clack for job-satisfaction; using a noiseless machine, says J. B. Priestley, is like "typing on a steak and kidney pudding."

Work efficiency cannot be correlated to noise. Dr. Alan Carpenter, Cambridge University psychologist, reports on an experiment in which a factory soundproofed some of its perforating machines and found that production rose on all of them. For the employees, apparently, it was enough that some attention was being given to them. Otologist Glorig found in other experiments that factory employees made more mistakes both when noise was turned on and when it was turned off. Continuous music has been found to make cows give more milk, and to combat tedium and raise production in offices and factories. Muzak, a leading piper of auditory tonic, has different programs for factory (brassier), office (subtler), supermarket (a combination of the two), and travel, mainly for airplanes. Plane fare is carefully screened for content; Stormy Weather and I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You are out. Muzak once played I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling and, says a company official, "we've never heard the end of it."

As between clicks and whirrs, drips and hums, bangs and roars, the intermittent sounds seem psychologically the worst. A Japanese college student, cramming for an exam, got so maddened by a pile driver that he ended his own noise problem forever by rushing out and putting his head between the pile and the descending hammer. The gentle Mabaans, subjected to loud noises by Rosen and Bergman, suffered spasms of their blood vessels.

Freud dealt with noise irritation as a symptom of anxiety neurosis "undoubtedly explicable on the basis of the close inborn connection between auditory impressions and fright." But Freud did not live in a modern apartment. People who do are subject to what Columbia University Urban Planner Charles Abrams calls "a new form of trespass, a new invasion of privacy." The Dickensian poor may have had to make a virtue of propinquity, and the Latin races have historically prized it, but the upper middle classes in the U.S. find unwanted intimacy irritating. Unseen, but all too perfectly heard, are domestic strife (and bliss), digestive strains, telephone bells ("Is it ours or theirs?"), new hi-fis and old TV commercials. Pounding on the wall is no solution: it is all too likely to collapse.

Poor walls or no walls, in fact, are responsible for the acoustical double life that so many Americans are forced to lead. Urbanization and the consequent spurt in apartment living, together with high costs, put a premium on smaller rooms, lower ceilings, cheaper materials. And the modern vogue for the light and glassy rather than the solid and massive, says Acoustical Engineer Leo Beranek, seems to be based "not on function but on poetry. Spaces are not isolated, but continue without barrier through glass, grilles and gardens. But continuous structures and the open plan are inimical to quiet living." From one room to another flow the sounds of whirring mixers, juicers and garbage grinders, babbling radios and television sets, humming refrigerators and air conditioners. The air conditioner's metallic threnody, in fact, is one of the important new sounds of America. It hangs in the air above close-nestled, rich communities like the thrum of some giant insect infestation, and it is setting neighbor against neighbor, township against contractor, and contractor against manufacturer.

A Quiet Motorbike

Fighting back against noise is still mostly a holding action. Dr. Donald F. Hornig, special assistant to President Johnson for science and technology, acknowledged last week that "the generation of noise will get worse with the increase of population density." But here and there, the battle goes forward.

New York City has a strong new law requiring walls soundproof enough to reduce any airborne noise passing through by 45 decibels. In Geneva, Switzerland, it is an offense to slam a car door too loudly. France confiscates automobiles that repeat noise violations. The rubber, plastic-or leather-guarded garbage can is commonplace in London, Paris and Berlin--an improvement that could hush Manhattan's most characteristic and deafening early-morning sound. Bermuda has instituted the quiet motorbike. Outboard motors are losing their bark; truck mufflers that kill the roar are available.

In Coral Gables, Fla., a noise ordinance adopted by the city commission in June has set the allowable loudness for appliances so low that contractors are hesitant about installing any more air conditioners until the manufacturers have managed to reduce the noise. The prospect worries the makers because modern compact machines are noisier than they used to be, and the engineers are not sure what to do about it. Noisier still are the so-called heat pumps, those outside installations housing large fans to fill the house with heated air in winter, cooled air in summer. Heat pumps recently installed at a housing development at Irvington, N.Y., so overheated nearby residents with their throbbing roar 'that the town banished devices developing more than 45 decibels as measured at the nearest property line.

The irony of the air-conditioner uproar is that, however unwanted the sound it makes on the outside, the hiss of air inside is just what the noise doctor ordered. Sound engineers refer to it as "white noise" or "acoustical perfume," and they use it widely, especially in offices, to blanket distracting sounds that spring out of silence into disconcerting acoustical relief. A too-silent Massachusetts Roman Catholic Church put in white noise to preserve the secrets of its confessionals.

The Sonic Boom

No amount of acoustical perfume is a match for the biggest noise of this noisy century: airplanes. In his transportation message to Congress last March, President Johnson directed the Federal Aviation Agency and NASA, along with the Secretaries of Commerce and Housing and Urban Development, to formulate a program to combat aircraft noise.

Ray Shepanek, noise chief of the Federal Aviation Agency, breaks the problem down into three lines of attack. First is the aircraft itself. The whining water-assisted jet is giving way to the fan jet, which is quieter but hardly deserves its adman appellation, "Whisperjet." The 490-passenger Boeing 747, not yet built, is planned to make less noise than the 707 although its engines will develop 40,000 lbs. of thrust as opposed to 15,000 lbs.

The second Government attack on noise is in getting the airplane on and off the ground. The FAA is testing a new glide-slope, which would bring an airplane in much more steeply than at present, cutting down the distance it would have to fly at low altitude. There is a plan for jets to climb out on takeoff at reduced power and noise to 3,000 ft. For the third aspect of the noise problem--the sufferer on the ground--the FAA is willing to go all out when it can plan from scratch, as in the case of Washington's Dulles Airport, where 10,000 acres were used to provide a large buffer area and housing developments are kept even farther away by zoning. For houses already adjacent to jet runways, the U.S. Government takes a general attitude of "Sorry about that." But a successful lawsuit by Seattle householders, who argued that the airport authority was making use of their property by overflying it, is raising fears of similar damage suits elsewhere.

The number of people who live within screaming distance of a jet runway is, after all, rather limited. Not so the millions whose houses--and back teeth--will be jarred by sonic booms ten years from now when the supersonic age hits its stride. SSTs, creating a shock wave as they exceed the speed of sound, will send down their thunder in a "carpet" as much as 80 miles across. More than a quarter of the people subjected to sonic boom in the 1964 tests in Oklahoma City said that they could not learn to live with it. This is unwanted sound with a vengeance, and no one seems to have much hope of doing anything about it.

Even without SSTs, the sky of the future will be plangent with machinery; instead of the 90,000 privately owned planes in the U.S. air today, there will be 150,000 by 1975. The 112 airports now equipped for jets will number about 300 within four years.

In the long run, nature may provide an ecological solution to the problem of noise; a current study by Professor Bernhard Zondek of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical School finds that rats exposed to loud noise exhibit a marked decline in the pregnancy rate, although they copulate as zestfully as ever. Or perhaps the racket will drive man underground, as in the case of a junior high school near Carswell Air Force Base outside Fort Worth, whose 475 students now study in perfect peace while the jets roar overhead. Or yet again, mutation may be the answer. The big sound so savored by discotheques may be the beginning of the New Man, thoroughly conditioned to equate a high decibel output with a high old time.

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