Louder, Please

With noise pollution under attack across the U.S., it hardly seems a propitious time to produce noisemakers. Yet a few manufacturers are doing just that. Silence, they say, is often a bigger nuisance than noise. Too much of it creates uneasiness, is distracting and reduces work output.

The most widely used of the noisemakers produce a mild form of radio static called "white noise" by engineers. Turned down to a discreet volume, the static masks distracting outside noises and disturbing interior echoes. The white noise has its limitations. "It's very tricky," says Robert Newman, senior vice president of Bolt Beranek & Newman, a Cambridge, Mass., company specializing in acoustic engineering. "It would take a horrendous amount of noise to mask a supersonic transport airplane. Generating white noise to hide sounds above the annoyance level is like using Chanel No. 5 to hide the fact that you haven't had a bath for weeks."

Manufacturers who strove for years to take noise out of their products are now engineering it back in. Sperry Rand announced an especially quiet Remington electric typewriter, only to find that secretaries complained that the new model was slow and stiff. In fact, the quiet model was at least as fast and workable. Without the old hum, however, typists had the impression that they were working less briskly. Hoover Co. had the same experience. Their engineers perfected an almost whooshless vacuum cleaner that promised to be a smashing success. But housewives, who associate noise with power, assumed that the new machine would not effectively suck up dirt, and it found a market only in hospitals and nursing homes.

For those who cannot sleep amid too much quiet, New York's Hammacher Schlemmer sells a device called Sleep Sound for $19.50. It whooshes like "a breeze in the trees," according to one salesman. And for those sound-starved insomniacs who want something cheaper, Syntonic Research has produced a simple record with one side devoted entirely to the sound of surf, the other to tropical-bird noises.

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