Puzzlepieces – tag ‘pollution’

In an earlier post complaining about excessive noise I briefly mentioned the trends within music. The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR has more interesting details on this include some real stats (sadly using only the top song from each year rather than some sort of average). There’s a Wikipedia article now, Loudness war. Some more anecdotes can be found in an article from the Times Online.

The comfort for me in all this is that people seem to be really realizing that this is a problem and ruining the quality of music, and so maybe we are or soon will hit a peak and then trend back to something more reasonable. Don’t even get me started on people using earbuds whose music can still be heard by others.

Leaf Blowers

Last week I was also reminded of something that’s been bothering me for years, leaf blowers. I’d describe a leaf blower as something that accomplishes the same thing as a rake, but with the added benefit of costing more, taking much longer, requiring more effort, using gas or electricity (cost and pollution), and making a ton of noise. A quick search online for ban “leaf blowers” shows that I am very far from being the only one with this opinion. It appears that a lot of people are working to get them banned, and in some places have succeeded. Let’s hope that spreads.

I did my usual Facebook check and there are tons of anti-leaf-blower groups, with fewer than a couple hundred people in most of them. The Clean Air California website seems to be aiming to ban them statewide or even US-wide. Here (sorta) in Toronto I see an article on a motion to ban them in 2007 which failed for what seems like pathetic reasons including industry lobbying, 6 years after the previous attempt to ban them.

Looking at the leaf blower issue turned up the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, which seems to be perhaps the American equivalent of the Canadian advocacy site I linked to in my previous post. Last year I attended a lecture at Town Hall Seattle by Gordon Hempton who started the One Square Inch of Silence project, not a bad idea but more significant for it’s symbolism than the one particular place. I don’t have any real conclusion here, I’m just complaining in my usual, not-really-doing-anything-about-the-problem way.

Right to Quiet Society - Home Page - listening to Sounds Like Canada this morning and they were talking about sound pollution, something that bugs me infinitely. The link goes to a website they mentioned, for what may be the most prominent organization advocating for non-insanity on the matter. Non-insanity, of course, being defined as agreeing with me.

There are a huge number of noise problems, so I will mention some that are bugging me at the moment.

Problem unawareness - the fact that many don’t even realize that this is a problem is a problem in itself. People tend to think of tangible pollutants, and discount sound and others. Reminds me of the song Garbage.

Public music obligatoriness - restaurants, malls, stores, elevators, gyms, etc. all feel the need to be playing music 100% of the time. I suspect people buy more than they otherwise would, what with being unable to actually think things through on account of the noise. I would say that it is okay for some of these places to play music sometimes, but none of them should be playing music all the time.

The number of places where one can not have to listen to music is quite sad. I managed to forget my goggles when swimming on Saturday, meaning I kept my head above water for most of the hour-long swim. It wasn’t until then that I realized how insanely they blast music in there. A pool is a noisy place already, what with the echoing. Even good music sounds terrible at the volume they have to keep it at to hear it.

I really do not understand the concept of a restaurant or other venue in which one cannot actually hear anyone. Do people not go out to, you know, talk to each other?

Excessive volume - almost all the movies I have been to in theatres lately have been deafening. Literally painful to the ears to start with. I suppose we are on a very bad cycle these days: people listen to music/tv/etc. so loudly that they ruin their hearing, and thus much listen to things even louder, thus worsening the hearing of those and those around them, thus necessitating louder volumes…

On the subway, I can’t listen to my mp3 player, as I am not willing to turn it as loud as need to be heard over the subway itself, which is very loud. And yet I can still hear the music from the headphones of people sitting across from me. I have the maximum volume on my iPod set to a mere third of its potental maximum volume. It is hard to believe that these people will not need hearing aids quite early in life. To be fair, I do have an American iPod; it is different elsewhere thanks to the less-unenlighted France having maximum volume laws.

Noise from unnecessary tools - another thing mentioned on the radio show was leaf blowers. To me this fits into the category of tools that have no advantage over manual means (ever see anyone spend five minutes trying to move a single leaf with a leafblower?), yet produce a ton of noise.

Jarring sounds - if there has to be noise, it should stop, start, and change gradually. Abrupt changes in sound are just a bad idea, screwing up your scenses, just like lots of sharp scene changes in video.

I will have to check out quite.org now.