Listen Up!

Yesterday, listening made headlines in the New York Times. A captivating, multimedia feature followed sound artist and scholar, Jacek Smolicki, on a soundwalk of New York City, during which he used various DIY listening devices to eavesdrop on sounds that normally escape notice. These sonic snippets included the sizzle of microbes feasting on rotting vegetation in a Central Park pond, a leaky pipe beneath the West Side Highway, and the city buzz vibrating its way up the roots of trees.

Listening is a lost art, or at least an endangered one. A few years ago, I hiked up to an overlook in Colorado’s Lory State Park with Kurt Fristrup, a bio-acoustics expert and the retired head of the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division of the National Park Service. Along the way, he’d been pointing out various birds, so that by the end I could tell a yellow-breasted chat from a canyon wren or a western tanager. Fristrup had spent a career studying and working to preserve nature’s soundscapes. He told me that by masking nature’s sounds with more and more human noise, “we haven’t simply lost opportunities to hear those sounds, we’ve conditioned people not to listen.”

I consider a lack of listening to be both a cause and an effect of rising noise pollution. We invite more noise by neglecting the sonic dimensions of our architecture, urban planning, and product design. Meanwhile, most noise control is after-the-fact and focused only on the sounds we want to shut up, not what we want to hear. At the other end of this vicious cycle, how much can we truly listen when our soundscapes become overwhelmed by an impenetrable cacophony?

But, I think there are opportunities to revive listening, not as a mere curiosity but to fuel a renewed appreciation of how much sound environments matter to our health, wellbeing, and our connections to the world we share. Smolicki’s art and advocacy foster this listening revival. His installations bring life’s neglected sonic dimension front and center, evoking everything form threatened marine ecosystems to ubiquitous technology to the tragedy of World War II concentration camps in his native Poland. He also works to make listening a collective experience by organizing a biennial Walking Festival of Sound with his colleague, Tim Shaw, two weeks of events celebrating everyday sounds held in different cities around the world.

The 2026 Walking Festival of Sound was in Boston-Cambridge this spring, and I was fortunate enough to help Smolicki open the festivities with a talk about Clamor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he was finishing up a Loeb Fellowship. It was a great opportunity to try and weave sound and noise together into a common cause: The importance of listening. More listening can help the design world to be more sound-aware, and it can broaden noise concerns to include a more proactive consideration of healthy and supportive soundscapes.

My hike with Fristrup was filled with listening, which he reminded me is voluntary for humans but mandatory for most other species. In one way or another, both terrestrial and aquatic animals rely on sound to find food, avoid predators, attract mates, and find their way. They have to listen, as best they can. Whereas, we can put on our noise-cancelling headphones and otherwise retreat into sonic isolation. Sometimes shutting out the noise is exactly what’s needed. But, in a larger sense, the only real antidote to an ever-noisier world is more listening, not less.

Noise Control Needs a Champion

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had abdicated its responsibilities to mitigate noise pollution for more than 40 years. In 1972, Congress passed a federal Noise Control Act that required the EPA to inform the public about noise pollution risks, support noise research, and label noisy products, and set noise emission standards, all of which it did for about a decade through the Office of Noise Abatement and Control (ONAC). But when President Ronald Reagan took office, he eliminated ONAC’s funding without Congress rescinding the authorizing legislation.

For decades thereafter, noise control was largely considered a local matter (while pockets of federal noise remained in places like the FAA and OSHA). Then in 2023, Quiet Communities and Jeanne M. Kempthorne, a retired federal prosecutor, sued the EPA over its failure to implement and enforce the federal Noise Control Act. Last month, the District Court in the District of Columbia ruled in the plaintiff’s favor, stating that the court had “little trouble concluding that the EPA has unreasonably delayed in carrying out its duties” to protect the public from noise.

The next step will be the remedy phase in which the court will determine what the EPA must do to fulfill its duties and how quickly they must do it. This is a landmark victory for the nation’s noise fighters, and it will be interesting to see if and how ONAC is reconstituted for the 21st century. At the very least, putting noise back on the EPA’s agenda will revive the issue in the public consciousness as a widespread public health issue rather than a niche concern of isolated noise battles gauged by complaint.

Reflecting on the ruling in Forbes magazine, Bill Schiffmiller, an accessibility consultant and lifelong hearing-aid user, suggested that we might be on the cusp of a movement to improve our sound environments in ways well beyond the government’s ability to compel through regulation. Specifically, he argued that noise is a problem ripe for private-sector innovation, tapping expertise that already exists to improve people’s sonic experiences in our built environments.

“That is why I keep returning to this court ruling,” he wrote. “Not because I believe government has no role. It does. But history suggests that entirely new business categories rarely emerge because regulation demands them. They emerge because someone recognizes an overlooked human need and decides to address it before everyone else does.”

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• One of the most enduring acoustic mysteries are the variety of unexplained low-frequency sounds heard (by some) around the world and collectively known as “The Hum.” Sometimes, the hum’s source is eventually tracked down to some industrial source, like the “Windsor Hum” that emanated from a steel mill on the Detroit River, while others remain unsolved, like the Taos Hum in New Mexico.

  Several years ago, I interviewed Glen MacPherson, an educator and researcher who took it upon himself to create an online repository of hum research and a global map of hum occurances. MacPherson told me he suspected the hum, in many cases, might be a sort of low-frequency tinnitus (i.e. a sound originating in the brain of the hearer, not from an external source). Earlier this year, scientists from Germany and Norway came to the same conclusion in a PLOS One study. The team studied 28 Germans who reported occasionally hearing a hum that others did not. They found that only 2 of them had above-normal low-frequency hearing, and they also tested whether they might be hearing otoacoustic emissions, which are faint sounds produced by the cochlea. No again. Thus, the researchers concluded, “low-frequency tinnitus might serve as a good explanation for many, but not all, cases.”

• Last month, I read about the Wisconsin residents filing a class action lawsuit against Microsoft over data center noise. Turns out they weren’t the only ones. Several lawsuits have been filed this year alone claiming harms from data center noise in Mississippi, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York. I wrote more extensively about data center noise in this newsletter last year.

• Add to the pile of studies linking health harms to noise exposure. A study of 3 million Danish people over 17 years published last month in JAMA Neurology found that people exposed to higher levels of traffic noise were more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease over the course of the study.

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Dear Readers

I hate missing deadlines, even the self-imposed ones. Whether or not you noticed this newsletter’s absence for the past couple of months, I apologize.

As a freelance journalist, I make a living one assignment at a time, most of which require pitches. Everything takes a lot of time, including this newsletter, which can take up to a week out of my working month. It’s no longer tenable.

So I’ve decided to change things going forward. Future Clamor posts will be punchier and less wedded to one format or schedule. I want to share interesting noise nuggets in a timelier way. I’ll occasionally dig deeper if the topic warrants, but without the obligation and expectations that come with monthly installments of longform plus “back of the book” items.

I hope you’ll stick with me. I truly value the community of readers that’s grown organically around a shared concern about noise and a fascination with the sonic realm. I’ve always tried to craft posts worthy of your attention, and that won’t change. Our inboxes, like the rest of our lives, are already too noisy. Thanks for listening!

To the misophonics in my family: Sorry for all the chewing.

The word misophonia means hatred of sound, but people with this disorder aren’t quiet-mongers. They don’t dislike sound generally or have super-sensitive hearing. Loudness isn’t the problem (quite often, it’s the solution).

People with misophonia aren’t more bothered than other people by sudden sounds or screechiness, nor by noises with more direct links to danger and distress such as angry shouts or cries of pain. Instead, the offending sounds are much more banal. Mouth, nose, and throat sounds are particularly problematic, but triggers may also include fidgety sounds such as finger tapping, knuckle cracking, pen clicking, or the scraping and clinking of utensils against a dish.

In the twenty-five years since misophonia was first named in the scientific literature, research interest in the condition has exploded. Yet, misophonia is still not recognized as a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the bible of mental-health care. People with misophonia know that a lot of people don’t take it seriously. They know that the mix of rage and anxiety they experience when they hear certain everyday sounds is often dismissed as weird and overblown, even by the people closest to them, and even by themselves.

Estimates of misophonia’s prevalence vary widely, between 2 and 18 percent of the population. Plenty of people suspect they have the disorder but have never sought a diagnosis, including my wife, Meaghan, and my daughter, Izzy. When I asked if I could include them in a misophonia post for the newsletter, they readily agreed. So, we all filled out a misophonia assessment and then sat down to talk about triggers and exactly what they think of me when I slurp my soup.

The more you learn about misophonia, the more you realize just how complex it is. Genetics seem to play a role. Brain scans show that people with misophonia process sounds differently. Plus, some studies suggest a higher prevalence among women and a significant overlap with other mental health conditions, such as anxiety, while other studies don’t. On top of all this, is misophonia’s tangled social dimensions, which I wanted to focus on with the help of experts, including Meaghan and Izzy.

Stop! Hey, What’s That Sound?

Meaghan, Izzy, and I all completed the Duke Misophonia Questionnaire, created and psychometrically validated by researchers at the Duke Center for Misophonia and Emotion Regulation. The questionnaire listed 15 potential trigger sounds (including a write-in option), and the instructions asked us to indicate which sounds “bother you much more intensely than they do most other people.”

I chose two sounds from the list. I find that I’m really bothered by people talking in the background when I’m trying to focus and “repetitive sounds of animals” (specifically my dog’s hair-trigger barking). For comparison, Izzy identified nine problematic sounds, including a write-in for people brushing teeth. Meaghan picked eight sounds, and she challenged my two.

“Does the dog barking actually make you feel the way I feel with chewing noises?” she asked, “It’s like there’s a spike going in through my ear all the way into my brain. It’s a very physical feeling that’s just inside my ear and not quite in the middle of my skull.”

I had to admit that my answer was no. Sometimes my heart skips a beat when our dog explodes into a spasm of barks. But there are no brain spikes.

It’s safe to say that most people don’t enjoy listening to a lot of the common misophonia trigger sounds, and some folks are highly annoyed by them. But for people with misophonia, trigger sounds make their hearts race and their palms sweat far more than control-group subjects, indicating a hyperactive fight-or-flight response.

What elevates these noises from annoyance to a five-alarm threat for people with misophonia may be their inability to stop a sound from hijacking their attention. Specifically, brain scan studies find that people with misophonia listening to trigger sounds have a lot more action in the brain’s “salience” network, which sorts the stimuli that must be attended to from stimuli that can be safely ignored.

These intense reactions—the rage, the brain spikes— are particularly interesting when you consider that research shows misophonia trigger sounds lose much of their power when disassociated from their sources. For instance, a 2025 misophonia study by Laurie Heller, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, found that the same exact sound can elicit very different reactions when paired with videos suggesting alternate sources. The study, published in PLOS One, covered a series of nine experiments in which people who scored high on screenings for misophonia and control subjects listened to sounds that were either paired with videos of common trigger sources or plausible neutral sources (the actual sound source varied from one trial to the next). Here are a few examples of videos that might accompany the same exact sound:

Person smacking their lips OR Person pulling tape one and off a tape dispenser

Person chewing gum OR Person stirring noodle soup

Person swishing water in their mouth OR Duck splashing in a water basin

“My starting point was a question about the cognitive mechanism,” Heller told me. “Do you have a misophonic reaction to a sound if you don’t identify the source? Do you really need to know that a sound was created by a mouth, for instance? What’s actually causing this?”

Heller and her team found that source attribution mattered a lot to how people rated sounds on a scale of pleasantness. There was a “very powerful effect from the videos,” Heller said, in which people rated the same sound as much less unpleasant when it was paired with a neutral video. And it worked both ways. People rated the sounds from the neutral sources as much more unpleasant when they were paired with videos of common misophonic triggers.

The pattern held whether listeners were in the misophonic group or the control group, according to Heller. The difference was that the shift was much bigger for people with misophonia whose reactions to sounds paired with “unpleasant sources” were far more negative.

The results were the same, albeit smaller in magnitude, when the videos were replaced by text descriptions of the alternate sources. Finally, a follow-up study by Heller and colleagues used pupillometry (measuring the eye’s pupil size) to confirm that reactions to sounds shifted according to their supposed source (narrowing pupils is a tell-tale sign of disgust).

It’s About to Get Crunchy In Here

Disgust is a loaded term, especially when most common misophonia triggers are sounds made by other people. Misophonia researcher, Heather Hansen, assistant professor of psychology at William and Mary, tapped into this social judgment in a 2021 study where people with misophonia listened to various trigger sounds and rated their reactions to them. In addition to the numerical aversion ratings, there was an optional text box where listeners could jot down any other reactions. They didn’t hold back. They vented hatred for the invisible chewers, for instance, calling them rude pigs, cavemen devoid of manners, and so forth.

“This is interesting,” Hansen thought while reading these responses. “You are giving me a social judgment of this person from just a sound.”

In a follow-up study by Hansen and others, published by PLOS ONE in 2024, people with misophonia rated people in photos as far less likeable if they had previously been shown their photo while listening to a common misophonia trigger.

Social judgments are baked into the rage over loud gum chewing or spoons clinking against teeth. A mouth sound is much less likely to trigger somebody with misophonia if the sound is made by an animal or a baby, for instance (although, animal sound triggers are not unheard of). It’s also worth mentioning that people with misophonia aren’t generally bothered by sounds they make themselves.

“It’s funny,” Izzy told me. “You would think that my dog drinking water would be bothersome. It’s not at all. And I think it has partly to do with the fact that I can blame a human being for making these sounds.”

The judgements are reflexive. They’re not personal. Yet they’re inescapable. There must be a German word for the swirl of sympathy, contrition, and indignation you feel when your daughter glares at you for swallowing too loudly.

“It’s like the person who’s making these sounds is violating some kind of social norm and should know better,” I said, “So, do you, do you feel like…”

My wife jumped in. “Yeah, we blame you,” she said with a laugh. “We apologize, because we know that this is irrational. But, we do blame you.”

Got it. We moved past the trigger discussion to the next section of the Duke questionnaire, which asks about common coping behaviors and the extent to which sound aversions have impacted a person’s life. By far, the most common strategy that people with misophonia adopt is avoidance. They become practiced escape artists, not just abruptly leaving the dinner table, but in more severe cases, fleeing jobs, shedding friendships, shunning social get-togethers, and generally rearranging their lives around the sounds they fear they might encounter.

Fortunately, both Meaghan and Izzy reported milder life impacts, which they largely managed with an arsenal of improvised coping strategies. In our house, music is a must at dinner, for instance. Meaghan puts on noise cancelling headphones immediately when she boards a flight. Izzy reported covering her ears and humming or moving her hair around to create a masking sound, as well as breathing exercises and sometimes pinching her leg as a sensory distraction.

“I think acknowledging that it’s a real thing, and that we actually have a physical reaction, and that we’re not just being angry for no reason,” Meaghan said. “Like this morning, you made toast and you said, it’s about to get crunchy in here. I appreciated that. A warning is good. It takes the air out of the balloon a little bit.”

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• For the last century, traffic has been one of the biggest sources of noise pollution. Vehicle noise regularly tops lists of complaints and contributes to serious health harms, including heart disease and stroke. The gradual displacement of internal combustion engines with electric vehicles is a huge opportunity for sonic reprieve, despite recent slowdowns in the market’s growth. In fact, EVs are so quiet at lower speeds that carmakers are legally required to add sound to these vehicles for the safety of pedestrians and cyclists.

  But some car companies, including Porsche and BMW, want to go further. They’re adding more sounds to their EVs beyond what’s needed for safety to mimic the throaty roar of a “powerful” gas engine, for the sake of vanity, emotion, and, of course, branding. A few of these fake engine sounds, like Dodge’s “Fratzonic” faux exhaust system, can be earsplittingly loud (up to 126 decibels!).

  In Europe, EV sounds are covered by UN Regulation 138, which sets the minimum (47 decibels) and maximum (75 decibels) loudness (the European standard influences regulations internationally—more on that later—and the EV market more broadly).

  However, UN Regulation 138 is specifically about safety sounds, and when it came up for review in February, auto industry lobbyists argued that loud, internal-combustion mimicry played through “exterior sound enhancement systems” weren’t about safety and should therefore be exempt. Opposing them, public health and environmental advocates wanted to ban vanity loudness. The regulators compromised, by allowing the additional sounds but capping them at 68 decibels and defaulting to a quiet mode when the car is started, requiring drivers to manually activate the sounds every time.

  Importantly, the current acoustic limits only apply at lower speeds, up to 80 km/h (about 50 mph) with any high-speed provisions deferred until the next regulatory meeting in September 2026. This story was brought to my attention by Ingrid Buday, who leads an advocacy group in Toronto called No More Noise. Along with other anti-noise advocates in North America, she is planning a campaign to lobby regulators in Canada and the United States to follow Europe’s lead, and to push for a closure of the “high-speed” gap.

• Spring brings the return of migrating birds and their chorus of songs. But that chorus has steadily been losing its voices. Bird populations have been dropping for decades across North America, by some 3 billion (29 percent) since 1970 according to a landmark study in Science corroborated by a 2025 report by the North American Bird Conservation Commission.

  Scientists blame the loss and degradation of habitat for the disappearing birds, including the impacts of noise pollution, as a recent study details. A leading indicator of the decline is the National Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count, the longest-running community-science bird survey. The 126th count concluded in early 2026. While the number of CBC participants keeps rising, the number of birds they find keeps falling. Last year, they counted some 44 million birds, compared to nearly 69 million birds a decade earlier. The official numbers for the most-recent count won’t be fully compiled and available for a few months.

  

• Book News! Clamor has had a busy few months. In March, I joined two panels at the Tucson Festival of Books. Last month, I had the honor of speaking at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to help open the 2026 Walking Festival of Sound for Cambridge/Boston, 2+ weeks of listening and sound-focused events embedded in the host city (Thanks to cofounder Jacek Smolicki for the invite). Finally, in early May, I was delighted to learn that the Massachusetts Center for the Book longlisted Clamor for its annual nonfiction book award.

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An Ear in the Sky

Noise cameras are coming to an intersection near you. Triggered by sounds hitting 85 decibels, an array of four microphones triangulates the source, and a fisheye camera spots the offending vehicle, recording a snippet of video and snapping a photo of the license plate. After humans review the evidence, a court summons is issued to the vehicle’s owner.

The biggest name in noise cameras is SoundVue, sold by Intelligent Instruments Ltd, sister company to 24Acoustics, a UK company that specializes in remote noise and vibration monitoring at industrial sites. The company created its first noise-camera in 2019 in reponse to a request from authorities in the wealthy London borough of Kensington and Chelsea who were trying to crack down on souped up luxury cars—Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Porsches—that were loudly revving and racing through the streets late at night.

During a three-month pilot in the fall of 2020, the cameras worked well enough to become permanent fixtures in the borough (later expanding into other parts of London). In the summer of 2021, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) piloted a single noise camera in Queens. And for the next two years, they moved this camera from one location to another before installing several more cameras in 2023 when the city passed the “Stop Spreading the Noise Act,” authorizing a citywide noise-camera program. The Act called for at least five cameras in each of the five boroughs by September 2025. To date, however, they’ve only managed to install 12 cameras, due to insufficient funding. The DEP released its 2025 annual report on the noise-camera program a couple weeks ago.

Fines for vehicle noise violations in New York City start at $800 and go up to $2500 for repeat offenders. One of the busiest noise cameras is in Manhattan near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, which issues about one ticket every other day on average. In 2025, the DEP’s noise cameras flagged about 16,000 loud “events” triggering nearly 1700 summonses. Note: The DEP did not make anybody available to me for an interview about the cameras, but they did answer emailed questions.

Beyond New York City, SoundVue cameras have been installed in about half a dozen US locales, including Knoxville, the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and even the tiny city of Avoca, Iowa (population 1700) where the noise target is tractor-trailers “jake braking” as they pass through town on the state highway (i.e. slowing the truck by releasing compressed air from the engine to reduce wear and tear on wheel brakes).

According to Reuben Peckham, a director of Intelligent Instruments, the SoundVue software can distinguish between noise sources such as jake braking and loud exhaust, honking, loud music, or other noise sources, such as sirens that it ignores. He estimated that the SoundVue’s false positives vary by location but average about 10 percent. The noise cameras are sold globally, but the United States is the biggest market.

“I have a list as long as my arm of cities in the US that are at various stages of interest,” he told me, including cities such as Chicago, Providence, and Washington, DC that are considering pilots.

Many city authorities see these cameras as a solution to an age-old obstacle in noise enforcement—the ephemeral nature of noise, especially when the source is on the move. Nevertheless, champions of the technology must still navigate the patchwork of laws governing noise enforcement in the US.

For example, Miami has had a noise-camera pilot operating since 2023, but Florida state law requires noise citations to be issued by an officer who personally observes the violation. In 2024, the California Highway Patrol tested SoundVue and other noise cameras to spot cars with illegally loud exhaust systems. In California and many other states, car exhaust can’t be louder than 95 decibels, but the law also requires a very specific measurement to verify any violation, as we’ll cover later in this newsletter. Ultimately, the highway patrol chose to not recommend noise cameras “as a standalone enforcement tool to be used as the sole basis for issuing citations.”

There are also privacy concerns about the widespread use of noise cameras, with fears of recordings being shared beyond noise enforcement for general surveillance. But, according to Peckham, SoundVue cameras won’t detect normal speech, because they only start recording at 85 decibels, well above the 60 to 65 decibels of typical conversation.

“Even if somebody had a conversation directly underneath the system triggered by a passing car, the sound level from the car at 85 decibels or above is going to drown out the sound of speech,” he said, adding that the SoundVue software also allows for the blurring of faces in the videos it records, although the decision to blur is up to the cameras’ operator. The DEP spokesperson responding to my question about privacy concerns quoted the local law limiting the use of the recordings to the enforcement of noise violations.

“To be used in an investigation or criminal proceeding, a subpoena or search warrant is required,” the spokesperson added.

Are noise-cameras worth it? The answer might depend on your metric. SoundVue cameras currently cost about $40,000 apiece, including calibration. To date, New York City’s noise camera program is costing more than it brings in from fines. According to the DEP, the city has spent nearly $436,000 to purchase and calibrate its arsenal of noise cameras and an additional $1.3 million on personnel to operate the program. And while the city has levied more than $2.5 million in fines through the noise-camera program since 2022, they’ve only collected about $650,000.

Budget impacts aside, what about benefits to the health and wellbeing of city residents from reduced noise? Have the cameras reduced the noise endured by nearby residents? There has not yet been any before/after noise monitoring in the New York streets where noise-cameras are installed, and no such monitoring is in the works, according to the DEP spokesperson.

A 2023 study by the UK Department of Transport found that noise cameras did deter noisy vehicles from the streets where the cameras operated.

“While this achieved the ultimate aim of reducing noise pollution close to the installation site,” the report concluded, “further consideration is required to prevent the issue from being exacerbated in neighbouring areas.”

Peckham also sent me a graph of New York City’s 311 complaints about vehicle noise citywide, which showed a clear decline in the past three years.

The correlation here is evident, but it’s hard to draw strong causal connections between a handful of noise cameras and a citywide decline of noise complaints following the Covid pandemic when New Yorkers were stuck at home and noise complaints famously spiked.

With all that said, the serious health harms of chronic stress and disrupted sleep due to noise are well established, and the American Public Health Association labeled noise a “public health hazard” in 2021. And folks in New York City and elsewhere who endure sonic assault from super loud vehicles will applaud any technology that exacts some toll on the perpetrators.

Pipe Down!

Daren Schofield came to the noise fight later in life. Or, more accurately, the noise fight came to him. After three decades in law enforcement, Schofield moved into what he thought would be an idyllic spot for a quiet retirement—a house on three acres along a woodsy road winding through the hills of San Mateo County, California.

“We bought this house in winter. What a mistake that was,” he told me. Spring brought the noise—drivers of souped-up cars, trucks, and motorcycles with modified exhaust systems loved to let loose and show off along Schofield’s road. He quickly developed a “sheer hatred” of loud vehicles, he explained. But when he told local law enforcement about the noise problem, they claimed the legal standard for disturbing the peace with “unreasonably loud” noise was tricky to enforce on vehicles and easily defeated in court.

So, Schofield found another way. Rather than use the subjective “unreasonably loud” standard, he looked to the state regulations concerning vehicle exhaust systems, where there was a hard limit on loudness—95 decibels. The issue was that it had to be measured with a calibrated decibel meter at a precise distance and angle from a vehicle revving its engine to a specified rpm. Most cops didn’t have the equipment or training to enforce this regulation. Schofield decided he would provide both.

In 2020, he launched “Pipe Down,” a full day of classroom and field work to teach officers about exhaust noise, the noise-limit statute, how to measure the loudness of vehicles they pulled over, and how to write citations that would stand up in court. The training costs $175 per student, and the enforcement kits (sound meter, tripod, measuring tape, etc) cost $850 a piece.

Schofield told me that he’s trained about 125 cops from 23 different agencies in California, including Salinas, Daly City, and Redwood City. He estimated that at least a thousand noise citations have thus far been issued thanks to Pipe Down.

One of his most recent training sessions was with the police department of Gustine, a small town in the Central Valley with a population of about 6,000 people. Founded as a railroad town, Gustine grew rapidly in the early 20th century thanks to an influx of dairy farmers from Portugal. It remains a largely agricultural community, surrounded by orchards, but intersected by two state highways that bring constant noise. The Gustine police department surveyed residents about their concerns, and loud vehicles topped the list along with other roadway issues such as speeding and illegal u-turns. As a result, Gustine’s police chief, Ruben Chavez, decided to enroll three of his officers in the Pipe Down training back in December.

There’s plenty of loud through traffic in Gustine from vehicles traveling between the Bay Area and the Central Valley, Chavez told me, “but also a lot of the local folks have trucks souped up with the big tires and the modified exhausts.” That noise carries in a small, rural town, “and it really impacts the quality of life for our community.”

Chavez told me that his officers had issued about 25 citations for noise in just the first month following their training. But, rather than fines, most of these tickets are referrals to a state facility for a mandated fix to quiet the vehicle’s exhaust system.

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• A few years ago, noise complaints in China were off the charts. The outcry was (ironically) loud enough for the central government to launch an all-out assault on traffic noise in the nation’s booming cities. This included massive incentivizes for quieter electric vehicles, installing miles of new sound barriers, repaving roads with “quiet pavement,” and pushing municipal leaders to enact new regulations to curb traffic congestion and honking. For more details, check out this recent video report by Australian journalists:

• In January, the European Society of Cardiology, the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and the World Heart Federation published the first joint statement calling for urgent action to address environmental stressors, including noise and other pollutions, that contribute to cardiovascular disease.

• In addition to their noise-camera program, New York City’s DEP launched its own mobile app called “NYCNoise Monitor” late last year. Noise submissions, tagged with time, date, decibel count, and noise type, are mapped and appear in table format. According to the DEP spokesperson, nearly 6,300 noise submissions were made via the app in the first month after its launch.

  

  “Traditional [311] noise complaints often lack precise data on decibel levels and timing, making enforcement challenging,” noted the press release announcing the new app. “By allowing New Yorkers to measure and track noise in their neighborhood, DEP can better analyze citywide noise patterns [and] help DEP identify hotspots and guide targeted enforcement efforts.”

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Hooked on the Horn

The honking habits of India’s drivers have withstood decades of accumulating noise laws, escalating fines, periodic police crackdowns, and many, many public-awareness campaigns. Could technology finally break through the noise? An Indian serial entrepreneur named Satyen Engineer believes his latest venture, YHonk, could help calm the cacophony.

YHonk features a small in-vehicle device that tracks horn use along with speed, location, timing, and other contextual data fed into a central dashboard. Pilots of the system on public transport and other vehicles in several cities reveal some shocking baseline honking behavior and provide a platform for a range of interventions that have just started to be tested.

I recently interviewed Engineer who shared documentation on YHonk’s pilot studies and origins—the technology was patented in 2015 and won both funding and startup support from the United Nations Development Programme in 2020. Reporting on YHonk reminded me just how formidable the noise dragon is that it seeks to slay.

India has had anti-noise laws on the books since the late 1980s. Drivers can be fined for unnecessary honking (1000 Rupees, about $11 for a first offense and double for repeated offenses), and India has long prohibited honking in “silence zones”—a 100 meter buffer around noise-sensitive places such as schools, houses of worship, and hospitals. Honking aside, there are strict legal decibel limits for silence zones (50 dB during the day and 40 dB at night).

But enforcing these laws is another matter. A 2017 study of silence zones around India found that none of them met the legal standard. Likewise, on roads where honking is ubiquitous, singling out individual drivers to fine seems arbitrary and ineffective, and police opt instead for periodic “no honking days” of intense, albeit fleeting enforcement, while also leading or joining campaigns like the 2018 “Horn Vrat” (a fast from honking) when an autorickshaw festooned with bulb horns drove around Mumbai to raise noise-pollution awareness and discourage honking.

“I personally do not say not to honk. I say honk when required,” Engineer told me. “Every vehicle in the world has a horn, and the horn is there for a reason.”

The problem, he and others have noted, is that drivers in India use their horns for every reason, and for no reason. I’ve lived most of my life in cities, so I’m fluent in honk for hi there, wake up! stop! and move, motherbleeper! But, I didn’t realize how expansive a honking vocabulary could be until I visited India in 2019, funded by a reporting grant, to cover a growing anti-noise movement for Undark magazine.

Roads in Indian cities are overstuffed with vehicles of all sorts. Motorcycles slice between lanes, and pedestrians are often forced into the street when sidewalks are either missing or crammed with vendors. Honking becomes reflexive under these conditions, expanding into an all-purpose signal of intent—to turn, to pass, to nudge oneself another few forward. Honking also serves as a general venting of frustration at stoplights and other obstacles, and, of course, as a retort to other habitual honkers.

As part of my reporting for the Undark article, I had called Ritesh Vijay, a senior principal scientist with India’s National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), and arguably the nation’s foremost honking authority. Vijay spoke to me while walking to his office in the city of Nagpur, and our conversation was repeatedly interrupted by loud horn bursts. “Sorry!” he said with a quick laugh. “My God! You can see how noisy it is!”

NEERI had recently published a major noise pollution study of 27 Indian municipalities, including Nagpur, which concluded that honking was the biggest noise culprit. As noisy as Nagpur was, it wasn’t the worst of the cities NEERI studied, and neither was the megacity of Mumbai, which I had visited a few weeks before the call. No, the cacophony crown went to the comparatively small metropolis of Ulhasnagar, home to about half a million people on Mumbai’s outskirts.

In Ulhasnagar, which I also visited, weekday traffic averaged 91.4 decibels! That’s lawnmower-loud, hearing-damage loud. For comparison, traffic noise studies in New York and other American cities tend to measure somewhere around 70 to 75 decibels on average, which isn’t healthy but doesn’t pose nearly the same threat to hearing. Indeed, study after study finds exceptionally high rates of hearing loss among India’s traffic cops, not to mention the well-established links between noise exposure and heightened risks for hypertension, heart disease, and stroke. Below is a 30-second snippet of video I recorded in Ulhasnagar (September 2019).

While there are good, even life-saving reasons to honk, constant honking isn’t just irrational, it’s ultimately self-defeating. Not only does laying on the horn at a red light accomplish nothing, but the more honks there are vying for attention, the less effective every honk becomes. One consequence is decibel escalation. Standard horns struggle against the growing din, and the demand for louder, after-market horns in Indian cities is reportedly flourishing. Beyond loudness, there are also limits to driver attention and the desensitizing results of signal overload (like hospital “alarm fatigue” among clinicians).

In 2020, the Mumbai traffic police went so far as to rig visible decibel meters to several traffic lights at busy intersections which would restart the countdown to greenlights if the honks of impatient drivers hit 85 decibels. The police even made a video of their initiative, which they dubbed, “The Punishment Signal.”

All this honking hasn’t made India’s roads any safer. In fact, the number of deaths due to road injuries rose nearly 60 percent between 1990 and 2017, according to a study in the Lancet. Indeed, writing in Forbes India, the anti-noise activist Sumaira Abdulali blamed constant honking for road rage and aggressive driving. “An emergency warning device in the rest of the world, horns are not a substitute for the ordinary use of brakes, for road discipline or for other driving skills,” she wrote. “In fact, honking promotes speeding, overtaking and other rash driving.”

At a minimum, YHonk aims to make drivers and the people who employ them (such as transport authorities and municipal governments) more aware of their honking behaviors. For instance, a year-long pilot of the devices on five buses in the city of Hyderabad tabulated more than 940,000 honks. Assuming 5 days of driving per week, that would mean each bus honked more than 700 times a day if the honks were evenly distributed. However, the study revealed that one particular driver was responsible for nearly half of the honks.

“I mean, a bus driver could have a situation where he needed to honk four or five times a day,” Engineer speculated. “But more than that, there is something wrong with your driving behavior.”

YHonk’s dashboard drops a location pin for every honk, which turns red in a silence zone. Late in 2025, YHonk concluded a pilot with police vehicles in the city of Ahmedabad, two months of baseline measures followed by a third month during which silence zone honking generated a text message alert urging drivers to be more careful. As of this writing, the results are still being analyzed.

As Engineer acknowledged, sometimes silence zones aren’t well demarcated, and drivers could use some help knowing when they’re in one. He said he’s reached out to Google Maps to see if this could be added to their suite of traffic notifications.

Even in a silence zone, drivers sometimes must honk to keep themselves and others safe, which complicates any path between remote data and noise enforcement. As Engineer explained it to me, YHonk is a source of evidence. “We will provide all the data of honking violations to the traffic police department and leave it to them to make a decision.”

The data could also go to transport authorities, delivery companies, and others that employ drivers, who could use it to craft both sticks and carrots to encourage horn restraint, such as financial incentives for drivers who meet low honking thresholds. Still, as columnist, Bairaj Chawalgami, recently opined in the Daily Exelsior, a newspaper in the city of Jammu, changing India’s honking culture will take a combination of efforts. “A systemic approach, supported by both policy and public participation, is essential if any meaningful change is to be achieved,” wrote Chawalgami. That approach included legal enforcement, education and awareness, technology, and infrastructure improvements to lessen the “traffic chaos.”

Ultimately, breaking the honking habit will take a critical mass of drivers lifting their hands from the horn, enough to shift constant honkers from the norm to the exception on the roads. Engineer told me his plans to reach these numbers with YHonk in Ahmedabad. The city is due to host the Commonwealth Games in 2030 and wants to host the Olympics in 2036, which will put pressure on authorities to reduce noise and other pollution, according to Engineer.

A decade ago, the International Olympic Committee made environmental protection and sustainability a key component for would-be host cities, and Ahmedabad has a serious noise pollution problem. Engineer recently met with the Home Minister of Gujarat, the Indian state containing Ahmedabad, a man named Harsh Sanghavi, who also happens to be the Sports Minister.

“I said, I can help you reduce the noise pollution in the city,” he recalled. “The plan is to put the device in 1,500 municipal corporation vehicles.”

I was unable to confirm this plan with the Minister, but Engineer told me that if that first phase is successful, they would expande to all municipal vehicles, then cargo vehicles registered with the local Road Transport Office, and eventually licensed taxis and autorickshaws, which would amount to hundreds of thousands of devices tracking honks on the city’s streets.

“We believe we’ll be making a huge impact,” he concluded. “A huge impact.”

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• Book News! I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be on two panels at the Tucson Festival of Books hosted by the University of Arizona on March 14-15, 2026. I’ll join science writers Carl Zimmer and Sharon Udasin for “The Hidden Environment: What We Breathe, Drink, and Hear” and then for “Noise, Quiet and Well-Being” I’ll pair up with Rachel Kolb, author of Articulate:

  A Deaf Memoir of Voice (I’m reading this right now, and it’s excellent).

  

• Last month, the Wall Street Journal covered a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that found home values of houses within 100 meters of newly constructed highway noise barriers rose nearly 7 percent more than a control group of comparable homes 500 meters away, and the most gains went to homes closest to the hulking walls where the noise reduction was greatest (an estimated 1 percent increase in home value for every decibel of noise reduced). Extrapolating these findings, the authors estimated that traffic noise reduces property values by about $110 billion nationwide.

  As a sidenote, other studies find that traditional highway noise barriers have little to no benefit for folks living more than 100 meters away. In fact, because sound travels in waves that reflect and refract, soundwalls can sometimes make traffic noise worse for these more distant homes.

• I’ve become fascinated with sonification in which visual or numerical data is converted into sound. Last year, for example, an installation by the composer Peter Batchelor broadcast sonified data on the health of a forest ecosystem via tree mounted speakers in England’s Alice Holt Forest. Or, want to hear centuries of global warming as a musical composition? Check out this recent sonfication work by the mathematician, composer, and data scientists, Harlan Brothers:

  Finally, here’s a video in which the blind astronomer, Wanda Diaz-Merced, explains how she studies explosive gamma-ray bursts made by collapsing stars in distant galaxies by listening to the sonified data of light-intensity changes.

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A World of Sounds, Strange and Wonderful

Imagine picking a playlist for the cosmos, a sonic sampler of life here on Earth meant for an interstellar audience it might never reach. In the mid-1970s, this very task fell to the astronomer, Carl Sagan, who chaired a committee assembling the “Sounds of Earth” recorded onto gold-plated copper discs launched aboard the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1977.

For music, Sagan’s committee included Bach, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, the gospel and blues music of Blind Willie Johnson, and an assortment of classical and folk music from around the world. They also included spoken greetings in 55 languages, with varied verbiage but similar vibes—Greetings to our friends among the stars. Welcome, whoever you are. We wish you peace. Then there were natural and human-made sounds, such as wind, thunderstorms, birdsong, hyenas, elephants, jet engines, footsteps, and a human heartbeat.

The story of Voyager’s golden record is featured in the final chapter of The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination, a new and remarkable book by nature writers Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen.

The book is a slim volume of 36 chapters, each about four pages, stretching across time and space to unearth nuggets of soundscapes that might otherwise escape notice, from the singing sands of the world’s deserts to the “ghost army” of sound effects, fake radio traffic, and inflatable tanks that deceived Hitler in WWII.

Every chapter is a lyrical mix of science, history, philosophy, and beautifully rendered sound description. We learn about the acoustic arms race between bats and the moths they hunt using echolocation: Unloved, unlauded and at home in the dark, bats are the phantom aces of the animal kingdom. There’s an homage to the cicada: Song is the only means they have to assert themselves upon the world, and by extension upon us, via their sheer volume and vitality.

In one chapter, we meet French artist Marguerite Humeau, who set out to resurrect the sounds of prehistoric animals by reconstructing their vocal tracts, including Lucy, the 3.2 million year-old hominid who lived in what is now Ethiopia.

Later, there’s a chapter about the mysterious Taos Hum and other global hums—many of which are eventually traced to some human or natural source. Vieser and Yuen celebrate the stubborn mystery of other hums, like the one in Taos, excerpting an essay that the English writer D.H. Lawrence wrote after moving to Taos in 1928 in the hopes that a high, dry climate would relieve his tuberculosis (the disease would kill him two years later):

Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park. There is no mystery left, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we know all about it. We’ve done the globe and the globe is done.

The book’s preface invites readers to sample the chapters randomly “pinging from location to location,” as I did. Or, the book can be read in linear fashion, as it follows a loose chronology—beginning with radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson hearing low-level interference they initially pinned on pigeons roosting in the antenna, but later discovered was cosmic microwave background radiation, “the afterglow that verified the Big Bang” and ending with Voyager’s sonic message in a bottle.

You Are Here!

Reading the book’s final chapter kindled memories of visiting the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC with my family in 1982. I was 8 years old, and so I was naturally thrilled by the fighter jets, the space capsules, and the lunar module. But I remember lingering for a long time at the Voyager exhibit.

The display featured a duplicate of the golden record and listed all the bits of humanity we wanted the universe to know about us—the diagrams of DNA and other molecules, anatomical renderings of humans and other species, and a pulsar map of the Milky Way that pinpointed Earth’s location. There was a welcome and an openness in this collection, and the best kind of pride, which was reflected in the sounds chosen for the golden record. We hadn’t simply equipped the space craft to engage in passive listening, nor some desultory pinging. No, we had blasted a sonic buffet into the cosmos, replete with hyenas, thunderstorms, and Johnny B. Goode!

There are moments in life that radically alter one’s perspective about what’s important, what lasts, and how vast the unknown truly is. In 1982, both Voyagers were still relatively close to Saturn, still squarely in our cosmic neighborhood. But the exhibit made clear that the spacecraft would keep going, keep exploring, and keep searching for listeners in the years and decades to come.

Decades feel much briefer to me now than they did in 1982 when I stood in the museum contemplating Voyager 1’s next stops after Saturn. How old would I be when it departed the solar system? Almost 40? Unthinkable! Yet here we are, and then some.

After passing close to Saturn’s moon, Titan, Voyager 1’s flight path took it beyond the ecliptic plane where planets in our solar system orbit. Voyager 2 kept going to visit Uranus and then Neptune in 1989, after which its camera shut down. Voyager 1’s camera blinkered off on Valentine’s Day 1990, after transmitting a series of planetary images known as the “Solar System Family Portrait” that included an image of Earth that Sagan famously described as a “pale blue dot.”

From then on, we could no longer see what the Voyager craft saw. But we could still listen for their reports picked up by NASA’s Deep Space Network, a global array of massive radio antennas. Voyagers 1 and 2 continuously transmit data on plasma density, magnetic fields, and cosmic ray interactions. In 2012, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space (Voyager 2 would do so in 2018), and today it’s nearly 16 billion miles from Earth and adding another 38,000 miles every hour. Scientist estimate that the Voyager craft may run so low on power in five years or so that they’ll no longer be able to communicate with Earth. Even if their power supplies can be stretched further, they will likely fly beyond the range of the Deep Space Network by 2036. After that, they’ll continue their mission in silence.

If the Voyager craft ever do deliver their acoustic payload, then one sound our interstellar listeners will hear is laughter, from Sagan himself, as I learned from The Sound Atlas. What will these listeners make of this fragment of human joy or mirth? It may be the perfect response to blasting our Earth-bound sounds into space—profound, yet absurd.

Voyager 1 won’t get near another star for another 40,000 years—and a red dwarf at that, known as Gliese 445, part of the little dipper. It will take about the same amount of time for Voyager 2 to near Ross 248, another red dwarf, in the constellation Andromeda. Astronomers have yet to discover planets near either star. While the golden record is packed ready-to-play with a stylus, sound waves are altered by whatever atmosphere transmits their energy, and their potential listeners will need physiology for sensing the sound and an intelligence evolved to interpret those sensations.

Nevertheless, as long as Voyager survives on its journey, the possibility remains that Sagan’s laugh and the rest of Earth’s playlist will be heard one day to finally join us with another corner of the universe. As Vieser and Yuen conclude: “Hope is a mysterious quantity, sometimes manifested through the making of a message sent into the void, regardless of the odds, with the noblest of intentions.”

Relearning How to Hear

Matt Hay went deaf at 25, but he taught his brain to hear again with the help of classic rock and intensive auditory training, a story detailed in the short (18 minute) documentary Between Two Ears, which was released on YouTube in October. The film’s driving force, co-writer, and co-star is Angela Alexander, an audiologist and an expert in auditory processing disorder, who worked with Hay to retrain his brain.

Hay was a college student in the early 1990s when he learned that he was going to lose his hearing. An MRI revealed that the trouble he’d had understanding people on the phone or in noisy situations was due to a brain tumor impacting his auditory nerve caused by a rare brain disease called neurofibromatosis type II, and it was only going to get worse.

A music lover, Hay decided to make a playlist of his favorite songs while he still had hearing—66 tracks in total, by musicians like the Beatles, Elton John, Bob Marley, U2, and Peter Frampton. He then listened to his playlist on repeat, so he could still “listen” to them in his memory when his hearing disappeared. A few years later, Hay’s world went silent.

He opted for surgery, which could remove the tumor but wouldn’t restore his hearing, so he elected to go a step further and have the surgeons put in an auditory brainstem implant that could translate soundwaves from an external receiver, bypass his ears, and directly buzz an area known as the cochlear nucleus complex, the first relay station for auditory processing in the brain. The day the doctors switched on the implant, Hay could detect sound, but he couldn’t hear.

“Everything sounded like a bottle cap in a garbage disposal,” he recalls in the film.

So, Hay once again started listening to his playlist of favorite songs on repeat. His implant butchered the music, but Hay knew better, because every melody, every chord progression was cemented in his memory, and as he listened and mentally corrected what he heard, he guided his auditory processing into a gradual recovery. That’s about when Hay’s story was picked up by NPR in a podcast called “The Soundtrack of Silence” that aired in 2017. That podcast was heard by the actor Channing Tatum, who optioned the movie rights for Hay’s story in 2019 (the movie will star Tatum as Hay, and is in development by Paramount Pictures).

“So Matt Hay, was already famous by the time I met him,” Alexander told me in an interview. At the time, Hay was able to understand about two thirds of words in quiet, which his doctors found remarkable. Alexander told him, “We can do better than that.”

She’d been helping patients with auditory processing disorder (APD), which can result from a wide range of causes, everything from autism to stroke to head trauma. Most of these folks have normal hearing sensitivity. Meaning, they can sense sounds along the normal range of frequencies and decibel levels. But they struggle mightily to understand people in noisy situations.

Understanding APD and the auditory training that Alexander undertook with Hay starts with this basic premise: We sense sound with our ears, but we hear with our brains. We are born with the ability to sense sounds, but we learn to recognize, distinguish, and understand those sounds over time. For a century, the gold standard screening for hearing loss has been the audiogram, which measures how well you can detect beeps at audible frequencies. That’s important, but it’s not hearing in the real, human sense.

As I wrote in Clamor, “most people don’t complain to audiologists about missing particular pitches. They are instead distressed by struggles to converse with friends and loved ones in a crowded place. They miss out on the stories and can no longer engage in the banter. They’re embarrassed by their need to constantly ask others to repeat themselves.”

Alexander is among a growing number of audiologists who think her field should expand its approach to hearing difficulties, beyond the ears. Here’s how she described auditory training to me: The first step is phonemic training, in which a patient learns to recognize letter sounds without lip reading. With practice, patients recognize the sounds faster and more accurately.

“We usually train three to four new sounds per week, and then we keep layering,” she said, “by introducing new sounds, until a person is working on 32 or 34 sounds.”

The next part of a training session is a speech-in-noise task, in which patients try to understand target words in increasing levels of background chatter. There are two goals with this task. The first, she explained, “is we want to help a person just survive noise.” While that might sound dramatic, it likely also sounds familiar to people who experience the anxiety and fight-or-flight that kicks in as they struggle to hear at a noisy gathering. The second part is to improve their accuracy, and that’s a lot easier after a few sessions, “when their amygdala isn’t quite so fired up from the noise.”

Training sessions also include some short-term memory work and some speech-sound blending. “It’s kind of like circuit training,” Alexander explained. After 12 one-hour sessions of auditory training, once a week, for 12 weeks, Hay was able to recognize between 87 and 92 percent of speech in quiet.

If you want to learn more about Hay’s story, here’s his website, and he published a memoir last year, too.

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• Book News! Nature listed Clamor as one of the 10 Best Books of 2025!

• A recent study led by Australian researchers linked regular listening to music or playing an instrument to significant drops in dementia risk. The study, published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, analyzed several years of data from multiple longitudinal studies of more than 10,000 Australians aged 70 and up, and found that people who reported regular music listening had 39 percent less risk of developing dementia than those who rarely or never did, and those who played an instrument had a 35 percent reduction in dementia risk.

  The results come with the usual caveats about self-reported behavioral data and correlation not being causation. Another recent study published by the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, looking into links between music making and general cognitive decline in aging (not dementia risk) found mixed results. The authors of that study noted another challenge in researching music as medicine—defining the dose.

• There are only a few hundred North Atlantic right whales left in the world. In this podcast, produced by The Daily Mail, environmental journalist Jenn Thornhill Verma explained how human noise may be driving these whales closer to extinction (In a fun twist, the podcast is called The Decibel, but it’s a daily news podcast, not sound specific).

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Jimmy Page, William S. Burroughs, and sounds that could blow your mind, both figuratively and literally.

Note: A version of this essay appeared in Air Mail magazine earlier this month.

On a snowy February afternoon in 1975, a limousine whisked Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page from the band’s hotel near Madison Square Garden, where they’d played a show the night before, down to Manhattan’s then shabby Bowery neighborhood. Arriving at 222 Bowery, Page trudged up the stairs to the fourth-floor loft of the renowned Beat writer William S. Burroughs for an interview about rock ’n’ roll and the exhilaration of wielding sound’s immense power. The conversation, recounted by Burroughs in the rock magazine Crawdaddy, sprawled from the Loch Ness Monster to dolphin communication and eventually to sound that could kill.

Burroughs’s take on sound’s potential lethality was based on sensationalized media accounts of experiments by the French scientist Vladimir Gavreau, who had tested the effects of high-intensity infrasound (frequencies below what humans can hear) on himself and his colleagues in his lab, on the outskirts of Marseille, a decade earlier. The scientist theorized that just as a sustained high note can shatter a wineglass, sufficiently intense sound tuned to the very low “resonance frequencies” of vital organs might ultimately cause them to vibrate to their breaking point. I read about Gavreau’s work while researching my book, specifically for a chapter about the many health dangers of noise beyond hearing loss.

I was struck by society’s deep and abiding fascination with stories of deadly sound—from Homer’s man-eating Sirens to science-fiction thrillers such as Doctor Who to the media frenzy around the 2016 “sonic attacks” on U.S. diplomats and spies in Havana, Cuba—despite little actual evidence of lethal acoustic force and the many accounts by experts in sound, biology, and weaponry enumerating the scientific and practical challenges to creating such weapons. Despite substantial investments by the world’s militaries and spy agencies, the only verified sound weapons are ones that simply aim old-fashioned loudness at the ear, such as the LRAD (Long-Range Acoustical Device), a specialized speaker that produces incredibly loud sound from a distance and is often used for crowd control.

Gavreau, for his part, tested only short bursts of his infrasound blasters (essentially, massive whistles) on himself and his lab mates, an experience which he described, in dramatic terms, as quite painful and “very nearly lethal”—but failed to take any scientific measurements or conduct controlled trials. The Marseille authorities soon shut down the lab, not due to any threat of bodily harm but because the sounds shook the walls of nearby houses and set off incessant barking by neighborhood dogs.

Gavreau died in 1967, and while subsequent research has linked high doses of infrasound to a range of ailments, such as headaches, nausea, and difficulty breathing, nothing has come close to replicating his dramatic “findings.” Yet the legacy of his work has not only lived on but ballooned to terrifying proportions. According to South African biologist Lyall Watson’s 1973 book, Supernature, a scientific study of supernatural phenomenon, the first person to test Gavreau’s sound blaster “fell down dead on the spot” and “all his internal organs had been mashed into an amorphous jelly by the vibrations.” And by the time Burroughs told the tale to Page, the infrasound weapon had grown powerful enough to “kill everyone in a five-mile radius.”

By contrast, comparably little attention is given to the actual health harms linked to noise-induced chronic stress and sleep disruption, such as hypertension, heart disease, and stroke. The European Environment Agency has blamed long-term noise exposure for an estimated 12,000 preventable deaths a year across the Continent. New studies are constantly discovering more hard evidence of the dangers presented by noise, but it’s still a tough toxicity to sell, particularly in America.

The most obvious reason for this paradox is that the cumulative and indirect impacts of stress and lack of sleep will never capture the same attention as a loaded (acoustic) weapon that can melt your insides, even if the former threat is far more real. But I suspect there’s also a more subtle reason. All of us have felt the raw power of sound personally, from a loved one’s voice after a long absence to a rolling clap of thunder on a summer evening. And music might be one of the best examples of sound’s power, making it easy to imagine, as Burroughs did, how a weaponized derivative of such power could be devastating.

While chatting with Page, Burroughs wondered if, along with the dry-ice smoke and laser shows, just a touch of intense infrasound could be mixed into music to—figuratively—melt the audience’s collective mind. After all, the goal of any good rock concert was to tap into the highly combustible nerve of the “mass unconscious,” he wrote in the piece for Crawdaddy. “Rock stars are juggling fissionable material that could blow up at any time.”

The emerging field of auditory accessibility and inclusive acoustic design.

A few years ago, Fernanda Caldas-Correia was a master’s student in acoustics at Brazil’s University of Campinas (Unicamp) when she started to connect her chosen field with the intense stress and struggle she felt in noisy restaurants, social settings, and classrooms.

“I had some suspicions that I was autistic, but I didn’t yet have a diagnosis,” she said. So, she did some research and found that people with autism are often hypersensitive (over-responsive) or hyposensitive (under-responsive) to sensory stimuli, including sound. The discovery helped lead to an autism diagnosis and a shift in the focus of her researchas she began her doctoral studies—from sound localization to the potential for more inclusive acoustic design.

These days, Caldas-Correia spends a lot more time in classrooms as a teacher trying to communicate with students, rather than as a student herself. When things get noisy, it’s not just annoying, she told me, it can be overwhelming and exhausting. After class, she often needs to retreat to a quiet place, don noise-cancelling headphones, and avoid interacting with people for a while until she recovers enough to get back to work.

“I started thinking about this as an accessibility issue,” she explained. With the backing of her advisor, Bruno S. Masiero, an acoustic engineer and assistant professor of electrical and computing engineering, she reached out to several acoustics experts around the world who shared her interest in the potential for room acoustics to be more accommodating to people with autism and other neurodivergent conditions. Collectively, they organized special sessions and working groups on the topic at acoustics conferences. Based on those ongoing discussions, they coauthored “Ten questions concerning autism and auditory accessbility in buildings” published in September by the journal Building and Environment.

The opening questions of the paper covered the diverse nature of autism and how it’s commonly linked with very low tolerance for loudness and trouble with “sensory gating” (filtering/ignoring irrelevant sensory information). While everything from lights to smells to physical touch can contribute to sensory overload, the paper notes that hearing “is often considered the most impactful” in terms of autistic sensitivities.

For her dissertation, Caldas-Correia is examining how people habituate (get used to) background noise, using fingertip sensors to measure arousal levels. Earlier research using bursts of pure tone suggest that people with autism not only are less able to habituate to background noise, but their arousal levels often increase over a prolonged exposure. She is running experiments with more realistic sounds from a simulated classroom—alternating the acoustic parameters between noisy (a long 1.6 second reverberation and 50 decibels) and more controlled (0.7 seconds of reverberation and 35 decibels). Her focus is on how much a controlled acoustic environment helps people with autism tune out the background noise.

In the “10 Questions” paper, Caldas-Correia and her co-authors noted that most of the real-world research on noise and autism has focused on classrooms. These studies show that adding sound absorption to a classroom and taking other measures to reduce noise improves the focus and academic performance of kids with autism and reduces behavioral problems. To date, very little attention has been paid to auditory accessibility in other spaces, such as restaurants or workplaces (even though, as Caldas-Correia points out, classrooms are workplaces for teachers such as herself).

The paper concluded with some broad recommendations about designing more inclusive indoor spaces, but emphasized the need for flexibility and varied acoustic environments, some quieter and others more vibrant. While quieter spaces are critical to focus, relax, and minimize stress, they noted, “dynamic acoustic settings may support engagement in educational or social spaces, provided they are not overwhelming.”

The paper’s recommendations reminded me a lot of the acoustic fixes I’d previously reported on that benefit people in general, whether or not they’re neurodivergent—workers trying to focus in open offices, people at restaurants struggling to converse during a meal, clinicians at hospitals stressed out by “alarm fatigue.” Sound was welcome in all these scenarios, none of which called for silence or a single sonic solution. Indeed, the stress, frustrations, and communication breakdowns were almost always the result of sound and noise being neglected in the design and operation of these places, or sidelined by other priorities.

The authors stressed that they were not advocating for special accommodations but rather for “universal design”—based on the principle that good design makes a building, product, or service accessible to the widest range of people. There are plenty of universal design examples in our built environment (think curb cuts or door handles instead of knobs) that were originally conceived as a fix for people with disabilities but are extremely useful to the general population. Good acoustics should be another one.

“If we are designing an environment to be accessible, we are designing it to not only attend the needs of people with disabilities, but to help everybody as a whole,” Masiero told me. “Everybody benefits from better design.”

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• A surprising number of bird species are adapting to the spread of our noise by imitating it—replacing the trills and chirps of their usual song repertoires with renditions of car alarms and chainsaws. It’s not just the famous mocking birds (video below) but blackbirds, sulphur-crested cockatoos, and lyrebirds, too. Last month, Smithsonian magazine documented this fascinating response in “Five Dramatic Ways Animals Respond to Human Noise: From Mimicking Car Alarms While Wooing Mates to Calling Higher Over the Din of Traffic” along with other reactions to the growing din (e.g. whales “shouting” to be heard, animals fleeing noisy areas of their habitat or eating less as they maintain hypervigilance).

• It’s going to get a lot quieter in Southwest Detroit, finally, hopefully. The neighborhood, which I visited a few summers ago, is situated between a multi-modal freight yard, highways, and the international crossing with Canada (both the old one and a brand-new one). For decades, big rigs hauling freight have used the small residential streets of Southwest as a favored cut through to avoid clogged highways—up to one truck a minute, according to a community count done with public health researchers at the University of Michigan (I posted a video snippet taken from a Southwest front porch in my February newsletter).

  After many years of resident complaints and advocacy for a trucking ordinance, the city is finally acting, banning or limiting trucks on many of the neighborhood’s residential streets. Now the big question is whether the measure will be adequately enforced, and will the fines be big enough to deter violations or simply be absorbed as another cost of doing business.

• Readers, please help me out! I’ve been hearing about some exciting advances in directional sound technology that could have huge implications for noise. Imagine how much cacophony could be avoided if audible announcements, notifications, entertainment, or presentations at workplaces, transportation hubs, and other public places could be directed narrowly to reach intended listeners, and only these listeners, rather than loud broadcasts that hit everyone’s ears. The technology has been under development for decades, and at a very basic level, it works by encoding audible sounds into a beam of ultrasound (a higher frequency range than humans can hear and also very narrow so it’s easy to aim). I hope to have time to properly explore the most recent advances and applications in November. I might start with the person featured in the video below, but if anybody has tips for other experts, or is an expert, please let me know. Thanks!

• Book News! I now have the details for my appearance at Boston’s Authors and Innovators Festival on October 30, at the UMass Mt. Ida campus in Newton, MA. At 9:15 AM, I’ll be chatting about listening for signals in the noise with Laura Huang, distinguished professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, and the author of You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition. The full schedule for the festival is here.

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Can we return to the office but leave the noise behind?

With summer vacations behind us, students are being called back to the classroom, and their parents are increasingly being called back to the office. Companies are still struggling to find the right post-pandemic balance of workplace flexiblity, and one of their biggest obstacles is office noise.

Office noise isn’t new, but it grew from an occasional nuisance into a pervasive workplace problem during the open-plan office boom of the early 2000s. Spurred by the bright, modern headquarters of emerging tech giants, companies in every sector raced to remove walls and sound absorbing materials, to escape—at least aesthetically—the hidebound, hierarchical workplaces of the past. Open-office enthusiasts predicted that collaboration and breakthrough ideas would quickly bloom in these barrier-free spaces. At the same time, open-plan offices squeezed more employees into less square footage, which helped the bottom line.

But when the office-noise problem grew bothersome enough to be rigorously studied, researchers discovered that the promised collaboration boost was often a bust, partly due to the din and the lack of speech privacy that ironically led people to communicate more digitally rather than face-to-face. In survey after survey, exasperated workers reported retreating from the cacophony as best they could by donning noise-cancelling headphones, taking more breaks, and generally becoming less productive.

Then Covid hit, and the cacophonous offices emptied and went quiet. Working from home wasn’t always easy (or even possible for many) but people not only adapted, they enjoyed the added autonomy and flexibility, including more control over their sonic surroundings. In the post-Covid world, as more and more workers returned to the office, the noise problems they encountered were not quite the same ones they’d left behind. In many ways, they were worse.

There were several reasons for this. For one thing, companies often downsized office spaces that were no longer serving all their workers all of the time and instituted more shared workstations.

“A lot of companies have renegotiated their leases. They have optimized their square footage,” noted Flore Pradère, the Paris-based research director for global work dynamics at JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle), the global commercial real estate and investment firm. “But the result is that you come back to a much denser work environment where you have many more interruptions.”

In addition, these interruptions now included ubiquitous video-conferencing—the pandemic necessity is now taking up about a quarter of all the time people spend in the office, according to one of the recent survey studies by Pradère and colleagues. Importantly, a more sparsely attended open-office isn’t necessarily a sonic solution because stray conversations can be even more distracting without the usual background churn of workplace sound.

Finally, Pradère noted, employee expectations have shifted in the post-Covid era. Remote workers, she said, “got used to being able to focus on a task and to choose when they could be interrupted.” Even though employees surveyed by JLL agreed that sharing space is helpful for teamwork and collaboration, they still spend half their time on tasks that require focus, and they want offices that support that work.

The collision of heightened worker expectations with noisy office realities has fueled the market for small soundproof booths with names like Zen Box and Thinktanks. Even the much-maligned cubicle has been making a comeback. Meanwhile, a growing awareness that office noise hurts productivity and hastens burnout has spurred demand for acoustic consultants and workplace soundscaping that aims to not only mask noise but support attention and reduce cognitive load and stress.

Despite these efforts, noise continues to hinder the larger return-to-office push. A recent article in Facilities Management Journal covered the survey responses from more than 2,000 office professionals in the UK, in which 36 percent said that they worked from home to escape the noise, and nearly half said they struggled to concentrate when working in the office due to the din.

The press has been rife with stories of return-to-the-office mandates sparking revolts such as “coffee badging” in which people swipe in to the office just long enough to show their face and drink a coffee before sneaking out to get work done in a quieter place with fewer interruptions. The office dodging has led to more employee monitoring and scolding at companies like Samsung and Amazon.

Headlines aside, research by JLL and others suggest that full-time office mandates remain a minority in the corporate world (only one third of firms in the United States require full-time office presence, and the rest have some degree of workplace flexibility, according to latest “Flex Index” published by the workforce research and advisory firm Work Forward.

Some degree of hybrid work appears here to stay, and paying attention to office soundscapes and other environmental factors will be key to making these arrangements succeed, Pradère told me. Earlier this month, JLL published their 2025 Workforce Preference Barometer, based on a survey of 8,700 office workers in 31 countries.

“We saw that environmental factors, especially acoustics, light, temperature, all those aspects are really important to their overall assesment of the workplace,” she said. They found that 84 percent of people who gave their workplaces high marks were also happy with their company’s hybrid attendance policies. Whereas, 48 percent of people who were unhappy with their workplaces felt negative about the office attendance policies.

“The most advanced companies are providing access to a diversity of atmospheres and places in their offices,” she said. Through a mix of planning, creative scheduling, and careful design, “these companies are creating some very active and lively places, some places for more focused work, and even some places for restoration and regeneration.”

We built this city. We built this city…on a dull roar that never stops.

Mitchell Bend, Texas could be the first city founded to fight noise. In November, the residents of this unincorporated community in Hood County will vote on a ballot measure to create a new municipality, giving its residents the power to pass a noise code that could target the noise from the bitcoin mine they say is keeping them awake and making them (and their animals) sick.

The bitcoin operation is located about 10 miles south of Granbury, Texas (outside of Fort Worth). Last year, a group of locals partnered with the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice to sue the bitcoin facility’s owner Marathon Digital Holdings, Inc. (MARA holdings) over the noise.

I spoke to one of the defendants, Danny Lakey, by phone. The 56-year old Lakey and his wife moved from the city of Arlington to run a hospice in Granbury, and they bought a place on 8.5 acres that they intended to be their “forever home” in a peaceful rural area.

“We have a cattle ranch across the street, so it’s about 350 acres of nothing,” Lakey said. “When we’re looking out, we’re looking at a big valley, and we get to watch gorgeous sunsets and just enjoy the country life.”

But this bucolic scene is just half a mile from the bitcoin mine, and Lakey says the constant noise has kept him and his wife from sleeping well for the past two years. He regularly measures the sound from a spot out near his barn, and he said the noise peaked at 82 decibels but have settled to between 71 and 74 decibels after MARA changed to quieter, liquid-immersion cooling (note: The World Health Organization recommends that noise at night stay below 45 decibels for healthy sleep).

Lakey said the push to create a new municipality followed the realization that they couldn’t count on county, state, and federal authorities to help them mitigate the problem in a place where the economics, infrastructure, and policies are all lining up to bring more bitcoin mines and data centers.

If you’re looking for a place to build these facilities, “we’ve got your water and your power. We have cheap land and low regulations, a state that wants you and a federal government that says it needs you,” Lakey said. “So that is why we feel the need to incorporate, because if we don’t, we are going to be buried in pollution and noise.”

The company did not respond to my request for comment on the noise complaints or the efforts to create a new town. But, they did issue a statement in response to an Axios story about the controversy, which highlighted the soundwalls and other sound-dampening improvements they’ve invested in since acquiring the facility in 2024.

“We are committed to maintaining our health and safety standards at the Granbury data center and being good neighbors,” read the statement. It also noted that multiple sound studies, “have confirmed that MARA’s facility operates well below state and county law noise limits.”

That last bit is a familiar refrain. As I noted in my February newsletter, there’s a mismatch between loudness-based noise laws and the sounds emanating from bitcoin mines and data centers. For instance, Texas nuisance law sets 85 decibels—lawnmower loud and a danger to hearing—as a threshold for “unreasonable” noise. While some neighbors of MARA’s bitcoin mine claim they have clocked sounds at or above that level, the potential health harms of crypto and data center noise is less about absolute loudness and more about the fact that it never stops, disrupting sleep and triggering chronic stress.

This constant noise is also dominated by lower-frequency sound energy, which carries farther than higher frequencies, more easily penetrates walls and windows, and is discounted by the “A-weighted” decibel measurements that dominate most noise ordinances. Lawmakers have begun to recognize this disconnect. Earlier this year, for example, legislators in Virginia passed a bipartisan bill to tame their ubiquitous, low-frequency noise of the data centers spreading across the state, but Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed the measure.

Soundscapes escape a budgetary buzzsaw (for now)

As the fiscal year comes to a close this month, the National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division (NSNSD) seems poised to survive into FY2026, despite the administration’s request to slash 50 percent of the stewardship funding that supports the division among other programs. The House and Senate appropriations bills currently keep the 2026 NPS funding levels nearly on par with this past year (The NPS budget in FY2025 was about $3.3 billion, with approximately $375 million for resource stewardship).

It’s worth remembering that the founding charter of NPS in 1916 included the parks’ soundscapes among the natural resources the new agency was mandated to protect. However, NPS didn’t truly listen to these soundscapes until 2000 with the creation of the Natural Sounds Program (that became NSNSD in 2012) to rigorously record and analyze the park soundscapes and provide technical expertise on efforts to protect the parks from noise pollution. Since that time, the study of natural soundscapes has rapidly grown from a niche concern into the expanding field of bioacoustics that has become inextricably linked with nature conservation writ large.

We can learn a lot about ecosystems by listening to them. Networks of small, durable sensors can capture the sonic life of a forest, a desert plateau, or a coral reef from every direction, emanating from otherwise hidden sources, reaching across vast stretches of space and time—clueing researchers into the presence and migration of keystone species, the varying degree of biodiversity, the success of conservation measures, or the impacts of a warming climate, natural disasters, illegal loggers, and poachers.

Earlier this year, one of the world’s most-ambitious bioacoustics efforts passed a major milestone when the Soundscape Baseline Project completed one-year of 24/7 recordings from six forests around the world—in Ecuador, Peru, Gabon, Germany, Bruei, and the United States. While periodic recordings will continue, the baseline measures amounted to more than 300,000 hours of listening, generating a massive amount of data to be analyzed with the help of machine learning in order to develop a tool for measuring ecosystem change and the effectiveness of conservation efforts.

As a side note: More and more citizen scientists are dabbling in bioacoustics, thanks to initiatives like MySoundscape, described on its website as, “A STEM project to sound-map parks of the world, one community at a time.”

Created and voluntarily led by a Larry O’Gorman, an electrical engineer and expert in digital signal processing at Nokia Bell Labs, MySoundscape is a STEM education platform that introduces high-school aged students to environmental acoustics including classroom lessons and a guide to making objective and subjective soundscape measures of local parks, mapping the results, and potentially using the data for environmental science projects, such as tracking seasonal changes or measuring how trees and landscape buffer traffic sounds and how that changes subjective soundscape perception.

MySoundscape is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) North Jersey Section and the IEEE Future Networks Technical Community, and O’Gorman invites teachers or youth leaders interested in the project to contact him at log@ieee.org.

Book News

Clamor received some rave reviews over the summer from New Scientist, Nature, American Scientist, Forbes, and Scientific American.

Next month, I’ll be talking about noise and soundscapes to a business-minded audience at the Authors and Innovators Business Ideas Festival, which will be linked to the Boston Book Festival (more details to come in October’s newsletter). Finally, say hello to Lulu, the latest #ClamorDog!

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• Humans aren’t the only species to struggle after a night of noise-disturbed sleep, according to a recent study of common city birds published last month by two animal behavior researchers in New Zealand.

  Previous studies have found that noise and light pollution disrupt the sleep of birds. To test the impacts of these disturbances, the researchers caught 13 common myna bird in the Aukland area. Over the course of two months, they compared the mynas’ songs following nights when the birds were allowed to sleep in a quiet environment or were kept awake by the researchers continuously moving about the lab and occasionally tapping on their cages.

  “After just one bad night of sleep, common mynas sang fewer and less complex songs. They also spent more time resting during the day,” the researchers wrote in an overview of the research published by The Conversation. “Birds that sing more frequently and with a greater complexity can attract better mates and defend territories,” the researchers noted. “Therefore, a poor-quality song can seriously affect a bird’s ability to reproduce and survive.”

  

  Listen below to the common myna singing after a normal night of sleep and then after a restless, noisy night:

• There’s a massive silence in the middle of the Canada’s vaunted campaign to curb underwater noise, according to a recent analysis by Canadian researchers. Canada has been a leader in the push for quieter shipping via the International Maritime Organization, and the government published an extensive Ocean Noise Strategy last year. And yet, noise pollution and soundscapes are almost entirely absent from the nation’s efforts to protect endangered fish species.

  Specifically, the researchers found only one mention of noise pollution as an environmental threat among the 138 recommendations for listing by Canada’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife and none of the 56 plans for species recovery considered the fish's use of sound, the importance of soundscape in its habitat, and the potential threat of noise pollution.

  Landmark reports such as the Ocean Noise Strategy are mostly “guiding documents” for regulators but don’t contain anything enforceable, the researchers noted. “Therefore, the most concrete way to mitigate the impacts of noise pollution is to include considerations of noise and species’ use of sound in conservation strategies.”

  I emailed lead author, Kiara Kattler, a master’s student in marine ecology at the University of Alberta, who cited research suggesting that reducing noise pollution is helping the recovery of endangered Southern Resident killer whales.

  “These studies demonstrate how important noise pollution, and thus noise reduction, is for the sustainability of vulnerable populations,” Kattler wrote. “Our hope is that this work flags noise pollution as an important aspect that should be considered in future conservation and recovery plans.”

• Watch this space! An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich is collaborating with city officials to study the impacts of urban design choices on the soundscape of city greenspaces and the resulting impacts on citizen health and wellbeing. In this first year of the three-year project, researchers have been leading Munich residents on structured soundwalks through three distinct types of neighborhoods that are slated for major redevelopment within the next decade. They are combining objective and subjective measures of the soundscape with saliva samples to measure stress hormone levels of listeners.

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A Conversation with the Din Slayers

This post is going to dig into the noisy nitty gritty. It’s a bit of a departure from Clamor’s normal fare. Typically, I explore ways to make noise discussions broader, more proactive and forward thinking, and more inclusive of the sounds we want to hear and not just those we want to shut up. As noted in my June newsletter, however, I know many readers are also hungry for more immediate help waging noise fights in the here and now.

To help fill that gap, I spoke with two veterans of the noise trenches—healthcare and environmental scientist Jamie Banks, founder and president of the nonprofit Quiet Communities, and Rick Reibstein, an environmental lawyer and former manager of the Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction program who chairs the nonprofit’s legal advisory council. Quiet Communities has multiple anti-noise campaigns, pursuing everything from quiet restaurants to quiet skies, and they field hundreds of inquiries a year from people under sonic assault seeking anti-noise strategies, solidarity, or at least a sympathetic ear. What follows is a condensed version of that conversation, edited for clarity.

Q: Let’s start with an overview of the complex matrix of authorities and noise regulations that may or may not be enforced. Can you give me the big picture of what people need to navigate when they take on a noise fight?

REIBSTEIN: Well, if we had not dismantled the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control [in 1981], then their “Every Community Helping Others” program would have informed local communities on how to respond. The ECHO program was efficient governance. Instead of the feds trying to control everything and do everything, the goal was to help states and cities learn from each other and form networks and regional technical centers staffed with experts to figure out how to mitigate the noises from different sources.

Instead, there’s now a patchwork of laws at the state and local level, many of which are not enforced, or they have impractical enforcement methods. So, they get ignored. But if someone is making noise that is harming someone else, then they have a responsibility to try to mitigate that harm. With that concept in mind, you have a common-law property right through the law of nuisance, you have the state and local rules for allowable noise, and you have the state’s general duties to protect the public health. You have various things that you can pursue at law, but they're all difficult.

BANKS: And apart from the ECHO program of technical assistance that Rick was referring to, the Office of Noise Abatement and Control provided for research, education, noise regulations for certain class of products, interstate commerce, and transportation.

So, all of that is gone. And in the meantime, there would have been so much more to learn. For example, the decibel isn't enough. The decibel is one characteristic of the sound, but there's pattern, duration of exposure, tonal components, roughness, sharpness, and frequency spectra. That's particularly problematic because so many of the complaints come when industrial noise, aviation, gas leaf blowers, whatever, have those strong low frequency components. It comes right through your walls and windows. You cannot get away from it. But because the A-weighted decibel is really the sole metric that's relied on and underweights low-frequency sound, we have ordinances in the country that aren't protecting people.

Q: That's what I hear a lot from people. They contact their local or county government, and somebody comes out with a sound meter and says well, this isn't breaking any decibel threshold, so there’s nothing we can do.

REIBSTEIN: It happens way too frequently.

Q: Rick, you recently gave a talk through Quiet Communities outlining steps people can take to fight noise—like asking local authorities to investigate the noise and collecting evidence of harm—that had the potential to resolve the issue or, if not, to build a stronger case for eventual litigation. Can you walk me through those?

REIBSTEIN: There’s also a third purpose, which is to make you look good and reasonable and make people want to help you. So, you talk about your right not to be harmed and you ask that they do an investigation into why this noise is happening.

Right there, you're educating the local official who thinks, oh, I don't have to worry about shutting down the local steel mill, the gun club, or the local sawmill. I just need to get an expert in there who can look at possible noise mitigation. Many states also have a pollution prevention program, but even though noise is a pollution, a lot of those programs don't know what to do about noise. My program in Massachusetts would have gone in without hesitation but there will be many that will say, oh we don't know how. By the way, these pollution prevention visits are usually confidential, so the company doesn't need to worry about people coming in and fining them or telling the world what they see.

Now suppose that's what you've done. But the officials do nothing, and the company completely ignores you. Now you're going to court. By this time, you've set yourself up as reasonable and you're presenting a picture to the judge and the jury of people who are acting in bad faith, because they don't even try. Now in court what's before the judge is a balancing test. In a nuisance case, you're supposed to weigh the gravity of the harm against the utility of the action. Both of those have a reasonableness test.

Q: Can we dig into the evidence gathering piece? There are a lot of apps with noise meters now. But do you need to have scientific instrumentation that’s precisely deployed? Can evidence be logging noise events in a journal? What do you suggest?

REIBSTEIN: You shouldn’t just grab a snapshot of the problem with a few sound meter readings. You want a more continuous sound measurement over time. And if you can, you want to have enough people in the neighborhood participate in the measurements and pool their data. Some of the apps will do that, but that’s beyond my expertise. The point is, that if you can show a cluster of harm, then the Department of Public Health has to respond. But it also is evidence in your case, before you sue or pursue any litigation or anything, it's like, hey, you're ignoring me, but this is real. Look, there are 48 people who are registering this noise. We don't want to fight with you. We want you to do this investigation.

BANKS: I think one of the things that was pointed out with noise meters, and I'm not sure how it applies to the apps, is that, to take this evidence to court, you have to show that the meter has been calibrated properly.

Q: I know people in neighborhood groups have partnered with public-health researchers to get calibrated, scientifically-validated evidence of their noise exposure. But, not everybody can arrange that. These noise apps are accessible, networkable, and usually free, but are they a waste of time if people want to use their data as evidence in court?

BANKS: It's a little complicated apart from the app itself. It could be the app from NIOSH, the occupational safety and the health division of the National Institutes of Health, which is considered a quality app for noise measurements. But within that app, are people using the right metric for the specific kind of sound? What is the distance away from the property? Did you do indoor measurements and outdoor measurements? Was your measurement at the property line? How does that mesh with whatever ordinance is on the books? There’s a lot to it. So even though I want to say, “crowdsource this data,” and it’s fine to send people out with these sound meter apps, it's not as simple as that.

REIBSTEIN: You also have to show harm. You have to show that these noise levels are corresponding with people being disturbed by them. So, you have to couple the sound measurements with surveys or reports or letters from a doctor to show that all these people in the neighborhood lost sleep that week, because of all the noise.

Q: How does Quiet Communities pick its noise battles?

REIBSTEIN: It grew organically. We’re almost all volunteers. So, it's what everyone was willing to do, and what interests them. Jamie shapes and influences and brings things together and helps it coalesce. Jamie then says, oh, you guys should work together, or these issues go together. Otherwise, we'd all be wasting our time accomplishing very little.

BANKS: You know, we're still quite young, even though we're going on year 13. In terms of knowing how to approach this, we cannot possibly step into the shoes of the federal government. But in fact, that vacuum has really created a problem, because a lot of those complaints are coming to us. And as Rick noted, we only have so many people, and many are volunteers, there's no real funding. The challenge is to create a sustainable business model to support our existence going forward. We’re working on that, and one of the aims is to be able to scale what we do. So instead of helping 20 communities a year, we have resources and expertise that can be dispersed among many communities - almost recreating the ECHO program.

Q: One of the campaigns that seems to be notching a lot of wins recently is the one against noisy and heavily polluting landscaping with gas-powered blowers and other equipment. What’s contributed to that success?

BANKS: The landcare program is the oldest, and it is really how Quiet Communities started. In 2010, I was working at home. And I had lived in my town outside Boston for about 25 years at that point. I lived in a little village setting right in the middle of town and always enjoyed it. But over time, more and more of the properties around me started hiring landscape maintenance companies. And so I was hearing this noise of the leaf blowers and lawnmowers for hours every day, every working day of the week, sometimes as early as 6:30 in the morning. It just was crazy.

The workers were not wearing hearing protection. I have videos of them blowing up incredible amounts of dust apart from the combustion vapors and then taking the blowers and blowing the dust off of each other. I was just aghast and because I am a health scientist, I started looking into the health effects and talking to all these communities around the country dealing with this pollution.

So, there's a long story to this. I did a lot of work here in Lincoln. We formed a citizens' committee. We became a subcommittee of the conservation commission eventually, and it took us seven years in this environmentally conscious town to get a summer restriction on gas-powered leaf blowers. It was brutal.

REIBSTEIN: But this is the approach that Quiet Communities takes, which is you don’t just say we hate gas leaf blowers so let’s ban them, like some places have tried, only to find that the police don’t know how to enforce it and don’t want to do it, and so it doesn’t work. Instead, you go out and you teach people about the alternatives, and you try and bring together stakeholders. We’ve taught people about better lawn care and gone to our representatives asking for money from the legislature to help contractors to switch to electric equipment. We’ve gone to DPWs and asked them to take some electric equipment so they can demonstrate its effectiveness for the town. And we’ve hosted conferences and invited all the contractors to come and see how this equipment works.

Q: Can you talk more about engaging stakeholders and broadening the campaign against gas leaf blowers? It starts as a noise complaint, but it has become an issue that’s also about worker health and environmental harm.

BANKS: Yes, I could hear that sound, but I could also open my front door and smell the gas fumes. And I just thought, this cannot be good. It's not good for me. It's certainly not good for the workers that are exposed to this for hours a day with a gas tank on their back. Then I ran into somebody at EPA named Bob McConnell and talked to him, and he said, we should look at the National Emissions Inventory database and look at the pollution coming out of those machines. So, we put together a paper about the nationwide levels of emissions, including volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and carbon monoxide.

We partnered very early on with an organization called the American Green Zone Alliance that was trying to promote a programmatic approach to an enduring change to more sustainable landcare practices. We've now been working with them for 12 years. We helped transition entire municipalities to electric, all of their municipal operations. We recently helped transition the entire Los Angeles Unified School District - more than 800 campuses.

And one of the things we do is something we do as part of that program is an Environmental Landscape Footprint, quantifying the noise emissions, the toxic air pollutants, the fuel that's spilled upon refueling, the non-recyclable waste that's associated with maintaining gas equipment with lubricants, detergents, oils, and the fuel consumption. And then we also do an economic analysis to show that investing in equipment that is quite a bit more expensive upfront can be highly cost-effective because of the avoided fuel cost and reduced costs of maintenance - those can start to kick in very quickly at commercial scale. So, there's a real solution here.

Q: One of the biggest challenges I hear from people fighting noise is feeling hopeless and powerless and alone. Given the number of folks you've been engaging with, do you have some words of assurance on that front?

REIBSTEIN: We get these complaints. And I find out that these people are suffering unbelievably. I try to help them, and I often feel completely unable to help them, but they still write me after to say, “Thank you so much. I'm so happy that you are there to talk to. Someone believes me.” So, even when I haven't been able to really help them, I'm at least doing that, which is of some help. I think it's important for us to be there for people. I feel bad about all those that we're not helping.

Anyway, I teach environmental law and policy at Boston University, and Jamie doesn't know this yet, but this semester, I want the students to take some of these noise complaints and follow up on them, to call people and ask what’s going on so that at least people feel reached out to. It’ll be voluntary. Students won't have to do this, but some of them really like opportunities to deal with real-world problems.

BANKS: Well, I think that's great and yes, we can work on that. The other thing we try and do is highlight lead-by-example success stories, where people can take hope in looking at those other communities that have been successful in dealing with noise issues, even if sometimes those wins are small.

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• I have heard a bit about acoustic therapies for Parkinson’s Disease (Here is an overview and here is a study of one specific therapy called “Binaural Beat Stimulation”). There are several approaches being studied and multiple theories about how acoustic stimulation could help people struggling with motor control. Maybe the soundwaves kickstart alternative motor networks in the brain, or provide important rhythmic cues to stabilize and coordinate movement, or trigger the production of dopamine, the key neurotransmitter deficiency in Parkinson’s Disease. But, nothing prepared me for this video posted by a Canadian man named David who blogs about life with Parkinson’s. David discovered that low frequency soundwaves (128 hertz) calmed his dyskinesia , which is involuntary, repetitive, twitching and jerky muscle movement that can be a symptom of Parkinson’s or a side effect of some medications (hat tip to acoustic consultant Gary Madras, whose LinkedIn post introduced me to this video):

• New studies are adding evidence for a “noise gap” in America — in which the worst noise pollution from transportation and industrial sources is in lower-income communities of color — including a nationwide study published in Nature and another focused on Portland, Oregon from the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology. There’s mounting interest in the cumulative impacts of multiple pollution exposures, especially in the most vulnerable communities. Nevertheless, noise pollution struggles for recognition in these studies and policy discussions, despite being the second largest cause of environmental health problems behind air pollution, according to the World Health Organization.

• Book News! If you’re in New York City, I hope you’ll join me for a talk about Clamor with Tanya Bonner, leader of the Washington Heights/Inwood Noise Task Force. We’ll be at Sisters Uptown Bookstore in Washington Heights on Tuesday August 19, starting at 6:30 PM and wrapping up at 8 PM. Stop by and say hi.

• Finally, I’m an avid hiker (pics below), and nothing makes me feel like more of a grumpy old man than encountering groups of teenagers or twenty-somethings bopping along the trail with their personal playlists blaring from a Bluetooth speaker.

  I get the appeal. I listen to music on my runs, but through earbuds. I also appreciate that these are (almost always) young people choosing to get together in nature rather than peer endlessly into their phones. This is definitely a good thing. Who cares if they need some tunes to power them to the overlook? Well, I do.

  Am I being too much of a curmudgeon? Maybe. But, one of the biggest reasons I love to hike is the multisensory immersion in nature that it offers and the all-too-rare feeling of being away. I can’t help feeling that these Spotify-tethered hikers are diluting that experience for themselves and marring it for others—me in particular. For more on this issue, last month, the president of the American Trail Running Association, Adam Chase, argued both sides for the running vertical of Outside online.

  

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Can Consumer Demand Defeat Noise?

Consider these numbers from the June 2025 report on environmental noise by the European Environment Agency: 50,000 new cases of heart disease, 22,000 new cases of type2 diabetes, 66,000 premature deaths every year across the continent. To be clear, these findings are based on analyzing medical outcomes across modeled exposures to just one sector of noise—transportation sources. The numbers are big and scary, and they made headlines, just like the equally big and scary numbers did from the previous EEA report in 2022, and the one before that in 2017, and so forth.

I think reports like this and the science behind them are critical to awareness, but I also think there’s a limit to the power of big numbers when it comes to changing behaviors and policies, especially with few signs of progress year after year. There’s a lot to the old adage that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. Clearly, these studies are important evidence that noise pollution is a massive public health threat and not just a nuisance. It’s just as clear, however, that scary statistics aren’t enough to move the noise needle on their own.

Fortunately, the flipside of our growing noise threat is an underappreciated opportunity and the chance to augment the alarm bells with more positive motivation to improve our sound environments. Last month, Forbes published an intriguing three-part series of articles by Bill Schiffmiller, a lifelong hearing-aid user and the founder of Akoio, a consultancy focused on accessibility and auditory matters. Schiffmiller suspects we are at a cultural turning point when it comes to noise. Specifically, he argued that our mounting auditory and attentional fatigue may finally be triggering a shift in social norms and a coalescing of consumer demand for acoustic relief.

“Humans evolved in environments where sound signaled something important,” he wrote. “Now we live in a world of meaningless noise forcing our brains to sort through an endless stream of irrelevant sound.” I would add that noise as unwanted or irrelevant signals should include the deluge the non-audible, digital noise compounding our stress, anxiety, and cognitive overload.

Humans are famously adaptable, but there are some fundamental limits, and we seem to be butting up against them when it comes to the capacity of our (auditory) attention. Plus, more attention is gradually being paid to the sensory sensitivities of people with autism and other developmental conditions. The good news, according to Schiffmiller, is that people are increasingly ready to reward sound-aware products, services, retailers, and employers that help tame the growing noise in our lives. As he noted, “the market is responding.”

Is this just the optimism of someone in the business of helping that market respond, or is there a real shift away from our longstanding sonic neglect? The evidence for the latter is scattered, but ample. For example, in recent years, I’ve seen quiet scores appear in online real estate listings alongside the ratings for schools and crime. Quiet airports have likewise proliferated.

Recently, I was interviewed by Julien van Hoeylandt, an investor who hosts a podcast about noise-reducing products and innovations called Fighting Noise and manages to find new ideas to discuss every week. My March newsletter highlighted a “Travel Report” from Pinterest, which analyzed more than 1 billion travel-related searches on its platform and found that the number of vacation planners hunting for quiet destinations jumped 50 percent from 2023 to 2024, while broader searches related to a “quiet life” quintupled over the same period. Meanwhile, several retailers (like Currys pictured above) have started instituting quiet hours to be more welcoming to people with sensory sensitivities.

In addition, consider the rapid growth of apps such as SoundPrint, a crowd-sourced guide to quiet restaurants (and other venues) that has aggregated hundreds of thousands of user “soundchecks” since it launched in late 2017 and has grown into a global go-to resource for people who enjoy talking to one another while sharing a meal (I recently wrote about the growing demand for reclaiming sonic space for conversation in the Boston Globe). Meanwhile, relaxation and meditation apps such as Calm and Headspace that offer a menu of soothing soundscapes boast millions of paid subscribers.

In his Forbes articles, Schiffmiller notes the growing popularity of product certifications and endorsements from groups such as Quiet Mark. He also details the shifting norms and massive market for new, stylish hearing protection and augmentation devices from brands like Eargasm, Earfab, and the Apple Airpods Pro2 with “conversation boost.”

“Ear protection is no longer something to hide. It is something to choose,” he writes. In addition to these in-ear options, high-decibel alerts have been bundled with sleep, heart rate, and other personal wellness trackers. The demand has grown strong enough to support Nuance Audio’s $1,200 prescription glasses with built-in, invisible hearing aids to help folks focus (in the visual and auditory sense) on people they’re conversing with in a noisy environment.

Last but not least, let’s look at the demand for noise-cancelling devices. Bose sold its first pair of noise-cancelling headphones to normal consumers in 2000, and that market could near $42 billion by 2031, according to KBV Research, a global market research and consulting firm.

The counterargument to market-based acoustic optimism is that we can’t buy our way to a less noisy world any more than we can buy our way out of a changing climate or other pollution binds, and that a more fundamental cultural shift is needed, in which we buy less, use less, and drive less. I’m sympathetic, both with the call for lower-impact lifestyles and with the argument that commodifying quiet risks making a luxury out of something that should be free and plentiful but is increasingly rare and priced accordingly.

But I don’t believe that growing consumer interest in their sound environments and sonic awareness among product developers, architects, and urban planners is necessarily opposed to making more substantive changes in how we live, work, commute, and consume. I remain enthusiastic about the potential for noise (and sound more broadly) to keep gaining currency among the professionals who design and build our world. I think that’s real. Even if none of these innovations are the solution to noise, I think they can be meaningful steps toward improving our sonic environments and, by extension, our health and wellbeing.

For example, I recently learned about a startup called CalmWave, which uses AI to analyze historical and current patient data to help hospitals optimize their alarm settings (via suggestions to clinicians, with multiple safety checks). The goal is to stem the flood of “non-actionable” alarms (not requiring immediate clinical response) that disguise real emergencies, cause clinician “alarm fatigue,” and keep patients from getting their rest. I have more reporting to do, hopefully for a bigger story on this, but for now I’ll note that they cut non-actionable alarms by 58 percent during a six-week pilot of the system in a hospital intensive care unit.

As I’ve noted before, one of the biggest refrains among audiologist, public health researchers, and activists is that it’s hard to get people to care about noise and to understand the importance of our sonic environments. Fighting that apathy is job one in achieving a less noisy world, and that’s a multi-front effort.

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• Earlier this month, the New York Times opinion section featured an 11-minute video about Ludwig Berger, a sound artist who has spent the past decade recording the melting and slow disappearance of the Morteratsch Glacier in the Swiss Alps. The film is all about the sound, an ASMR mix of audio that Berger has collected as he drops his mic deep into the slowly vanishing ice. There are the expected sounds, the plink plunk of droplets trickling into rivulets and combining into ever-louder cascades. But from the depths of the ice, we also hear a stranger mix of creeks, gurgles, groans, and moans, as if the glacier is alive…but dying. Berger himself seems to frame the sound art to be less a documentary of nature’s mysteries or a call to arms for saving the ice and more of a recording for the sake of posterity. “It’s almost like the last cry of the glacier in this valley,” he said.

• People living near the recharging hubs for Waymo self-driving taxis have been up in arms about the noises the cars make at all hours, a mix of beeps and tonal warning sounds when reversing and honking at one another in automated confusion when maneuvering in a crowded parking lot. A few months ago, noise-harried neighbors of a Waymo hub in Santa Monica posted an online petition seeking relief from the “noise pollution” on Change.org, which has gathered more than 300 signatures as of this writing. Others have resorted to vigilante activity, known as “Waymo stacking”—using traffic cones and other means to block the driverless taxis from entering the recharging lots (see video below).

  I called up the petition’s creator, a film score producer named Chris Potter. He said it’s not the loudness so much as the low-frequency sounds and persistent beeps of the Waymos that disturbs him and his neighbors, especially at night. “The city keeps saying that the noise isn’t going over the decibel limit, and I keep saying that I never said it did,” he told me. Waymo had yet to respond to the online petition and Potter told me they had not reached out to him personally,

  I emailed Waymo and got a response from company spokesperson, Ethan Teicher, who said the company had already changed the Waymo software, so that cars stopped honking at each other in the depot lots. The backup alerts were more complicated, he wrote, because federal law requires the reversing vehicles to emit some kind of warning, but “our engineers have identified a potential solution, and we are discussing its implementation with regulators.” He declined to provide details on that solution.

  “Feedback from the community is incredibly important to us,” Teicher noted. “In Santa Monica, we made adjustments to our operations as soon as we were made aware of noise complaints, including instructing personnel to limit cleaning noise…limiting working hours, purchasing quieter equipment, and planting fast-growing foliage to increase privacy and absorb noise.”

• At least on the noise front, New York City’s congestion pricing is a quiet success. The system charges drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 60th Street (the southern edge of Central Park) during certain hours. In March, The City, an independent digital news site about New York City, analyzed noise complaints for horn honking originating from zip codes in the congestion-pricing zone, using the publicly available 311 data. When they compared the days between the start of congestion pricing on January 5, 2025 and March 6, 2025, with the same period in 2024, they found that honking complaints plummeted 69 percent (from 219 to 67).

  I did my own analysis using the same zip codes and dataset but expanding the period to July 1 and calculated a much smaller, but still noteworthy, drop in honking complaints of about 32 percent (from 841 to 573).

• There’s a Clamor event tomorrow evening (July 16)! If you are in the Boston area, please join me and acoustics guru Ben Markham, president of Acentech, to talk about noise and soundscape solutions at the Parkside Bookshop in the South End.

  

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What Can We DO?!

During a recent virtual author talk, I was asked a question in the chat that I have faced many times: What ACTIONS can we take to generally increase quietude in our environments?

It’s a reasonable question, and it seems like a simple one. But it’s not. I’ve spoken with many people around the world who have devoted years, even decades, to “increase quietude” in their environments by fighting noise of every sort—big rig trucks shortcutting through residential streets, jet overflights and helicopters, data centers, leaf blowers, excessive honking, fireworks, fracking, construction, and so forth. In every case, it was a slog and a frustrating, sisyphean struggle for control over sonic space.

The answer to “Who do I call about this?” varies tremendously from place to place and noise to noise (here’s the noise cheat sheet for Boston, for example). Then, once you’ve found the right audience for a complaint, stirring action and enforcement of noise regulations remains hit or miss.

When noise fighters win victories, it’s typically due to a combination of dogged persistence and, importantly, gaining allies. The nonprofit Quiet Communities, for instance, has spent years building a coalition to displace gas-powered landscaping tools—yes for the sake of ears, but also for lungs, for workers’ health, and the for the environment. They’ve spread the word about noise harms, but also worked with the owners of landscaper businesses to supply training and support government incentives for transitioning to quieter, cleaner electric tools. This approach is working.

I believe we get tremendous leverage from broadening the anti-noise cause. One example is the healthy buildings movement includes acoustics as one of its foundations along with factors such as like ventilation and water quality. Or take the burgeoning field of sensory ecology that’s revealing how the “sensory smog” of human noise pollution, along with artificial light, degrades wildlife habitat. Finally, after cardiologists at Massachusetts General Hospital showed how noise is a key risk factor in chronic stress and its health fallouts, they suggested that noise exposure be included in clinical assessments for heart-disease risk.

I recommend apps like SoundPrint, because they link users to a global network of people who value quiet, not only guiding them to lower-decibel venues but harnessing and amplifying consumer demand for healthier sound environments. Simply put, more allies means more effective pressure on policymakers and businesses to seek solutions. Understanding sound’s role within larger issues such as mental health and environmental justice spreads awareness of noise harms and supports proactive efforts to improve our sound environments.

Having said all that, what ACTIONS can we take? People understandably also want more practical strategems for battling the noises they’re enduring right now. Groups such as Quiet Communities have resources at their websites broken down by noise concern. The group will host a (members only) forum “Introduction to Noise & The Law” on Thursday, June 19 at 4PM.

I also want to provide more immediately helpful answers when these questions arise, and I am mulling what I can do via this newsletter. For instance, on the policy front, I’m already planning to look into the impacts of noise cameras as well as the sonic implications of congestion pricing. Beyond that, I’m considering a Q&A with a veteran leader of noise fights who can get specific about the effectively organizing against noise, or at least a listing of top anti-noise coalitions. I welcome suggestions.

The Noisy Doors of Perception

When I was researching Clamor, I let my curiosity and enthusiasm get the better of me. The book’s first draft ballooned to more than 100,000 words (400+ pages). Potential readers will be glad to know that rewrites cut that word count nearly in half. There’s much to be said for concision, and even more to be said for a clear, focused argument. But, a few of the noise darlings I killed to maintain message discipline are worthy of resurrection.

So, I was so excited to learn that the science magazine Undark publishes a regular feature called “What I Left Out” (WILO for short) where book authors highlight an interesting story they had to drop from the final draft.

My WILO was about Albert Powers, a Yale psychiatrist who works with young people who hear voices and worry they are experiencing early symptoms of psychosis. But Powers knew that a lot of people who hear voices can lead otherwise normal lives. He joined forces with high-functioning voice hearers, such as mediums, spiritualists, and practitioners of certain religious traditions to investigate the mechanisms of auditory hallucinations and whether they can be altered. The research is a mix of structured interviews and brain scans using hallucinations induced with classical conditioning—repeatedly pairing a barely audible tone with a salient visual cue, and then randomly showing only the visual cue and observing brain patterns in people who say they perceive a tone that doesn’t actually exist.

In the initial findings, published in Science in 2017, Powers and his team found that voice hearers with and without a clinical diagnosis were more likely to percieve a non-existent tone compared to control subjects who never heard voices. Plus, there was no significant difference in brain-activity patterns for people who reported hearing a tone, whether it existed or not. Finally, while control subjects were less prone to auditory hallucinations compared to voice hearers, they were not immune to them.

At this point, you may be asking: What does this have to do with normal, audible noise? The common denominator is the importance of control in our sonic experiences. In everyday sound perception, we are much more likely to tolerate or even welcome sounds we feel some control over while the lack of control is a key factor in perceiving sounds as distressing noise. And when it came to hearing voices, the research subjects diagnosed with psychosis were much more likely to feel distressed and much less likely to feel any control over the voices, compared to high-functioning voice hearers.

Powers and company have spent the last several years exploring the mechanisms of this control—what it is, how to measure it, and most importantly if/how it can be enhanced—in a project dubbed Project COPE (Influence/Control Over Perceptual Experience).

Their findings also support a bigger theory, which is that all of us hallucinate to some degree as part of normal auditory perception. Simply put, the amount of data from our ears (and all our senses) is too overwhelming and noisy for us to deal with in real time, and so our brains make predictions, using expectations from our lived experiences, to prune and marshall that barrage of inputs into a coherent and useful sensory reality as efficiently as possible.

This requires a fair amount of perceptual gap filling, with illusion where necessary. It’s how ventriloquism works, and it’s also behind phenomena such as sine-wave speech, a stripped-down version of a human voice in which all the acoustic elements have been removed except changes of frequency and amplitude. The end result is an eerie robotic whistling, like R2D2 with a cold. But, after listening to the original, intact voice recordings once or twice, the whistles suddenly become intelligible. Your expectant brain conjures the missing consonants and vowels, forging a signal from what was previously just noise.

Just for fun, I took one of Project COPE’s published papers about auditory hallucinations, and I fed it into Google’s Notebook LM, which uses AI razzle dazzle to transform dense text like this into a podcast conversation between two artificially generated cohosts. The result doesn’t get too deep into the details, and it includes some odd repetitions and a few too many “oh wow!” reactions. Still, the overall results are still pretty amazing. Have a listen:

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• A recent story about rooster noise being litigated in an English courtroom caught my eye (the case dragged on for about three years and cost the animal’s owner nearly $4500). I recalled the story of Maurice, a French rooster that became a cause célèbre in 2019 when a couple bought a vacation home in a rural area of Western France and proceeded to lodge a legal case to silence their neighbor’s rooster. Not only did a French court toss the case, but after another rooster, Marcel, was shot to death by noise-disturbed neighbors, the uproar led to a new law protecting the “sensory heritage” of rural France—from the sound of cowbells to the odor of cow droppings, and yes, rooster crows.

  

  These cases also reminded me of a fascinating article about the era of European history when animal owners didn’t face court judgment but the animals themselves did—pigs, dogs, and bears were tried on charges of murdering and maiming humans while rats were tried for stealing grain. The article mentions only one rooster to face justice, and it wasn’t for disturbing the peace, but rather for somehow laying an egg, which locals took as a sign of demonic possession. The rooster was found guilty and put to death.

• In Limerick, Ireland, they plan to make a popular park feel quieter by adding sound. Many parts of People’s Park are quiet in the old-fashioned way (i.e. low-decibels). But, there are a couple areas where noise from the abutting busy roadways infiltrates the park and disturbs visitors. So, Limerick’s Environment and Arts departments are jointly commissioning sound art for the sonically disturbed areas to create “audio islands” that will mask the roadway noise and make the place a more pleasant and “quiet” place for visitors. The Limerick City and County Council issued an artist brief that described the park’s existing soundscape using data from soundwalks and copious acoustic measurments. The deadline for submitting sound art proposals is June 25. The concept of adding sound to enhance a feeling of quiet has been proven in other cities, such as Montreal and Berlin. I plan to write more about Limerick’s efforts in a future post.

  

• Office noise is fueling worker resistance to a push from employers to end hybrid and work-from-home arrangements, according to a report in last month’s Facilities Management Journal. The article detailed the results of a survey of more than 2,000 office professionals in the UK, in which 36 percent said that they worked from home to escape the noise, and nearly half said they struggled to concentrate when working in the office due to the din. The report echoed similar noise-based resistance to an office return covered by Fast Company magazine and the radio show Marketplace.

• #ClamorDogs for June prefers digital reading.

  

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Welcome to the May edition of CLAMOR! It’s officially publication month for my book, and so I’m tackling one of the biggest noise question out there—why should we care? I also share a silent Memorial Day tribute and a compendium of noise explorations from Boston to Mumbai. Finally, there’s new research on sound and our cells, a bipartisan bill to control data center noise gets vetoed, and #ClamorDogs.

Tilting at Noise?

Examining the anti-noise endgame

In the spring and summer of 2020, as the Covid pandemic descended, roads, skies, and cities emptied, businesses and schools shuttered, and gatherings of every variety disappeared. Researchers measuring sound from different locations during this period found an average drop of somwhere between 4 to 6 decibels.

This hush was hardly universal, but the decibel reduction was widespread enough to say that Covid temporarily ushered in a quieter world. It’s also fair to say that people had mixed feelings about this acoustic reprieve. Yes, it was beautiful to hear so many birds and so little traffic. And yes, the quiet brought some solace and a welcome space for reflection. Nevertheless, the terrible disruption, hardship, and fear behind the decibel drop was inescapable.

I had just started work on Clamor, and my in-person reporting plans were upended, while the research and interventions I’d hoped to cover were canceled. I managed to get an 18-month extension on the book, and my noise reporting boiled down to a lot of reading and thinking. One thought percolated above the others: What was the goal of the fight against noise? And by extension, what was my goal in writing a book about the topic?

We share an increasingly crowded planet with more than 8 billion other people, and the anti-noise quest can seem quixotic when viewed through a historical lens. Consider the indomitable Julia Barnett Rice, one of New York City’s most famous noise battlers. In 1906, Rice launched a war on Hudson River tugboat whistles, which ultimately succeeded and blossomed into a citywide anti-noise crusade. But in that same decade, the Wright Brothers took their maiden flight at Kitty Hawk, and the first Model T rolled off a Detroit assembly line (hat tip to Les Blomberg, of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, for that historical tidbit).

The more I read and thought, the more I was drawn to more positive takes on sound and noise that emphasized what they were for as much as what they were against. I met with hearing-protection advocates who celebrated favorite sounds and hearing’s vital role in connecting us with one another. I gravitated to researchers and acousticians who thought about how the mix of both wanted and unwanted sounds could help or hinder the functioning of the places we make—our offices, schools, hospitals, restaurants, and so forth.

Why does this matter? If you’re reading this newsletter, then you’re either related to me or you’re somebody who already understands the broad implications of sound and noise beyond personal annoyance. But that case still needs to be made more convincingly and to a much bigger audience. When people ask me why they should care about noise, my answer is that they probably already do. They likely care about noise deeply when the car alarm is blaring down the street at 3 AM, or when they’re sweating an important deadline in an open-office flooded with coworker chatter, or when they visit a loved one in a hospital who can’t sleep due to constant alarms. My argument is that to care about big issues such as fraying social connections, shattered attention spans, the epidemic of chronic stress, sleep disruptions, or degraded natural habitats, is to care about noise.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to dig into all this with Nancy Nadler, deputy executive director of the Center for Hearing and Communication for their 30th International Noise Awareness Day (see their full line-up of interviews here).

As we near Memorial Day, a tribute to the fallen.

A sign greets visitors to the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast of France, where thousands of white grave markers blanket a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach. It reads:

Look how many there were. 
Look how young they were. 
They died for your freedom. 
Hold back your tears and keep silent.

Well, How Did I Get Here?

I pulled together my four magazine features about noise, which led to the book proposal for Clamor. Links and short descriptions follow, plus a bonus video from my noise reporting in India.

1. “Is Boston getting noisier? This app is designed to help us find out” Boston Globe

My introduction to the wide world of noise was this 2018 piece for the Boston Globe magazine profiling noise researcher Erica Walker (featured in the March newsletter) when she was a postdoc trying to understand noise beyond a decibel count. For the headline writer, Walker’s new noise app was the hook. For me, it was the possibility that we’d mismeasured noise for the last 100 years.

2. “The roar of military jets triggers a crusade for quiet” High Country News

The Hoh Rainforest is a lush, moss-covered sanctuary of quiet deep in Washington State’s Olympic National Park. The acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton (pictured in the above photo by Shawn Parkin) wrote about this place in his book One Square Inch of Silence, before the quiet was shattered by new noise from U.S. Navy “Growler” jet training missions overhead.

3. “It’s not just you: Restaurants have gotten too loud. But there are some fixes.” Popular Science

Super-loud restaurants are a real problem, both for diners and ear-weary restaurant staff. In this feature, I focused on the acoustic design and engineering firm Meyer Sound, and its system for fine-tuning restaurant soundscapes, but I also covered less-expensive solutions from considering sound upfront in restaurant design, before it becomes a massive noise problem.

4. “The Fight to Curb a Health Scourge in India: Noise Pollution” Undark

A grant from the Pulitzer Center allowed me to visit Mumbai, Delhi, and a couple other locations in India to report on growing anti-noise activism in some of the noisiest places on Earth. Below is a video I took during the Ganesh festival in Ulhasnagar, an hour east of Mumbai. Even on non-festival days, Ulhasnagar is the noisiest urban area in the Indian state of Maharashtra, according to the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), which reported that traffic noise in the city averages 91.4 decibels!

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• Your cells can hear! Scientist have identified about 190 sound-sensitive genes, including ones in a study published last month in the journal Communications Biology. Scientists at the University of Kyoto described how acoustic vibrations affected preadipocytes, which are fat cell precursors, by suppressing adipocyte differentiation, which is a step toward becoming full-fledged fat cells. Several years ago, these same researchers showed that sound waves could also suppress other genes that were instrumental in bone formation and wound healing.

• Earlier this month, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have required the builders of new data centers to submit site assessments on the project’s noise impacts on residents and schools located within 500 feet of the property, in addition to examining the impacts on water and agricultural resources, parks, historic sites and forestland (see February’s newsletter about the growing din of our digital migration).

• A reminder that if you’ll be in the Boston/Cambridge area on May 21, 2025, please join me at the Harvard Book Store for a Clamor book launch event at 7 PM. I’ll be talking noise and soundscapes with Dan Gauger, one of the acoustic pioneers who created the first Bose noise-cancelling headphones and many other products you know and love. No ticket required.

• Finally, dogs love Clamor! Nancy Nadler, my interviewer for International Noise Awareness Day, sent me this photo of her dog and a friend discussing my book:

  

  I then asked other review-copy readers for pictures of their dogs enjoying Clamor, and received some great ones. In the months ahead, I’d love to post more photos of #ClamorDogs. Please, message me yours!

  

  

  

  My dog, Roscoe, reads a few pages between naps while I work. When he wakes up, he quietly stands vigil and invites me to take a walk.

  

  

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In the 1990s, the Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge became the first person to reach both Poles and the summit of Mt. Everest unassisted. Years later, in his book Silence in the Age of Noise (2018), he reflected on the weeks he spent alone crossing Antarctica.

“At home, there’s always a car passing, a telephone ringing, pinging or buzzing, someone talking, whispering, or yelling. There are so many noises that we barely hear them all,” he wrote. “Here it was different. Nature spoke to me in the guise of silence. The quieter I became, the more I heard.”

In the absence of everyday noise, a myriad sounds rushed to fill the sonic vaccuum—the wind as it came and went and sometimes whistled, the crunch of snow beneath Kagge’s footsteps, the deep seismic hum of the ice sheet, and the sustaining rhythms of his breathing and beating heart. At the same time, a fascinating and ever-changing display emerged from the “visual silence” of the exceedingly flat and white vista spreading for miles in all directions.

“The ice and snow formed small and large abstract shapes,” Kagge recalled. “The uniform whiteness was transformed into countless shades of white, tinged with blue on the surface of the snow, or somewhat reddish, greenish, and slightly pink.”

I’ve read a lot of reflections on silence in the last few years, and a couple themes echo through many of these writings—whether by Zen masters, Trappist monks, composers, sound-designers, or neuroscientists. First, we don’t experience silence as a true absence, but something more like an expansion in auditory perception, reaching out and newly receptive now that we’re no longer bombarded by noise. Second, the noise that silence-seekers most sought to escape was not defined by loudness but by its assault on our attention. And this sort of noise need not be audible at all.

“When we confront silence, the mind reaches outward.”-John Cage

The Maverick Concert Hall is a barn-like structure built in 1916 of rough-cut oak and pine timber with a sloping gambrel roof situated in a woodsy area near Woodstock, New York. On a late August evening in 1952, a crowd gathered here for a performance by the virtuoso pianist, David Tudor.

Among the pieces Tudor would perform was the premier of 4’33” by the avant-garde composer John Cage, which the audience would soon discover was four minutes and thirty-three seconds without a note being played. Dismissed by many serious musicians and critics (then and now) as a gimmick, 4’33” is among the most famous demonstrations that silence is simultaneously impossible yet immensely powerful.

At the concert hall, Tudor approached the piano with his usual gravitas, sat down, opened the keyboard lid, and did nothing for 30 seconds. Then he closed and reopened the lid and waited another 2 minutes and 23 seconds before closing and reopening the lid again and waiting for 1 minute and 40 seconds. When the final seconds ticked away, Tudor closed the lid a final time, stood up, and walked off stage.

Despite the lack of notes, the performance was far from silent. In the first movement, “you could hear the wind stirring outside,” Cage recalled. “During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof.” By the third movement, people shifted uncomfortably in their seats, grumbled complaints, or walked out in frustration.

Structurally, the silent beats of a composition are the purest measure of time, which Cage believed to be the most fundamental musical ingredient. With 4’33” the passage of time was a constant, like an empty glass into which any sound or silence could be poured.

On that late summer evening in the Maverick Concert Hall, an audience listened to itself. They likely sensed the tension in the creaks of shifting seats and clearing throats, as the pianist waited, and they waited. They may even have felt wonder—what the hell is this about and what will happen next—just as they noticed the wind rustling the trees and the first raindrops pattering on the roof.

In May 2000, NPR’s All Things Considered told the story of that evening and Cage’s exploration of silence and listening (below is a rebroadcast from 2012).

What is the deepest silence you have ever known?

That was the central question posed by Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz at the opening of Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise (2022). The book was born from a 2017 article they co-authored in the Harvard Business Review, which went viral, about the increasing importance of cultivating “quiet time” in busy lives. Zorn and Marz asked people from all walks of life about their deepest moments of silence, and they were struck by how many of these memories were filled with sounds, some of them quite loud—babies being born, a summer forest suddenly alive with cicadas after a 17-year absence, kayaking a clean line through roaring rapids, or losing oneself in chest-thumping rhythms on a crowded dance floor.

To make the case that the world is getting noisier, many writers (including me) will cite decibel-based evidence, such as spikes in restaurant loudness, the need to crank up emergency sirens across the decades to overcome the rising city din, or the vanishing of natural quiet. But arguably the biggest noise problem we face is the noise that shatters focus, an onslaught of unwanted signals at any decibel level, including zero. The most challenging quiet to achieve is a quiet mind.

The connections between audible noise and what Princeton University historian Emily Thompson dubbed the “online cacophony” of overstuffed email inboxes and endless social media scrolls is more than metaphorical. Not only do our digital notifications lay claim our attention with a growing menu of pings, beeps, and chimes, but an overload of signals—audible or not—depletes our limited attentional resources in many of the same ways.

Unfortunately, we have a love-hate relationship with the noise of distraction. As much as we crave quiet, we also kind of fear it. For instance, according to a 2014 study by researchers at the University of Virginia and Harvard, people would rather administer painful electric shocks to themselves than sit silently in a room, alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.

As the explorer Erling Kagge recalled from his days on Antarctica, “The biggest challenge is to get up in the morning when the temperature is fifty degrees below freezing. The next hardest challenge? To be at peace with yourself.”

The noise that scatters our attention can be exhausting. Yet we still crave the quick bursts of dopamine from scrolling social media and letting our thoughts skip along on the surface of our consciousness. What are we missing out on? What’s being left unsaid? What uncomfortable or awkward thoughts might rush in to fill that silence?

“Even if we are not talking with others, reading, listening to the radio, watching television, or interacting online, most of us don’t feel settled or quiet,” wrote the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Silence. “This is because we’re still tuned to an internal radio station, Radio NST (Non-Stop Thinking.”

Recognizing the challenge of reclaiming our scattered attention, Hanh suggested people try a “walking meditation…to clear the mind without trying to clear the mind.” You don’t say, “Now I am going to practice meditation!” or “Now I am going to not think!” he continued. “You just walk, and while you’re focusing on the walking, joy and awareness come naturally.”

When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is, effectively, no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. -Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, theologian, and social activist, Thoughts on Solitude (1956).

Attention Restoration

When we tune out the noise, we can tune in something else. Nature, for instance, is filled with sounds that can help quiet the mind. According to “Attention Restoration Theory,” developed in the late 1980s and early 90s, by Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, then environmental psychologists at the University of Michigan, our minds recharge when our attention gets captured by the right kind of stimuli—engaging but not demanding or alarming, offering a bit of surprise but within a broader pattern of familiarity and safety. Nature has plenty of acoustic hooks that hit this attentional sweet spot that Kaplan’s called “soft fascination,” ranging from birdsong to the splashes of a cascading stream.

With that in mind, I’ll close this post with the story of Bernie Krause , who has been a renowned collector of nature’s soundscapes for more than half a century. He’s authored several books, including The Great Animal Orchestra (2012) and The Power of Tranquility in a Very Noisy World (2021), and his recordings have been featured in zoos, aquariums, films, TV shows, and multimedia museum exhibits.

But, before all that, in October of 1968, Krause was a 30-year old pioneer in electronic music. One afternoon, he found himself driving across the Golden Gate Bridge up to a woodsy suburban park. All Krause knew was that he needed to collect some nature sounds so he and fellow musician, Paul Beaver, could mix them into an ecology-themed, synth-heavy album called In a Wild Sanctuary. He had no plan. He didn’t know much about nature. Truth be told, he was a little scared of it. He certainly didn’t know that he was about to change his life.

In the late 1960s, the duo of Beaver and Krause made far-out music with what was then the latest technology, Moog synthesizers, an instrument they also sold as the company’s west-coast sales reps. After demonstrating the Moog from a booth at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Beaver and Krause were suddenly much in demand, selling synthesizers and playing them as studio musicians for major bands like the Byrds and the Doors who were pushing a new wave of psychedelic rock.

They signed a record deal with Warner Brothers in 1968, and according to Krause, whom I interviewed by email and phone in the spring of 2021, the inspiration for Wild Sanctuary was kind of a fluke.

“I didn’t know what ecology was back then,” Krause told me. “But we had no other ideas.”

So, toting a couple of stereo microphones, a headset, and a portable tape recorder, Krause set off into the park. He marched down a trail away from any sounds of traffic, until he reached a small stand of redwoods where he stopped, slipped on the headphones, and pressed record.

It wasn’t an ideal time to listen. A lot of the migratory birds had already moved along. After months with little rain, the nearby stream was reduced to a barely audible trickle. A breeze rustled the tree canopy, and then a pair of ravens passed overhead, Krause recalled in an email, describing, “the edge tones of their wingbeats and occasional three-beat caws lowering in pitch slightly with each statement as they distanced themselves from my mics.”

But the scarcity of sounds didn’t matter nearly as much as how listening made Krause feel. He had spent a lifetime battling a chronic state of agitation and distraction, which was belatedly diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Those first few moments of listening to nature offered him the first real relief. It settled his mind and soothed his anxiety.

“As soon as I switched on the recorder, the impact of that delicate acoustic fabric and space that I heard was so stunning and emotionally powerful,” he told me. He could still only manage a minute of quiet listening before he’d ruin the recording by slapping at mosquitos or shuffling his feet. But the effortless engagement he felt with the natural world as he listened to it had hooked him. He kept making recording trips into the field, and each time, he was able to stay still a bit longer and lose himself deeper in the rush of sounds filling his ears.

In the decades that followed, Krause would devote his life to nature listening, amassing more than 5,000 hours of soundscapes, and advocating on behalf of habitats around the world threatened by noise and other human endeavors such as clear cutting and climate change. But it wasn’t science, environmentalism, or aesthetics that kept Krause returning to nature for more listening. “The reason I do it,” he said, “is because it makes me feel good.”

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• As detailed above, sometimes the “noisy” experience is our ultra-low-decibel scrolling through social media, distracting ourselves with its ephemera and outrage-bait, while a higher-decibel woodsy walk beside a rain-swollen river gives us a “quiet” feeling of calm, clarity, and receptive attention. I thought about this the other day when I caught myself checking Instagram while watching TV and, ironically, this video of comedian Des Bishop’s musing on mindfulness popped into my feed (warning, naughty words):

• In 2017, after Bernie Krause had spent decades immersing himself in natural soundscapes that soothed his psyche, he encountered a new and terrifying natural sound—the roar of a wind-fueled wildfire that forced him and his wife to flee their California home. The fire consumed their house along with a treasure trove of recordings. Recently, the New Yorker online featured a documentary called The Last of the Nightingales by filmmaker, Masha Karpoukhina, about Krause and what our planet’s ecosystems can tell us through the sounds they make, including/especially the scary ones.

• Traffic noise is on the rise in the Galápagos Islands of all places, and a recent study found that the growing raquet makes the male Galápagos yellow warbler more aggressive and confrontational when he hears another warbler singing in his territory. “Communication usually is in lieu of physical aggression,” one of the co-authors explained in an article about the research in The Guardian, “but if the communication is not possible because of noise, then they might actually engage in risky behaviours that would lead to a physical fight.”

• If you’ll be in the Boston/Cambridge area on May 21, 2025, please join me at the Harvard Book Store for a Clamor book launch event at 7 PM. I’ll be talking noise and soundscapes with Dan Gauger, one of the acoustic pioneers who created the first Bose noise-cancelling headphones and other products. No tickets required, just show up and say hi. (Also, a reminder that the good folks at Tertulia are offering offering a big discount for preordering the book here.)

  

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Hello and welcome to the March CLAMOR! This month, we cover the noise and other pollution from the growth of industrial-scale wood-pellet production in the rural southeastern U.S.—spurred by global appetites for “clean” energy and for conquest. Also, some new-ish fixes for city noise, a Clamor flash sale, and trending quiet. Finally, if the sounds of chewing fill you with rage, Yale researchers want to hear from you.

The noisy fallout of good (and bad) intentions

In the last decade, scores of industrial-scale pellet manufacturing plants have popped up in places like Gloster, Mississippi home to around 1,000 people, about 70 percent African American, and more than a third living below the poverty line.

The wood rush was sparked by a 2009 decision by the European Union to classify wood pellet burning as a renewable energy source that could help member nations ditch fossil-fuels. The argument is that the trees made into pellets are replanted, thereby ensuring a long-term offset of the carbon released in the short term. That’s controversial according to many ecologists who argue that cutting down, pulverizing, pelletizing, shipping, and then burning trees at an industrial scale is not clean energy, despite the replanting.

In any case, the subsequent spike in wood-pellet demand left manufacturers hungry for new supplies of wood, which they found in the southeastern U.S. where pine trees are plentiful and so are struggling rural communities eager for development and jobs. Suddenly, the roads in Gloster and similar small towns were filled with heavy trucks bringing logs to the manufacturing plants and then hauling away tons and tons of pellets to begin their journey to Europe. The pellet manufacturing also hit nearby residents with a barrage of noise from grinding, drying, and hammering wood into tiny cylinders, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

In addition to noise, both trucks and pellet facilities emit particulates and other air pollution. In 2020, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality fined the UK-based owner of Gloster’s pellet plant (Drax Global) $2.5 million for air quality violations. The company subsequently began making investments in Gloster, including $130,000 for a walking track, a holiday turkey giveaway, and STEM programs for local kids. In 2024, they committed $250,000 to a community fund.

Economic Benefits but Public Health Costs

To learn more about the possible fallout from an expanding wood-pellet industry, I spoke with Erica Walker, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University and director of the Community Noise Lab. Last year, Walker won a five-year, $5.8 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (and then a second grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) to measure air and noise pollution from pellet plants and other sources across Mississippi, along with their potential effects on a wide range of children’s health problems, from asthma to obesity. Among her partners in this work is the grassroots community group, Greater Greener Gloster.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Walker since 2018 when I wrote a research profile about her for the Boston Globe magazine, which was my introduction to the wide world of noise. Walker was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and for the last several years, she’s increasingly focused on environmental health issues afflicting her home state, including (but definitely not limited to) noise pollution.

Asked about her current work, Walker stressed that she wasn’t out to demonize the wood-pellet manufacturers, which provide a source of needed jobs (including for the region’s tree farmers). Nevertheless, she said there needed to be an accounting of the costs from this and other development, to give communities like Gloster with the information they need to negotiate “good neighbor agreements” in which industries agree to take steps such as enhanced pollution mitigation and sustained investments in communities where they operate.

Walker and her team are spreading environmental sensors in communities across the state, some with pellet manufacturing, some without, and some with other potential pollution sources, such as oil refineries, data centers, or simply crumbling infrastructure. The researchers will analyze these exposures alongside a longitudinal health study of kids—tracking everything from hearing difficulties to respiratory disease to chronic stress to obesity—via health visits to households in each of the communities.

Key excerpts from my interview with Walker are below. They’re mostly audio, except for this first video clip (for the sake of the shared screen) in which Walker described the noises of wood pellet manufacturing.

In 2024, Mississippi was 49th in state-by-state rankings of overall health compiled by the United Health Foundation (Louisiana was 50th). Untangling the reasons for this is Walker’s larger purpose. As she put it, the overarching question driving her research is this: Why are healthy children turning into unhealthy adults in Mississippi?

Walker is also eager to equip local people with the skills and knowledge to keep tabs on their own community’s pollution exposures and to keep fighting for better environmental health long after her grant expires. In the two clips below, Walker explains her wideranging investigation of pollution and the health impacts across Mississippi (clip one covers the environmental sensor data, and clip two is focused on the health study):

How noisy are these pellet plants? According to Walker’s preliminary data, a pellet manufacturing facility adds between 12 and 16 decibels to daily lives of nearby residents, depending on the frequency range measured. “That’s huge,” she said (decibels are a logarithmic measure, so every ten decibels means ten times as much sound energy hitting people’s ears).

Near the pellet plant in Gloster, the DNL (day night sound level; a 24-hour average) was 65 decibels, which is the threshold where the FAA pays for sound insulation in homes near airports. In the following clip, Walker talks about the potential noise impacts they’ll be tracking.

In these final two clips, Walker explains how her research findings could be parlayed into “Good Neighbor Agreements” between wood pellet companies (and other industries) and the communities where they want to operate.

What’s Russia Got To Do With It?

The pellet industry is on track for more rapid growth, thanks in no small part to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That year, the U.S. was already the leading exporter of wood pellets to the EU, supplying more than 3 million metric tons a year, and the war boosted the market for U.S. wood pellets in two ways. First, Russia had been another major wood-pellet supplier for the EU, but that supply dried up completely post invasion. Second, the war scuttled mounting pressure to de-classify wood biomass as renewable energy. European governments became even more eager to wean themselves from Russian fossil fuels, principally natural gas, and so the EU kept “wood biomass” classified as a renewable in its 2023 Renewable Energy Directive.

Last fall, separate from Walker’s research, the Southern Environmental Law Center and a coalition of community and environmental groups in several southern states surveyed people in more than 300 households in five communities located within a 2-mile radius of a pellet plant. Among the findings published in their October 2024 report was that nearly half of respondents were bothered by pellet plant noise every day, jumping to nearly 70 percent in households within a mile of the plant.

More pellet plants are now in the works across the southeast (and elsewhere) to meet the demand, which is also rising rapidly in Asia and North America, leading to growth projections for the global market from an estimated $15 billion currently to more than $21 billion in 2030.

The (not so) Radical Ways to Make Cities Sound Better

City noise problems are as old as cities themselves. From the prohibition of night-time chariot driving in ancient Rome to modern municipal noise codes, most efforts to diminish the din have taken a similar approach—crack down on the sounds that people complain about the most. That’s logical, but it also means that noise battlers are almost always playing catch up, whac-a-moling unwanted sounds, feeding stereotypes of finger-wagging negativity. we can do better in at least two ways.

Without denying the need for traditional noise control, we could do a lot more to proactively avoid noise in the first place with urban design that takes common noise problems into account. Below is a video demonstration by Raj Patel, a leading international acoustics, audiovisual, and multimedia consultant and designer with the firm Arup (video produced by the Wall Street Journal):

Just as importantly, we should also consider the soundscapes we actually want in our cities, not just the noises we want to avoid or squash. New tools being developed at places like McGill University’s “Sounds in the City” lab will let people sonically experience a planned urban space before it exists. With these new tools, city planners, developers, and other stakeholders can listen to a planned commercial district, city park, or plaza as the day passes into night. They can assess the sonic fallout from different design choices, such as placing a water fountain in a park, changing outdoor seating arrangements, tweaking traffic patterns, adding trees, and so forth. After listening, they can make more adjustments and listen again, steering toward a soundscape that enhances rather than detracts from people’s experience of the place. Ideally, these tools would also be used for community engagement and outreach on major developments.

Back in 2022, I interviewed one of the McGill researchers working on this project, a doctoral student named Richard Yanaky. At the time, it was a desktop prototype. But, last month, Yanaky put out a call for people willing to test out a virtual reality version of the project. I’m told he’s likely found all the subjects he needs for that study, but this video gives a flavor of the experience:

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• Book annoncement! Now through May 20, 2025, the book-discovery platform Tertulia is offering 25% off of Clamor pre-orders. Get in on that deal here.

  

• The number of vacation planners hunting for quiet destinations jumped 50 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a “Travel Report” from Pinterest that analyzed more than 1 billion travel-related searches. Broader searches related to a “quiet life” skyrocketed by 530 percent over the same period.

• March 3, 2025 was World Hearing Day, the tenth edition of awareness raising, free hearing screenings, and other events worldwide dedicated to protecting our ears (organized by World Health Organization). This year, the WHO published new “safer listening” guidelines for video games as well as music, sports, and other entertainment venues.

• People with misophonia experience abnormally high levels of anxiety, rage, and stress when they hear chewing, sniffling, throat clearing, or other “trigger sounds.” Sound familiar? If so, check out the recent call for study volunteers by Yale researchers investigating possible genetic underpinnings of misophonia and a menu of other disorders (you don’t need to be based in Connecticut). I heard about the research through the newsletter of Dr. Jennifer Jo Brout, a leader in treating people misophonia.

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Welcome to the February edition of CLAMOR! This month’s post explores the shifting soundscape of our digital migration, as well as new findings about chronic noise impacts on heart health. Finally, the Korean noise war flares up (again), Finland announces a new “national soundscape,” and a bit of book news.

The Future of Noise in a Digital-First World

The opening vignette of Derek Thompson’s cover story in this month’s Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century” is the deserted bar area in his local Mexican restaurant, a once-lively gathering spot that’s become a hushed staging area for delivery orders, with a bartop ceded entirely to the bags of food ordered by app.

Thompson goes on to detail America’s worsening “isolationist dynamic” in which we increasingly avoid interacting with people in real life anytime our devices offer an alternative. It made me wonder about the sonic implications of this trend.

Consider all the “social” settings where people are now physically together but mentally separate, their attention devoted to personal devices, neither listening nor speaking to the people who are actually in their midst—creating the sort of oddly quiet scenes that former surgeon general Vivek Murthy described during his anti-loneliness “We Are Made To Connect” tour of college campuses in 2023.

Obviously, there remains plenty of people noise in the world. But on the margins, there’s a sonic shift underway in which the myriad sounds of people interacting face-to-face is supplanted by the constant, droning noise of data centers spreading around the globe to enable our digital migration.

The (Not So) Frictionless Future

A core promise of computer technology’s rapid advance has been an escape from the messiness of our analog world—all that paper, the traffic and other logistical snarls, and the awkward, frustrating, or even frightening encounters with other people. It’s an ideal epitomized by “the cloud” of networked servers, software, and databases powering an expanding universe of friction-free information transfer, connection, and commerce, which we can access anywhere and anytime, in our pajamas if we want, with a few silent finger taps.

While there are undeniable benefits of this computing revolution, there’s also a growing realization that neither the cloud nor the digital ideal it supports are nearly as ethereal as we imagined. For instance, my former colleague, Vince Beiser, recently wrote about the scourge of e-waste on his Power Metal newsletter. There’s also lots of new research and reporting on the real-world impacts of data centers. These squat, concrete server farms devour energy and guzzle water. They also emit an incredible amount of noise. Heat is both a wasteproduct and a lethal enemy of data processing hardware, and so the servers must be blasted by noisy cooling systems 24/7. As a case study out of MIT’s Schwartzman College of Computing put it, “the cloud of the digital is also relentlessly material.”

And these material appetites and impacts are growing explosively, thanks to the computational needs of AI, digital currency mining, and old-fashioned internet. Data centers are far and away the fastests growing sector of commercial construction in the United States, with nearly $30 billion spent building new ones in 2024. A recent report by Compass Data Centers forecasting market demand through 2030 was titled “We are Going to Need a Bigger Boat.”

The Emerging Backlash

In early 2025, the journal Frontiers In Public Health put out a call for research papers focused on the health impacts of noise from “emerging technological sources” such as “cryptomining operations, massive data centers for cloud storage, and the proliferation of other digital infrastructures.”

But how noisy are data centers really? That depends. Inside a server room, the roar can reach well above 90 decibels (power-tool loud), which can cause permanent hearing damage unless workers protect their ears. Outside a data center’s walls, the decibels aren’t nearly as extreme, but there’s a lot more to noise than loudness and more to noise harm than hearing loss.

Mounting evidence links long-term exposure to moderate-decibel environmental noise, such as road traffic and jet overflights, to heart disease, stroke, and a range of other serious physical and mental maladies, via chronic stress and disrupted sleep. And studies find that disease risks start to ramp up at just 40 decibels on average, which is at the lower end of noise levels measured in many neighborhoods near data centers. (More details below under “Circadian Chaos”)

In the building frenzy, data centers are popping up everywhere, but they’re concentrated in places with cheaper land and power—including the resurrection of decommissioned power plants—and in places luring investment with generous tax incentives. A growing number of people in these hotspots are discovering—and protesting—the resulting noise (among other concerns such as rising electricity rates and environmental pollution).

Responding to complaints, data center owners usually point out, correctly, that the sounds from their facilities aren’t loud enough to violate existing regulations. However, most local noise ordinances are designed to combat high-decibel, episodic noise. They’re weighted to frequencies in the sweet spot of human hearing, which discounts the lower-frequency tones that dominate data center noise, travel farther than higher-frequency sounds, and more easily penetrate windows and walls (the sort of noise you feel as well as hear). Plus, unlike late-night parties or road construction, the noise from data centers never shuts up. It can’t. If server rooms paused their cooling, the cloud would quickly overheat into a smoldering ruin.

From Texas to Arizona to Virginia especially (the state with the highest concentration of data centers) noise is triggering a growing number of protests and lawsuits against new server farms and higher hurdles for new facilities from state and local officials.

Besides driving neighbors batty, noise is a symptom of data center inefficiency, driving up costs and cutting into profits. So, bottom-line concerns of data center developers should help mitigate the din with investments in energy efficiency and technologies like liquid immersion cooling that can lessen the need for all that air conditioning. Smarter noise regulations will also help, such as those proposed in Virginia at the end of 2024 by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) report on data center growth, which recommended giving localities the authority to enforce lower-decibel thresholds for data centers that take into account the constant, low-frequency nature of their noise and to require sound-modeling and impact studies before the construction of any new facilities.

The Clamor for Convenience

Real-world noise from the digital realm doesn’t stop at data centers. Whenever I click my way through an order on Amazon or another ecommerce platform, for example, I add a bit more impetus to an expanding web of warehouses and distribution hubs that are disproportionately located in neighborhoods of least resistance pumping out air and noise pollution.

I recently visited the neighborhood of Southwest Detroit sandwiched between freight distribution centers and the busiest trade crossing between the U.S. and Canada. Bigrigs cut through these residential streets to avoid the congestion of surrounding highways, averaging a truck a minute according to counts by neighbors and public-health researchers at the University of Michigan. A video snippet below shows what goes on all day there, and into the night:

In the very near future, our online purchases will generate a whole new noise—the buzz of delivery drones coming to a neighborhood near you. Globally, about 5 million drone deliveries were made in 2024, a number that could explode to more than 800 million by 2034 according to some estimates.

Drone delivery has definite advantages, such as speeding medicine and other critical supplies to remote places such as mountain villages and offshore oil platforms. But, as the market takes off, so will the swarms of drones summoned simply for an extra smidgen of convenience for customers who want that late-night snack or other impulse buy airlifted to them minutes after clicking “purchase.”

NASA studies find that people are more annoyed by the keening whine of drone rotors than they are by truck or van noise at the same decibel level—a finding that fits with some early real-world encounters:

For now, drone deliveries are rare enough that their potential ubiquity is often discussed with a sort of abstract fascination, similar to musings on a future of flying cars and robot butlers. Only a handful of municipalities have done much serious planning for commonplace drone deliveries—to proactively study things like routing, licensing operators, flight restrictions, and potential sites for the depots that will be the hives of drone flights and noise. It’s unfortunate, but not surprising. Reactive thinking has long been the Achilles heel of noise control movements—battling the sources of unwanted sound only after they’ve become deeply rooted in our daily lives and livelihoods while ignoring the next noise threat droning our way on the horizon.

Circadian Chaos and Floods of Free Radicals

Connecting the Biological Dots Between Noise and Disease

Simply put, more noise means more heart disease, hypertension, strokes, and heart attacks. The links have been found over and over. Still, when it comes to noise and disease, the path from correlation to causation is long and appropriately difficult, given the many confounding factors, including the fact that people exposed to more noise from transportation sources or heavy industry also breathe in more particulate matter and other noxious air pollution, as well as the need to trace the pathology between decibels and biological changes such as arterial inflammation.

Late last year, however, a group of scientists from Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S. weighed the collected research on noise and health and and wrote an article titled, “Noise Causes Cardiovascular Disease: It’s Time to Act” published in the journal Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology.

The research they reviewed included sleep studies showing how nighttime noise leads to more fragmented and lower quality sleep, even when the sleepers aren’t aware of the disruptions. The resulting circadian chaos contributes to higher blood pressure and an amplified stress responses and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

They researchers also reviewed PET scan studies showing that people exposed to more noise had more active amygdalas (part of the brain on guard for threats) as well as more downstream inflammation and oxidative stress—a flood of free radicals damaging cells and tissues—that can stiffen and clog artieries. In addition, mouse research published in January by the journal Antioxidants found that administering drugs known to block the stress-inflammation response lessened the harmful impacts of chronic noise.

While calling for more “comprehensive stratgies to mitigate noise pollution,” the researchers also recommended that noise be included “as a significant cardiovascular risk factor along with other environmental hazards such as ambient air pollution” in the guidelines on heart disease prevention used by cardiologists and other clinicians.

Meanwhile, the European Environment Agency (EEA), which has blamed noise for about 12,000 premature deaths annually across the continent, published their latest batch of noise findings. Among the topline items: 20 to 30 percent of Europeans live in areas with enough transportation noise to be considered harmful to health, and this noise also impaired the reading ability of more than half a million children.

If plowing through journal articles isn’t your thing (or even if it is), check out The Quietest Year a 2024 documentary by filmmaker Karen Atkins covering the physical and mental toll of noise and the spread of noise pollution in Vermont—a state long synonymous with bucolic peace and tranquility.

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• North Korea has launched its latest salvo in an ongoing noise war with South Korea across the DMZ. Since 1963, both sides have had loudspeakers to blast into enemy territory. According to a Radio Free Asia story, North Korea recently started harrassing South Korean border villages with late-night spooky sounds of ghost-like wailing and howling wolves after South Korea broke a period of truce by bombarding the North with news broadcasts and K-Pop hits.

• On December 6, 2024, Finland celebrated its 107th day of independence by sharing 15 musical compositions commissioned by the goverment to be its “national soundscape.” The pieces, collectively titled “Ääniä,” meaning “sounds” or “voices” in Finnish, were composed by Lauri Porra, an acclaimed contemporary composer from Finland.

  “This understated, minimalist music is meant to create a certain atmosphere,” Porra said in the press release announcing the works. “What’s being depicted is space. There’s space to think, feel and live in Finland – not only in nature, but also in the Finnish way of life.”

• The podcast “Politicology” recently aired a great, two-part interview with the coauthors of Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise (2022), Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz. The book does a great job of connecting all the audible and nonaudible noise in our lives, going deep into the meaning of quiet and the value of unbroken attention.

• Book News! Clamor is now featured on the book page of the Society of Environmental Journalists. It will also be available as an audiobook via RB Media Global and available wherever audiobooks are sold as of May 20, 2025.

Preorder Clamor Here

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Happy New Year! Welcome to the first substantive edition of the CLAMOR newsletter. This is a new adventure for me, so thanks for your patience as I work out the kinks in the months ahead. My focus will be on bringing you noise news from unsual places, along with some interesting listening. In this post, we’ll explore a worsening din beneath the waves, the sonic revival of coral reefs, and more evidence that protecing natural soundscapes is good for both nature and for us.

The Not-So-Silent Deep (and how a changing climate will make it even noisier)

In Jules Verne’s classic, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo takes the Nautilus deep to escape the violent seas of a hurricane.

“We had to seek repose at more than twenty-five fathoms [150 feet] submerged in the bowels of the deep,” recalled the novel’s protagonist, Professor Pierre Aronnax. “But there, what silence, what peace!”

The notion of a vast, silent peace beneath the waves is poetic, but false. Oceans are actually awash with sounds—from fish grunts to whale songs—that the inhabitants rely on to find food, avoid predators, and communicate where light to see by is often at a premium. This underwater world is also increasingly inundated with noise from a range of human sources from miltary sonar to natural resource exploration and extraction to more and more ships churning through the water with the freight and fuel of expanding global trade.

Global Seaborne Trade (Billions of Tons)

Rising Temperatures and Decibels

Meanwhile, a warming climate will make this underwater cacophony a lot worse in a couple ways highlighed by new research. First, melting polar ice will unlock some of the last vestiges of pristine, quiet ocean to vessel noise and other pollution. In 2024, the journal Nature published an analysis by Swedish and Norwegian scientists that raised an alarm about noise pollution from new luxury Arctic cruises, adding to a growing pile of studies on threats posed by newly opened shipping lanes and natural resource extraction in one of the planet’s few remaining quiet refuges. And as ship traffic grows, warmer and more acidic ocean water will propogate the resulting noise more efficiently. A 2023 study out of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research predicted that these changes could mean that by the end of this century shipping noise could be “five times as loud” as it is today in some ocean regions.

A lot of underwater noise is incredibly loud. For instance, Naval sonar can hit well over 200 decibels and has been implicated in several mass whale strandings, confirmed by the U.S. Navy itself. But loudness is only part of the problem for undersea creatures. A related, but distinct noise threat is the growing ubiquity of sonic intrusions, which drastically shrinks the sensory worlds of species that depend on listening for survival. Research on the ecological importance of underwater soundscapes and the impacts of noise have gained momentum in recent decades—boosted by lawsuit settlements between environmental groups and the Navy.

Studies show that as underwater noise rises, such as when big ships pass by or during pile driving for offshore construction, many aquatic species have trouble foraging for food, struggle to communicate (or just give up), and have surging stress hormones. None of these impacts are as directly harmful or dramatic as mass whale strandings, but they degrade the habitats of aquatic species, including many that are already struggling to survive, such as the North Atlantic right whale.

Noise = Waste

The biggest cause of shipping noise is cavitation around the propeller. While quieter propulsion systems are a big upfront investment for shipping companies, there is also an economic upside. Less cavitation means greater efficiency that will lower fuel bills and help meet other environmental targets such as reduced emissions. Many shippping companies already seek efficiency boosts by slowing down (“slow steaming”) during oceanic transits, which has a knock-on effect of less noise. In 2017, the Dutch shipping giant Maersk retrofitted cargoships to reduce fuel consumption and reduce emissions, and discovered that the upgrades also made the ships a lot quieter. A growing number of ports are experimenting with voluntary slow-zones in environmentally sensitive waters near the coast, and using monetary incentives to spur greener shipping that includes noise reduction.

A few years ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council made a short film about the worsening underwater noise problem, called The Sonic Sea (free trailer below, but it’ll cost a few dollars to watch the whole film).

Nature is Listening

Every species is affected by noise in different ways and at different times (when hunting, migrating, mating, and raising young, for instance), which means solutions can’t be one-size-fits-all and will require more research from the comparatively young field of sensory ecology.

Meanwhile, sensory ecologists have created new ways to guage the health of ecosystems by listening for things like earlier bird migrations or a sudden drop off in vocalizations from keystone species. Some scientists have started using AI to track the health of coral reefs by analyzing recordings of the teeming fish and snapping shrimp that call the reefs home and keep it thriving—or don’t when a reef is dying.

What’s more, these soundscapes actually help keep a reef healthy, because both baby reef fish and coral polyps start their lives in open ocean and find their way to a reef home partly by listening for it. In fact, a group of scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has had some success reviving sick reefs by playing recordings of healthy reefs to lure back the species essential to ecosystem function. Here’s a short NPR story about this work based on a 2024 study (linked above):

What’s In It For Us?

Along with understanding the importance of nature’s sounds to ecosystem health, there’s mounting evidence that listening to nature benefits us humans, too. It’s well established that spending time in nature improves mental and physical health. For more than a decade, nonprofit networks of healthcare providers and park agencies have promoted “Parks Prescriptions” for a wide variety of ailments.

But, if nature is a wonder drug, what are its active ingredients? Comparatively little research has dug into the sensory components of parks prescriptions. For instance, how much of the benefit from a woodsy stroll depends on the excercise, the visual immersion, the nature listening, or the antimicrobial chemical compounds wafting from trees that we breathe in as we walk? More to the point of this newsletter, how much of the benefit might be lost if nature’s sounds were overwhelmed by noise?

One researcher trying to sort this out is Alex Smalley, and environmental psychologist with the European Centre for Environment and Human Health. While a doctoral student at the University of Exeter, Smalley led a Virtual Nature project to measure the health and wellbeing impacts of different virtual-reality nature experiences, with the goal of creating restorative environments for people who could not get themselves to real nature, such as people with disabilities or confined to hospitals.

Here is a video about the work (I had trouble embedding directly. Click the image, and the video will pop up in a new window):

Meanwhile, a handful of researchers have zeroed in on nature’s greatest acoustic hits—water and birdsong. The rush of rivers and other natural water sounds have largely been studied for their capacity to shield us from stressful sonic intrusions. Breaking waves, for instance, can transform annoying traffic noise into something people find neutral or even pleasant, according to Swedish researchers.

A 2022 study by environmental neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin found that listening to birds for several minutes reduced reported levels of anxiety, while listening to the same decibel levels of traffic noise led to spikes in depressive symptoms. And in a November 2024 study, researchers from the University of West England, found that people listening to a recorded “dawn chorus” of birdsong subsequently reported lower levels of stress and anxiety, whereas stress and anxiety rose in subjects who listened to the same birds overlaid with traffic noise. The stress and anxiety worsened when the noise was from faster-moving (noisier) traffic.

It’s a catch-22. The more people value time in nature, the more noise (and other pollution) they bring—from roads to snowmobiles to those bluetooth speakers blasting hikers’ playlists.

About a decade ago, the park managers of Muir Woods National Monument (a forest of towering, old-growth redwoods just north of San Francisco) wondered if noise from the growing crowds of visitors not only harmed the local birdlife (including endangered spotted owls) but also degraded the experience of these human visitors.

After some initial research indicated that visitors would welcome a more hushed experience walking among the awe-inspiring trees, park managers tested out “quiet please” signs that were made permanent when they not only reduced decibels, but consequently increased the audible birdsong, and received rave reviews in visitor exit surveys. (I snapped the photo of one such sign, which tops this section, during a visit to Muir Woods in the summer of 2024).

Wait…What?!

Acoustic Odds and Ends

• A November 2024 article in National Geographic covered a “quiet counterculture” brewing among young people eager to escape their growing inundation in audible and digital noise. It highlighted trends such as distraction-free “silent walking” spread via Tik Tok, the growth of quiet-oriented meetup groups such as Peace in the Wild, “silent yoga,” and “no-talking coffee shops.”

• Looking to create your own perfect soundcapes? Services such as Defonic and myNoise provide dashboards to create immersive, customizable soundtracks for your life—from the background hubub of a coffee shop to bamboo forests sounds to help you unwind after work to summer night sounds for relief from tinnitus.

• KFC is jumping into the ASMR game with audio of chicken simmering in oil to mimic rainfall and help people fall asleep.

• A research group out of Montreal is turning the brain signals of minimally responsive hospital patients into music in order to spot changes in patients’ consciousness after they’re engaged by “therapy clowns.” It’s really too much to explain in brief, so here’s a link to recent coverage of the research.

• Finally, it’s 2025! The countdown is on to the publication of Clamor, the book, on May 20. To celebrate, there’s a Goodreads Giveaway you can enter to win a free copy until February 13. Feel free to pass it on!

  

  Preorder Clamor (the book) Here

Thanks so much for reading CLAMOR! Please spread the word and subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Share Clamor

Welcome to CLAMOR, a newsletter about how noise took over the world and how we can take it back. This newsletter is an extension of my book with the same name, which will be published in May 2025 (and can be ordered here).

For too long, we’ve mismeasured and misunderstood noise, exacerbating the harm it causes to our hearing, our minds, our overall health, and our environment. By framing noise as a loudness problem and seeking quiet as the only solution, we’ve missed countless opportunities to not only prevent noise but to cultivate soundscapes that improve focus, reduce stress, and generally make our lives easier rather than harder.

WHY NOISE?

I’ve been a journalist for more than a quarter century, both as a staff editor at the Atlantic and Mother Jones and as a freelancer reporting on everything from unsolved murders to climate engineering to artificial intelligence in schools for publications such as the New York Times, Politico, Popular Science, the Washington Post, and Wired. I’ve always been drawn to issues with an inherent complexity that defies easy answers and black-and-white framing. Noise is one such issue that we’ve oversimplified much to our detriment.

While reporting my first noise article, for the Boston Globe Sunday magazine in 2018, the people I met who thought a lot about noise tended to fall into two camps—those who warned of a serious, growing, and overlooked public-health threat requiring stricter regulations, and those who felt noise concerns were mostly proxy battles for broader cultural conflicts and not really about sound at all.

Both sides made points but also seemed stuck in their respective ruts. One was constantly reactive and steeped in a culture of complaint. The other seemed to shrug at the notion that noise causes real harm to people and the planet. On the fringes, however, a third group was emerging that seemed to bridge the gap by taking sound seriously and not just noise. It was this new movement that inspired Clamor.

Researching the book, I encountered an eclectic mix of folks, including musicians, doctors, architects, ecologists, teachers, and activists, who think that noise is a big problem—maybe bigger than we realize—but also insist that sonic solutions can’t be judged by decibel counts alone.

Clamor pushes the boundaries of noise and calls for a more proactive and holistic approach, beyond whack-a-moling decibels, to not only mitigate noise harms but to understand sound as a potential ally for better health and wellbeing.

WHY THIS NEWSLETTER?

In short, I want to keep the conversation going. I’m a storyteller with insatiable curiosity. But no matter how doggedly I report and how many words I’m allotted, even for a book, I can never tell the whole story.

During the years I worked on Clamor, I left entire chapters on the editing room floor and killed countless darlings (as one must). The people, places, research, and stories featured in its chapters remained frozen in the time of my reporting. I hope the book will spark bigger discussions about noise and soundscapes of our daily lives, and my goal for the newsletter is to fuel those conversations with updates, new ideas, and fresh analysis.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Do NOT expect a barrage of complaints and grousing about personal noise annoyances. My goal is to highlight surprising noise news that hooks into broader issues ranging from preserving nature to creating healthier buildings. I’ll also post about people proactively using sound and soundscapes to improve the places we live, learn, and work—from hospitals to homes to schools. Along the way, I’ll recommend interesting listening, whether it’s a podcast like 20,000 Hertz “The Stories Behind the World’s Most Interesting and Recognizable Sounds” or snippets of sound from the surface of Mars (from https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/sounds-of-mars/)

Mindful of all the “noise” hitting your inboxes, we’ll start small, with well-curated monthly installments of intriguing noise news and sound stories that I hope you’ll enjoy and help shape as we go. The newsletter will be completely free for now, although I may start selling paid subscriptions at some point to sustain the work. In the meantime, please spread the word and be in touch with your comments and suggestions about sound and noise issues you’d like to see covered. Thank you so much for reading, and for listening

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