I’m sitting in the breakfast area of a middle quality hotel, and the amount of noise is remarkable. I don’t mean the volume. According to an app on my phone, the noise level is around 60db—nothing unusual.
It’s the quality or sources of the noise that prompt some reflection. It’s mostly electronic. There are the obvious healthy human sounds: quiet conversation; the mother walking her child through the buffet as she reads the label on each item; utensils clanking against dishes. But there’s also background music played by the hotel, the sound from a giant TV playing some morning show nobody’s watching, and then the sound from several different cellphones where people are watching loud video, oblivious to the fact that they’re in a shared space.
I want to write something longer about this. It’s a great fractal illustration of something that ails our modern society. Noise pollution is just that: it’s something created by humans that spreads out, creating negative effects on people far beyond those who created it.
We’re mostly unaware of both how pervasive noise has become and its negative effects on our emotional and cognitive health. And we’ve failed to develop (or failed to maintain?) any ethic or set of manners guiding the artificial noise we create and propagate in shared spaces.
Interestingly, we do have such rules for natural human noises. We generally recognize when we’re talking to loudly in a public setting and regulate our volume accordingly. We shush our children in restaurants or hotels when we anticipate their sounds disturbing other patrons. And we offer judgmental sidelong glances at those who don’t.
Why don’t we recognize the impact our artificial noise has on an environment?