Why noise?

What is noise?

At a basic level, sound is vibrations; when a person perceives sounds, they are perceiving acoustic waves moving through a medium. If we’re talking about supposedly objective measures, sound becomes noise when it exceeds certain thresholds, measured in decibels; decibels don’t technically measure loudness, but a rise in decibels generally corresponds to a rise in perceived loudness. However, in everyday practice frequency, duration, and context all shape how an individual or group classifies some sounds as noise.

As sound moves through space, its meaning shifts. What was music may become noise or vice a versa. Noise is also often associated with ideas of social disorder or unruliness. One of the things I wrestled with in my dissertation, is the idea of noise as something produced by “others,” by people outside of oneself or one’s community, that threatens to invade or contaminate.

As a term, noise, or ruido in Spanish, is also used to describe many kinds of sound. Noise can describe residential sounds or nuisances, but is also applied to sound from industrial production, and road or airplane traffic. In the latter cases, noise may be categorized as “environmental noise,” a potential pollutant, created by human activities, considered detrimental to human health, and generally quantified in decibels. Noise’s status as environmental contaminant versus nuisance seems rooted in its acknowledged potential to impact health; however, recognizing some forms of noise as pollution requires social and cultural work.

I mention all this to point out that the term noise, as generally used, can gloss over important differences in the quality, scale, and impact of different sound sources. However, the fact that noise can mean many things, and isn’t always clearly defined, also makes it a great subject for studying from a social and cultural perspective.

Why study noise? 

Noise is worth studying because it’s a topic that touches on fundamental questions about what it means to share space and live in proximity, and acceptable or desirable ways of doing so. It’s also important to study from a public health and environmental justice perspective.

There is evidence that noise can have negative impacts on auditory and non-auditory health, leading to annoyance and adverse health effects including stress, sleep disturbance, and cardiovascular disease. However, the impacts of exposure to residential and leisure sound are less well studied than exposure to noise from road traffic, planes, and trains. This may be because sounds from residential and leisure activities are often conceptualized as quality-of-life issues, rather than environmental or public health problems. That doesn’t mean these types of noise issues do not impact people’s lives. These types of noise conflicts within communities are also important because urban densification is likely to increase in the coming decades (MacCutcheon 2021): in parallel, noise, and noise conflicts, are also likely to increase.

I focused on noise in gentrifying areas and noise complaints among middle-class groups, but if we zoom out, noise is not a luxury issue: the health and quality of life impacts of noise are not limited to wealthier countries or groups. In fact, recent data suggests that the impacts of high noise levels (especially from industrial or other sources) are not evenly distributed across populations. For example, a study led by environmental epidemiologist Joan Casey found that noise pollution levels in the United States are higher in neighborhoods with larger Black, Asian, and/or Hispanic populations, as compared to neighborhoods with higher proportions of white residents (Casey et al. 2017) 

By dealing with noise challenges in non-exclusionary ways, policymakers and communities may be able to talk about and potentially change the underlying conditions which generate noise conflicts. Cities face many other pressing issues, including housing shortages, infrastructural decay, and the impacts of climate change, but noise is an issue that can and should be considered. Creating a city that is less noisy, particularly from traffic noise, could also be in line with important sustainability goals (Morillas et al. 2018). Addressing sound in cities may offer an opportunity to not only improve urban sonic environments, but to initiate needed conversations about city design, how shared spaces are used, and the relationships between residents, and between residents and government entities.