“Pollution pollution is the next big (and current) public health crisis,” chided one commenter. When The New Yorker recently proposed noise pollution as the next public-health crisis, the internet scoffed. There is no Michael Pollan of sound limiting your noise intake has none of the cachet of going paleo or doing a cleanse. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.Īs environmental hazards go, noise gets low billing. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. Noise is never just about sound it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. A man in Pennsylvania, said to have had no more trouble with the law than a traffic ticket, ambushed an upstairs couple with whom he’d had noise disputes, shooting them and then himself, and leaving behind a sticky note that read, “Can only be provoked so long before exploding.” There’s the man accused of threatening his noisy neighbors with a gun, the man who shot a middle-school coach after they quarreled over noise, the man who fired on a mother and daughter after griping about sounds from their apartment, the man who killed his roommate after a futile request that he “quiet down,” and the woman who shot at a neighbor after being asked to turn down her music-all since the beginning of this year. In New York City, a former tour-bus driver fed up with noisy parties across the hall allegedly sought help from a hit man. After repeated attempts to quiet his raucous neighbor, a Fort Worth, Texas, father of two, perturbed by loud music at 2 a.m., called the police, who came, left, and returned less than an hour later, after the man had allegedly shot his neighbor three times-an incident not to be confused with the time a Houston man interrupted his neighbor’s late-night party and, after a showdown over noise, shot and killed the host. Noise-or what the professionals call a “very dynamic acoustic environment”-can still provoke people to murderous extremes, especially when the emitter disturbs the receiver at home. The 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh recounts how one of the gods, unable to sleep through humanity’s racket and presumably a little cranky, opts “to exterminate mankind.” The earliest noise complaint in history also concerns a bad night’s sleep. He wrote in a text message that he felt as though someone was launching “an acoustic attack” on his home.įrom April 2019: James Fallows on leaf blowers and activism As the months passed, he felt like he was in a war zone. He sensed it coming from everywhere at once. The noise hummed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like a mosquito buzzing in his ear, only louder and more persistent. Each night, he’d will himself to sleep, ears plugged and head bandaged, but he could feel the whine in his bones, feel himself getting panicky as it droned on and on and on and on and on. When that still wasn’t enough, he moved into the guest room, where the hum seemed slightly fainter. ![]() When that didn’t help, he also tied a towel around his head. “That was when I started getting concerned,” he observed later. He got up to shut the window, but that made no difference at all. He had just closed his eyes to go to sleep one night when he heard it: EHHNNNNNNNN. The Brittany Heights neighborhood in Chandler, Arizona (Cassidy Araiza) Where was it coming from? Would it stop? Would it get worse? He started spending more time inside. It was aggravating, and he felt mounting anxiety every day it continued. But whenever he went out to cook or read, there was that damn whine-on the weekends, in the afternoon, late into the night. ![]() Thallikar had installed a firepit and Adirondack chairs in his backyard. This being Arizona, Thallikar and his neighbors rewarded themselves for surviving the punishing summers by spending mild winter evenings outside: grilling, reading, napping around plunge pools, dining under the twinkle of string lights. In early 2015, Thallikar discovered that the hum had followed him home. The whine became a constant, annoying soundtrack to his walks.Īnd then it spread. Evening after evening, he realized, the sound was there-every night, on every street. ![]() Just one single, persistent note: EHHNNNNNNNN. It sounded a bit like warped music from some far-off party, but there was no thump or rhythm to the sound. On another walk a few days later, he heard it again. It was during one of these strolls that Thallikar first became aware of a low, monotone hum, like a blender whirring somewhere in the distance. In the evenings, after work, Thallikar liked to decompress by taking long walks around Brittany Heights, following Musket Way to Carriage Lane to Marlin Drive almost as far as the San Palacio and Clemente Ranch housing developments. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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