Why Noise Pollution Is More Dangerous Than We Think | The Backstory | The New Yorker

a pair of musicians here plugs silicon ear plugs sleep buds pluggers earphones when all else fails these are hearing

aids I'm not really quite ready for yet but but I have a couple of years ago I wrote an article about hearing loss I have a connection with hearing loss my

grandmother when she was a young woman a suitor took her hunting in a boat and rested his shotgun on her shoulder and

fired deafened her for the rest of her life the more I learned about it the more I was amazed not only how hearing works but also that

I could still hear at all given all the bad things that I'd done to my ears through my especially a mile essence you know all the firecrackers to my friends and I salute each other all the rock concerts that we went to all the lawns

that I mowed without any kind of hearing protection it's phenomenal given that we evolved in a completely different sound environment it's astonishing than our ears anybody's ears work at all

[Laughter] people who live in New York live surrounded by sound you walk down the street there's a siren going by they're

idiots honking at people who cannot be affected by it there's somebody with a jackhammer tearing up the street right next to you they're people playing music super loud

we all kind of think of this you walk down the street this is part of what makes New York cool but less Blomberg a founder the noise pollution Clearing House he said to me that if we could see

the sound that we generate it would look like litter it's as though we were driving through the countryside throwing things out of the car these noises both

individually and cumulatively have health impacts I went to see a group in Paris that measures the noise pollution

in the Greater Paris Area one of the things they found is that the loudest areas are on the transportation paths so roadways train lines in the flight paths

of airports people who live in those places have a significantly higher incidence of a long list of diseases diabetes heart disease high blood

pressure sleeping problems birth related problems inability to pay attention at work health consequences life quality consequences that arise just from from

being exposed to noise the people in Paris and the World Health Organization have estimates of how much life is actually lost as a result to sound and

it's measured in years and so if you live in a noisy area it actually has an impact on longevity in the 1970s up in Inwood and the northern part of Manhattan there's a

elevated train track that's within a couple of hundred feet at the school and it bothers the students they can't study students on the side of the building

that was closest to the tracks by sixth grade were almost a full year behind students on the quieter side of the building in terms of their reading ability every few minutes the teacher

would have to stop for 30 seconds because the Train was so loud that the students couldn't hear her Transit Authority eventually installed rubber pads between the the rails the school put acoustic sound absorbing

acoustic tiles and the ceilings of the classroom and remarkably the reading scores then rose against it where they were the same on both sides of the

building the world before we came along it was a much quieter much darker place now over a relatively short period of time basically since the Industrial

Revolution we've added these extraordinary stressors to ourselves and then also to all them other creatures in the world the number of years ago a group of scientists in

Idaho did an experiment on birds during migration season they played road noise

through loudspeakers the road is about 700 meters long and it's made out of 15 different speakers that are all playing road noise at the same time and what

they found was that it had a huge impact the number of birds cell by a significant percentage and that even among birds that stayed they put on less weight than they should have been at that time of season and it wasn't even a

very loud sound level I think to a New Yorker it might almost have sounded soothing where we have an even bigger impact on wildlife is under the water

where we can't see it in the oceans creatures that live underwater they depend on their hearing they can hear for hundreds hundreds of miles so sound can play a much more important

part for them than it does for humans there was a scientific study in Canada where scientists were measuring levels of stress hormones in a whale poop they had trained dogs that could sniff whale

poop over the side of a boat and they were collecting it what they found was that there was a sudden dramatic drop in the levels of stress hormones in whale

poop it dropped and then it picked up again and what had happened in between was 911 the world got very quiet the ocean shipping halted the noise levels in the

ocean dropped and when that human generated noise was gone stress levels in those creatures fell the stress levels that they had been measuring was not normal for those creatures it was

something that was caused by human sound generated under the sea sound that we're not even aware of the sound of ships going overhead - ordinarily I'm not even aware

of airplanes flying overhead and the week after 9/11 I said like it is really quiet what's different and realized that air traffic had been halted and so this

sound that I had never really consciously noticed before as soon as it was gone I realized how significant it

had been one difficulty who had sound once you decide to regulate it is how you do it New York City has an immense sound

ordinance was the city suddenly quieter than it was a decade ago 20 years ago it's very hard to enforce even strict

requirements the police have to be trained in acoustics and they have to be equipped with devices that enable them to the world and they are they they have

to care enough to actually do it there's some researchers at NYU in a program called sonic s Oh NYC they're measuring sound levels in New York they have some sensors that they placed

around in various places in the city and they're adding more with help from citizen scientists you can even go

online and participate they're training algorithms to identify sound sources so their hope eventually is to have a

system that monitors sound levels in New York it can detect when sound levels are higher than are supposed to be allowed

and they can identify exactly what the source is by having having trained this algorithm to know the difference between

a jackhammer and a police siren when I was in Paris one of the researchers that I was talking to he said a single person on a motorcycle in the middle of the night riding across Paris can wake up

thousands of people he is one person on one device at one moment in the night has this effect on thousands of people they all wake up maybe they can't go

back to sleep they're not able to pay attention as well at work the next day or at school the next day so just this one little act a careless act has consequences we think in terms of air

pollution water pollution we don't think of these less tangible impacts that we have but sound is one of them and loud sound doesn't affect just us it also

affects other living things [Music] you