Daily Soundtrack or Immutable Boombox?
Teddy Wayne complains that the world has become filled with a cacophony of annoying sounds, many of them produced by mobile phones and tablets.
“Beyond an all-you- can-hear buffet of ring tones, there is the default whoosh and ding of text messaging; the click of typing; alarms that sound like analog clocks or tweets (of actual birds); the shutter click of the camera; and noises for a bevy of other functions and apps,” Mr. Wayne wrote in The Times. “Then, too, the racket on computers: the clatter of files being ‘tossed’ into the trash or recycle bin (and of being ‘emptied’), email alerts, start-up and shutdown chimes.”
The sounds of mobile games may have changed most over the last decade, according to Jean-Luc Cohen- Sinclair, an assistant professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston who has worked on games’ sound designs. They often have a percussive buildup of energy “like someone snapping their fingers,” he told The Times. “Everything is loud for games.”
Designers focus on the midrange frequency, which works best with earbuds, and it is louder, meaning if you are near someone wearing earbuds you can hear the sound too. Loud earbuds and headphones lead to hearing loss — the World Health Organization estimates that over one billion teenagers and young adults are at risk. And what do people do when their hearing starts to go? They turn up the volume, causing more harm.
The harm to American diplomats in Cuba, who began suffering from concussion-like symptoms last August, was originally attributed to sonic attacks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation ruled out that theory in January, but scientists are still trying to figure out what happened.
Dr. Douglas H. Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, said the patients’ symptoms were real. “It looked like concussion pathology,” he said. “Processing speed, inability to remember — those are such classic symptoms we see in concussion.”
Dr. Smith told The Times he was trying to uncover the mystery: “This is concussion without blunt head trauma.”
The mystery of the Windsor Hum — which sounds like idling trucks or distant thunder — has plagued that Canadian city near Detroit for years, damaging people’s health and quality of life, numerous residents complain.
Some compare the hum to diesel engines running next to your home or the pulsation of a subwoofer speaker, and there are reports of it rattling windows and spooking pets.
“You know how you hear of people who have gone out to secluded places to get away from certain sounds or noises and the like?” Sabrina Wiese wrote in a private Facebook group dedicated to finding the source of the noise.
“I’ve wanted to do that many times in the past year or so because it has gotten so bad,” she wrote. “Imagine having to flee all you know and love just to have a chance to hear nothing humming in your head for hours on end.”
Ms. Wiese may want to check out the remote islands off Maine’s coast. The number of them inhabited by people year-round is just 15 islands today, down from a high of about 300 a century ago.
Chris Hodgkins, 30, is a lobsterman who lives in the island town of Frenchboro (population 61), about 10 kilometers south of the summer tourist town of Bar Harbor. He spends the winter repairing his traps, painting his buoys and cleaning his ropes.
For Mr. Hodgkins, the downside of island life is how few young, single women seem to want to try it. But he revels in the stillness. “Have you ever heard the absolute silence?” he asked.
If the noise is too much, go where the people aren’t.