Tuning out the noise
This episode from a well-known podcast icon is, aptly, all about sound
Sonic Bubbles - Twenty Thousand Hertz
Format: Single episode
Year: 2021
Listen on: Apple Podcasts or Spotify
One of the most recent episodes of Twenty Thousand Hertz investigates the devices that shape the auditory landscape, taking the listener on a journey to the origins of white noise machines, nature recordings and noise-cancelling headphones.
“Technologies like these help us create our own personal sonic bubble,” says host Dallas Taylor.
Sonic bubbles offer us self-control through sound control, author and guest Mack Hagood explains: “They help us control our own attention, and the way we feel, by controlling what we hear.”
Hagood’s book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self Control, explores how humans use technology to control our sonic environments through what he has dubbed “orphic media”, the technologies that “generate a safe space through sound”.
Taylor takes the listener back to the 1920s, telling the story of science fiction writer Hugo Gernsback.
“Gernsback kept getting distracted while he was trying to work, so he invented a device that he called the Isolator. It was this huge, rounded helmet that completely covered your head. It had black eyes and looked like something out of a horror movie.”
The invention never quite caught on. But the world was opening up and the industrial revolution brought with it machinery and activity that made noise.
“Noise, which was sort of this industrial by-product, it was something you didn’t want, right? As the years went by, these noises kept piling up,” Hagood explains.
“We get these innovations like the jet airplane, the interstate highway system, the open-plan office – all of these things amplify and proliferate noise. But there weren’t just new sounds to avoid. There were also new sounds to enjoy,” Taylor adds.
“We got used to mediated sound like listening to records or talking on the telephone, or listening to the radio. As a result, people’s relationship to sound changes and we become these kinds of sonic consumers,” Hagood says.
Now people are not just trying to drown the noise out, but rather to modify, manipulate and get creative with the sounds we are exposed to.
“One of these innovations was the harnessing of white noise. White noise is made up of all of the possible frequencies that we humans can hear, at equal loudness, which is roughly 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. Just like white is all the different colours combined, white noise is sort of like all of these different frequencies combined,” says Hagood.
In the 1960s, a salesperson named Jim Buckwalter invented the first white noise machine. He was staying in a motel with his wife, and the room they had checked into had a broken air conditioner and the couple were struggling to sleep. “Not because they were too hot, but rather because there was a poker game going on in the next room and they couldn’t sleep because of the noise,” Hagood says.
His wife then said to him: “If that air conditioner was working, we’d be asleep right now. I bet you could invent something like that, to make that sound.” Which he did.
“His goal was to replicate the hum of an air conditioner, but without the air part. In other words, it would be a sound conditioner,” Taylor says. His invention, the Sleep-Mate, was an instant success.
“White noise is basically sound that’s covering all the possible sounds that your ears could hear,” Hagood explains.
“Our auditory systems have evolved over time to aid us and to protect us, and to be alert and ready for things. It was probably pretty useful when we were sleeping outdoors on the Savannah to be a light sleeper and be tuned into sounds that are happening out there. So, just because our physical circumstance has changed and we sleep in these quite safe houses, that doesn’t mean that our auditory systems have completely changed in that way.”
A few years later, Irv Teibel did something similar when he became the first person to record nature sounds and capitalise on it as a relaxation tool. Teibel called his records “applied psychology devices in recorded form”, claiming that they would “counteract the damaging effects of noise pollution and help users achieve alpha brainwave states of consciousness. They would help you read faster,” Hagood explains.
People bought into it at the time and, today, research has shown the benefits of nature sounds.
The next tool to control the sonic environment was invented by Amar Bose in 1978: noise-cancelling headphones. These cancel what we don’t want to hear and instead focus on the sounds we want to let in.
“As wearable technology continues to develop, these devices have the potential to totally reshape our relationship with the sonic world. Pretty soon, we could all be wearing a high-tech headset that filters out any noise we don’t want to hear,” Taylor says.
Hagood posits that perhaps we are too attached to the idea of control: “Do we always need to be in our own personalized sonic bubble, hearing precisely what we want? Or, do we want to have space and openness for happy accidents to hear things that we don’t even know we want?”