Land of Oz

Noise

Here's an article about people complaining about noise. While mostly about the noise from an iPod's earphones, it also touches on iPod listeners singing along with their iPod. The following quote is what really got to me:

"Did anyone ever complain about the noise coming from a Walkman or a CD player?" he [Leander Kahney, managing editor of Wired magazine's Web site] said. "Unless you're in a quiet environment, you're really gonna have to strain to hear any kind of noise from somebody else's iPod."

Our world, he said, has become freakishly quiet. "It's not noise pollution — it's noise absence. And I find it almost more disturbing and upsetting than I did loud noise. It's sort of unnatural."

Where on earth does this guy live? I live in what I've considered a relatively quiet residential neighborhood, but it is still filled with loud speeding vehicles with bad exhausts, cars with audio units that you can hear blocks away with that annoying boing-rattle of cheap bass speaker units. Not to mention year-round and round-the-clock sirens, helicopters and fireworks. There's the one idiot neighbor who warms his loud car up every cold morning at 7:15 - 7:30 a.m. and another one who never fails to honk his horn, not once of course, for his ride pickup at 6 a.m. And did I mention the next door neighbor with their garage band and the house on the other side of the block that like to entertain the entire block with their musical racket? For awhile, people in the next block were calling the police to complain about the noise level from the house next door to me. Thankfully, one of house inhabitants got hauled off in an ambulance last year (disposition unknown) and it's been relatively (only loud a couple times a month at 2 a.m. now) quiet ever since.

I sit in my cubicle at work and listen to the ever-present growl of the air handling system, loud chattering employees in the next aisle and people holding conference calls with her speaker phone two cubicles away. And when the growl of the air conditioning dies, as it too often does, the apparent level of chatter and noise goes up a couple more notches.

I guess Wired magazine must have some special high-tech quiet zone that Mr. Kahney lives in, because I sure haven't noticed it. Yes, today there isn't the clump of horses hooves, or the rattle of milk cans in the morning and the train tracks a block away were removed several years ago. The growls of bears and howls of wolves have also gone away as well as the steam boats on the river and the clang of the street car three blocks away. But somehow, I don't think they added up to one addled adolescent with a 300 watt stereo system and 15 inch speakers in their car.

Labels: apple, driving, gripes, tech