Take Down The Volume

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday October 20, 2005

Wendy Champagne

Constant and excessive noise has both a physical and mental cost, writes Wendy Champagne.

Who hasn't gone out for a chat and a few drinks with friends on a Friday night and had to compete with blaring music, roaring extractor fans and bellowing voices?

Silence, like clean water, is fast becoming an endangered resource in urban areas, where we cannot hear ourselves think much of the time. Our "natural" soundscapes -birdsong, animal noises and people sounds - are being lost in the drone of freeway traffic, industrial white noise, car alarms, leaf blowers, aircraft and the mutter of a million TVs.

The noise-saturated environment has forced some people to seek silence: we now have "quiet rooms" in some office buildings and we take silent holidays at yoga retreats.

There are even Quiet Parties - the brainchild of New Yorkers Paul Rebhan and Tony Noe who, in response to the lack of quiet in their neighbourhood bars, created events where people could meet socially and preserve the peace by exchanging handwritten notes instead of talking.

Many of us live with such high noise levels it is making us sick. Noise-related symptoms range from irritation, headaches, insomnia, stress, flu, fatigue, changes in blood pressure and learning disabilities in children to partial or complete deafness.

Warwick Williams, senior researcher at the National Acoustic Laboratory, the research arm of Australian Hearing, says hearing injury is a health issue that is only just starting to be taken seriously in Australia.

Being exposed eight hours a day to noise above 85 decibels - a bit louder than a vacuum cleaner - is considered dangerous to hearing and may lead to what Williams describes as the "bloodless, hidden handicap" of deafness.

He recently conducted a survey of personal music system users outside Flinders Street Station in Melbourne and the Sydney's Town Hall, and found 25 per cent of people he sampled were risking overexposure to noise.

"You need recovery time from noise," says Williams, who uses the analogy that overexposure to noise is like training too hard for a triathlon - you get overuse injury. "If you are exposed to too much noise or live with noise all the time, in the end it will wear you out."

The European Commission has dedicated a lot of resources to its Noise Pollution Health Effects Reduction program. It estimates that about a quarter of its population of 460 million is exposed to noise levels high enough to have serious health consequences; 10 million people are exposed to ambient noise levels that can lead to hearing loss; and 30 million are exposed to occupational noise that endangers their hearing.

The terrible irony of noise injury, or noise-related hearing loss, is that it is often associated with tinnitus - so even while we lose the ability to hear external sounds, inside our head there can be constant ringing or buzzing.

Williams says noise exposure is like sun exposure: it is cumulative. Over a period of time the effects build up and won't go away. He says: "The louder the sound, the less exposure is needed to reach the maximum safe 'dosage' of sound per day."

Despite the fact that many of us live with irritating, even hazardous, noise, silence is not always welcome. We come home from work to an empty house and immediately turn on the TV. We rarely share silence with friends and it is not uncommon for us to avoid the gaps in conversation by finishing other people's sentences for them.

In a classic example, the BBC cut 12 seconds out of an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, when he asked for time to consider his answer to a question about the morality of the Iraq War.

"We are hearing the soundscape constantly, but are we listening?" asks Nigel Frayne, chair of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. "The less we listen, the less we are aware, and the less we know about how to listen."

Acoustic ecology is an emerging field of study that began in Canada in the late 1960s with a composer, author and professor of communication studies at Simon Fraser University, Murray Schafer.

Today, acoustic ecology attracts musicians, psychologists, sound designers, health practitioners and environmentalists who are interested and concerned about the interaction between humans and all living organisms and aural environments or soundscapes.

In his book The Tuning of the World, Schafer makes the case that our listening skills have been eroded through the dominance of what some people refer to as the "eye culture". He has also suggested that we use sound as an "audio-analgesic" to block out thoughts and emotions.

In contrast, says Albert Mehrabian, professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA, "being quiet forces you to think, to look at yourself, to look at where you have been and where you are going".

Says Frayne: "It seems to me we need to experience it [silence] more often and thereby learn how to appreciate and cope with it. When you talk you can't listen - and people talk an awful lot."

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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