I love being in the woods / fields / lakes. Fishing, hunting, hiking, etc. when you’re out there for a while you realize how much noise there really is. I wish everyone could / would take a few days a month and just spend it in the the natural world.
I feel revived after spending a day or two listening to the leaves blowing. As some have pointed out here, going back to civilization is hard. The noise doesn’t necessarily bother me on a conscious level, but it eats my focus and drains me throughout the day. Almost creating a tension, just from the constant sounds and being alert.
https://sites.warnercnr.colostate.edu/soundandlightecologyte...
> The Colorado State University Listening Lab was established in 2013 as a collaboration with the Natural Sounds & Night Skies Division of the National Park Service. The primary goal of the lab is to aid in the preservation and understanding of natural soundscapes by providing a resource to efficiently analyze the thousands of hours of acoustic data collected each year within parks, allowing park officials and scientists to promptly employ effective soundscape management decisions where needed.
> The lab typically employs 5 to 10 well-trained undergraduate student listeners to analyze the acoustic data that our NPS Scientists & Research Associates record within national parks around the country. Many of our student listeners are also enrolled in the University Honors Program and use their time in the lab to complete their honors theses. These students have moved beyond basic data analysis and have explored how noise affects the natural world to produce the following theses:
Also, there are fewer places where you hear no car noises or planes at all.
We can do something about it, but it takes work.
I don’t think there’s a limitation on places that are relatively silent. In other words, you can get a relatively silent world even 30 min for nearly every place on this map.
That said, I support forest preserves and places like the boundary waters
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters
Where they intentionally create preserves with no motors or human civilization.
I’ll also mention the decline in bird populations also startled me. For much of my life I went to the woods and heard so many birds. Even in the past few years I’ve notified the rapid decline.
That said, I always try to put it in perspective. 100% of the trees, grass, birds, bugs, etc in North America only came around the last 10,000 - 20,000 years. I’m not sure what is causing no the bird decline (I suspect it’s pesticides, with the protective agencies not regulating effectively or invasive species such as cats). I’m sure natural will adapt to fill the niche, but it’s definitely different.
It's because you are healthy. After an indigestion of artificial noise, even natural noise becomes an issue, unbearable. If you "break" after the "artificial" (more, "unnatural"), you will be compromised for the natural.
https://maps.dot.gov/BTS/NationalTransportationNoiseMap/
Also for those interested in the data side: https://data-usdot.opendata.arcgis.com/
Also interesting things like Whiteman AFB, from the recent stealth bomber post, shows nothing.
There are even audio recordings on the website which indicate the area is actually far from “silent”, but perhaps as close as possible to being absent if any sounds of human civilization.
It really is something to turn off your car, walk to a good spot, and feel for a moment like you might be the last person on Earth.
Can be unhealthy. Earmuffs seem to be as effective and, while you can still get damaged (risk of suction), it's difficult.
Issue: earplugs and earmuffs are designed to reduce noise, not to cancel it - to facilitate that you don't get damage from a bang but can still faintly but clearly hear your colleague calling "watch out". And, reduction in background noise amplifies the impactive - not in absolute but in relative amplitude, not in vibrational strength but in presence.
However, active earmuffs are amazing. I had my favorite pair finally give out, they had FM radio and an aux jack, but we're not active. It was fun to run a chipper and listen to a podcast, for instance.
For things I want hearing protection I have 4 choices now. The industry standard earplugs, which are foam that you roll and insert - Howard Leight, passive cans style muffs - generic, generic aviator style muffs with active microphones, and a fancy pair of Howard Leight active muffs.
The active ones are amazing. I can't believe I waited so long.
I live someplace so quiet now that I have to run fans or I can't sleep. The silence feels like a huge weight. When there's a widespread power outage I barely get any sleep, for example. I don't know that I could ever live near a thoroughfare ever again, for any amount of money.
In the open spaces, one single source can pollute for even ten kilometers or five miles of distance, and more. The added effects of natural acoustics can be worsening - barkings bouncing in the echo from valley to valley, starting in front and returning behind etc.
> The trend is higher sound levels in wetter areas with more vegetation. This is due to the sounds of wind blowing through vegetation, flowing water, and more animals (especially birds and frogs) vocalizing in more fertile locations.
Luckily, my tinnitus is noisier than both, so it doesn't matter where I live. I can't tell the difference.
What natural sources are so loud?
The tires are like nails on a chalkboard to me after living that way for a 5 years. It cut through my apartment walls and morning rush hour served as a mandatory alarm clock.
The only time engines were an issue were people with modded exhaust or people street racing (motorcycles or cars).
Cars are the biggest source of pollution in US cities, noise, particulate and visual. The early days of the pandemic in almost any city showed this so clearly.
Video is specifically the claim that cities CAN be quiet, and it gives examples of quiet, dense cities. The title is "Cities aren't loud, cars are loud."
Watch it. You will learn something.
Also it would be interesting to see outliers - what areas don’t scale with population as much and why (policies, etc)?
Ah, well.
They used to have a better map but it looks like it was replaced with this one:
I guess Alaska didn’t make the cut.
The woods and their quiet are never far away here. While cross country skiing, I often stop to listen to the wind and take in the mountains. After living in a metropolis where noise was a constant, I appreciate the peace and calm of nature, far from cars and planes and other human noise-makers.
I live in one of the quietest places available in the southeast. When I got into towns the pressure of the people sounds is noticeable. Even if Im there early when its actually quiet and everybody's asleep, its a different environment where your heartbeat echos too loud and the mice move quietly instead of rustling the leaves.
Its not that quiet in the woods, as others have said, its just a different set of noises and a different feel and extent to how they propagate. My wife can't tell a difference between the coyotes singing close to us or a mile away down the valley.
With the exception of the pine plantations. Big patches of pine can get spooky quiet; they muffle sound well, coat the ground with needles that dont say much, and few things really party there. Woodpeckers punctuate the afternoon.
They're doing construction on a bunch of new houses closer to the base. The planes fly lower than 1000 feet there. Part of the new development's area is deemed uninhabitable because of the bases noise study. So they put commercial developments (restaurants, shops, etc.) in that area.
I don't want to sound like a NIMBY, and I think building housing is more important, but it was interesting seeing how sound studies and regulation works. Also looking to see if the future residents will be complaining about the noise.
I will say though after living in the middle of the desert for the better part of a decade the silence (more mental / social than literal) did start to make me crazy. Not like manic or anxious crazy but more out of sync with the world of the living and the bearing on time. It was tempting but luckily I needed to find more stable work.
Oddly now that I'm back in a dense urban area its quieter in a lot of ways too in terms of barking dogs and generally loud neighbors. Much denser but different etiquette maybe. Its an interesting phenomena that Ive observed pretty consistently.
That said the comments here seem to be more centered on wilderness silence not urban vs rural silence. But it got me thinking.
https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/p/d/b00037383/
I just like _quiet_ and there are so many things around that make noise.
> Also, it is not feasible for NSNSD to collect samples at all park sites within a reasonable time. Therefore, NSNSD created a geospatial model that predicts soundscapes in parks across the nation.
Doesn’t that defeat the intent of measuring?
I happily grew up in the 80s in a place (communist Poland, so rather small car ownership) with very little artificial noise, but that is gone now.
How was it hundreds of years ago?
Even in our relatively quiet city life (no heavy industry) people already seem adapted that they have trouble sleeping in our country side where it is relatively dark and quiet.
On the other hand, a place I currently live in, almost no one keeps horses, cows, chickens etc, anymore, which are audible. Only a handful of dogs which love to bark. When every household was a private farm it had to be much louder around here! It's not as simple as I thought.
I spent a week in Helsinki, and was blown away by how quiet it was despite being far more dense than my city.
Cities aren't Loud, Cars are Loud.
Most "cities" in North America, to use the term generously, are miserable car sewers where you need to shout to have a conversation outside.
The motor sound isn't anything near quiet. Far from it. But I was astounded to find a button that enables a loud motor sound function.
With this button pressed the sound makes a lot of bikes sound like child toys. I really don't understand how one needs to show off in such a fashion and explicitly expressing a loud (pun intended) f** you to the rest of the world.
All I'm saying is, I kinda commiserate with the guy in that story.
Europe in general seems to have far less of that particular kind of jackassery. Better enforcement? Or are people just more considerate?
ugh
Its pretty much the only reason why I think dense living is a bad idea. People are are to inconsiderate of each other to make it work I think and construction quality is too low. I hate being subjected to other people's noise. I'm a light slight sleeper so it wakes me up or it makes it hard to concentrate or even just relax. I don't want to live on some strangers schedule.
I can go on forever with a huge rant about how terrible noise is. I hate dealing with it. Talking to every person who is just way to loud is like whack a mole with noise.
You can have quiet and soundproofed dense living. It just takes some standards and codes to take it into account.
NotJustBikes recently made a video about how some Dutch cities are taking this very seriously ( like Delft), and how it works ( Cities aren't loud, cars are is the video name). In France good soundproofing is mandatory on new constructions, etc. People and regulators just need to care :)
Construction can be annoying and I once lived next door to a tire shop and that was pretty bad, but even things like fireworks don't bother me.
I've lived in nature and on a farm before as well and both are pretty loud. Animals are loud and on the farm chickens, cows and geese can rival and humans noise or music. In nature bird noises are pretty crazy too and the coyotes will wake the dead from about 2-5am.
It’s a classic example of a commons. It’s something that benefits everyone, yet is SO easy to wreck for everyone for miles in every direction. There’s a classic article “Silence is a Commons” that has been posted here before; it’s not so much focused on health/wellbeing but makes a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431541
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions."
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922
...my city is unfortunately not one of them.
We live on a main road (although it's all relative, it's single lane in both directions and limited to 30mph) and i've already started noticing that the majority of what I hear is now tyre noise.
What do you mean by this? Got any links handy?
Not really. There do exist very noisy countrysides, mountainous areas etc. (Still often because of infrastructure or uncaring dwellers.)
As you move North the winter storms get more and more fierce. You have to go pretty far inland (Portland or Puget Sound) to reach calm waters and a low enough wind speed to hold down construction costs for tall buildings.
The closest thing to an exception is Grays Harbor, which is topographically equivalent to the SF Bay but extremely shallow -- much too shallow for container ships. They have to dredge it every few years just to get the ag/lumber/automobile ships into the port.
I live in a small town in Canada and I can travel outside the town just a few minutes and be in rural area. Although it's getting increasingly longer to get outside sprawl.
When I am there I often think to myself how quiet it is. At times it feels like my skull is going to collapse from the negative pressure of lack of sound.
And where I live near (~500m) the main hospital it seems to be with the increase in population comes an increase in ambulances. They at times seem to be constant on weekends or warm sunny days. Plus the emergency life flight helicopter. Maybe that's why the silence of rural areas is such a contrast to me.
Im skeptical of sound proofing actually working. I think to actually sound proof you need an airgap between walls? This is all really expensive too
But that only stops some sound. If its warm and you need to open your windows all of that effort doesnt matter. Your just stuck hoping you don't have loud neighbors. Right now my neighbor is practicing their saxophone, its loud and grating (and not well played) everyone's windows are open the weather is mild so im stuck listening to it
Sorry, I was tired. I meant to write that mass is phono-insulant (stops the passage of noise), not phono-absorbent (would not reflect noise).
https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/eu-commission-euro-7...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards
And there's been plenty in the automotive press saying how it will negatively affect the car manufacturers, e.g:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry-news-tech%2C-dev...
This is why it is useful for cars to make sounds. It also is the reason why that sound is so annoying. It is a constant trigger for our brains to react.
Good thing the end of those is in sight.
Those maps are generated by publicly available data (traffic, railway schedules, etc). In the case of airports/airbases, the data are generated with radar flight tracks. Military flight track data are often redacted (presumably because they can leak aircraft performance data) so it's not surprising that modeled noise from stealth aircraft was not calculated.
A soundwave is coming, you intake it with a microphone and attempt producing its inversion in real time in speakers, to cancel it.
As I have written, it may not work properly with impactive noise - it can do the opposite, because the impactive sound is cleaner. Or, it may be calibrated for impactive noise - so there exist earmuffs that recognize shooting sounds at their inception, to reduce these selectively.
As an aside, since your ears are not ringing / recovering from a very loud sound, and the amplifier turns back on very quickly, you can hear the reverberations, echos, and sympathetic resonances. It's quite cool.
Some how I can deal with fireworks too though i would be pretty irritated if it happened every night and woke me up or something. Loud music drives me crazy, especially if its not music I enjoy. Bass particularly is bad, i struggle to drown it out with noise. I had a neighbor who I guess wanted to dj, the kick drum would go straight through the wall for hours. Cars that drive by with loud music or idle out side my window i found irritating.
Speaker phone conversations bother me, not sure why, i can usually tune out most regular conversations (except when its not in english?), but they also wake me up. Hearing muffled conversation through a wall is distracting. Loud tvs suck. Children screaming is terrible, babies crying etc.. My downstairs neighbor wakes me up when they start yelling at each other at 7am. Closing doors or cabinets or walking is mostly fine for me.
I guess no unnecessary or sudden, loud, repeated noise would be great. Like a car alarm or a child screaming for no reason. I'm not totally sure what the pattern is or what a tolerable noise is or bad noise is. Crickets are nice, i had no problem when i lived next to a lake with frogs or in pr with coqui frogs. Construction is bad.
Plenty of music people think to treat their rooms with the usual foam on the walls, but not everyone thinks (or cares) to treat it with bass traps.
It works! ;)
I guess the weather comparison trope is based on New York and places that it snows a lot, but so much of the US has a far better climate than the west coast.
Where I am it never ever gets hot and it gets below freezing maybe two or three nights a year. When it's warm it's never humid (dry summers) and the only time it's humid is when it rains, which happens pretty much all winter. I kinda like that. Nights are cool (55F or below) every night, even in the middle of summer, which makes for comfortable sleeping.
The main downside IMO is the short days in the winter, but that's really latitude rather than weather.
Just wondering, have you lived anywhere with a different climate?
Really, do they have to? They can't just give it a little throttle to get it moving, they have to open it all the way unsettling the whole neighborhood with the exhaust noise when it's otherwise quiet and there are few cars?
As a motorcyclist, I'm firmly in the camp about quiet, stock pipes.
If I was dictator, I would impound and destroy any vehicle that was too loud.
Worse is booming bass. Not while driving, but at home from the neighbors. Hours on end... boom... boom...
I've been told the number of people driving with loud exhaust is a function of how close you are to the nearest meth house. This is after adjusting the data for level of travel a given road or nearby road
I live near a school (equivalent to middle as well as high school). The rest is a purely residential area.
I feel that living near a school in the morning with mommy driving little Kevin to school in big SUV and little Kevin's older brother revving his engine as much as he can with his car comes probably somewhat close.