August 29, 2005

Urban Racket and the Quest for Quiet

By Daniel Porras
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

To walk around San Francisco is to swim through torrents of sound waves. Grinding bus brakes, blasting horns, growling garbage trucks, screeching cell phones, loose metal manhole covers slapping the ground as diesel trucks thunder over them. Cities, with their hard surfaces and right angles, are amphitheaters of industrial-age noise.

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), prolonged exposure to more than 85 ‘unit A’ weighted decibels (dBA) – the standard unit of sound measurement – is hazardous to hearing. The Grand Canyon at night with no wind or birds, according to the National Institutes of Health, measures about 10 dBA. Inside my downtown studio apartment with the whir of an electric fan that partially drowns out the noise of my neighbors’ lives, the ambient sound level is 50 dBA.

To measure the sonic assault my tympanic membranes endure on a normal day in our cacophonous city, I take to the streets. Armed with a $49 Radio Shack sound level meter, I walk down Bush Street, where the traffic streams by at an average of 70 dBA, to Powell, where the bell of a passing cable car causes a spike of 85 dBA - 15 dBA above the traffic din. According to San Francisco’s noise ordinance, which deals mainly with noise that crosses private property lines, any sound that exceeds the ambient noise level by 5 dBA is ‘unnecessary, excessive, or offensive noise’. I’m in a public space, however, where Lori’s Diner can freely pour 1950s rock hits from outdoor speakers onto the sidewalk at 83 dBA. Standing under the speakers amid the bustle of lower Powell Street, I’m completely awash in noise.

Shattered Soundscape
“Noise is to the soundscape just as litter is to the landscape,” says Les Blomberg, Executive Director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, based in Vermont. Blomberg says noise is a global health problem that’s increased dramatically in the last one hundred years, first with the diffusion of the internal combustion engine and then with the spread of electricity, which made possible such raucous technologies as amplifiers, speakers, sirens, boom boxes, and car alarms. Noise causes a biological stress response in humans, who evolved in much quieter times, and can lead to an elevated heart rate, increased blood pressure, and loss of sleep and appetite. Studies show that children in noisy neighborhoods and classrooms do less well in school, and that working in a noisy environment can cause reduced productivity and hearing loss.

On Market Street the aural chaos really picks up. A sidewalk drummer at Powell and Market beats on 8 buckets, 4 water jugs, and 3 pans for a combined noise reading of 90 dBA, about the same level as a gasoline-powered push lawn mower. Then there’s the bus engines; the click-clack of high heels; shouting, honking, and the frantic rhythm of skateboard wheels rolling on a brick sidewalk. “Between the drummers and the cable cars I can’t hear myself think,” says Joe, a hot dog vendor who has worked this lively tourist spot for more than five years. By NIOSH standards, Joe works in a hazardous sound environment. “If you ever hear a story about the hot dog guy going postal because of the noise, that’s me.”

Noise and Nature
According to Bernie Krauss, a noted bioacoustician and sound engineer based in Northern California, it’s the animals that are ‘going postal’ from the ubiquity of human clamor, a globe-engulfing ruckus which he calls anthrophony. Krauss says the world of biophony, Nature’s finely-tuned orchestra, is being blasted out of existence by humanity. “Noise is power,” Krauss tells me on the phone, quoting the Reagan-era Secretary of the Interior James Watt. “Look at the straight pipes on the Harleys [going] down the street. The louder you are the more attention you will call to yourself.”

In a 2001 speech for the San Francisco World Affairs Council, Bernie Kraus, a composer and conductor with a PhD in bioacoustics, explained: “Many types of frogs and insects vocalize together in a given habitat so that no one individual stands out among the many.” This creates a protective chorus for the insects and frogs that allows them to communicate while not disclosing their positions to predators. The noise of a passing jet causes the frog biophony to stop, and the slow trickle of individual frogs back into the chorus allows owls and foxes to track down and eat the frogs. This is just one example of how human noise disrupts natural patterns. Ocean noise, such as the U.S. Navy’s powerful mid-frequency sonar system, which can reach above 235 dBA - as loud as a Saturn V rocket-launch – can cause whales to beach themselves and die with bleeding brains and ears, according to the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council.

In the Powell Street Bart station, a guitar-playing busker murders the chorus of I Wanna Hold Your Hand by The Beatles with a particularly off-key squeal that reads 81 dBA on the Radio Shack meter. Navigating the swish-suck-swoosh of the Bart ticket-taking machine (71 dBA), I make my way onto a Mission-bound train and hear the amplified announcement of the next stop (78 dBA) as Metallica’s For Whom the Bell Tolls pours from the headphones of the guy standing next to me. I exit the train at the 24th Street Mission Station just in time to hear the 102 dBA roar of an 8-car Pittsburg/Bay Point train at the opposite platform. It’s about as loud as a circular saw and with a similar metallic, high-pitched whine.

QUIET!!
So what can we do to stop the destruction of the global biophony and create less stressful urban environments?

“Shut the f**k up,” says Kraus, whose more-than-thirty years of natural field recordings give him little positive to say about man’s audio encroachment. Les Blomberg, however, sees hope. “The potential for improvement is incredible. We have technology to create directional speakers,” for example, “there’s no reason that anyone on the 13th floor of a San Francisco building needs to know that the fire department is going by.” Blomberg explains how silent car alarms and air conditioners, hybrid cars, and quieter lawn mowers, tires and pavement can all help curb noise pollution.

“We have to make our cities more attractive places to live if we want to stop sprawl,” he says. “That includes reducing crime, having better schools, and more peace and quiet.”