Discord

Mike Goldsmith explores the history of sound and noise beginning with the Big Bang, which was silent, reports Katherine Bouton in The New York Times (1/1/13). Mike is a PhD in astrophysics, and in Discord: The Story of Noise, he assembles “a lot of facts about noise” … and sound. The Greeks, for instance, “are credited with the first noise ordinance, in the first century BC — banning potters and tinsmiths, as well as roosters, from residential areas.” Stonehenge, “built around 2600 BC … was once nearly as reverberant as a concert hall, thanks to the smooth and slightly curved inner face of the stones and despite the absence of a roof.”

In modern times, the advent of “noise-absorbing buildings” prompted residents to fill their spaces “with newly available noisemaking technology.” One person’s noise is, to be sure, another’s sound: “You may have had to shout to be heard on early telephones, but the speaker would probably not call this ‘noise.’ In the same way, the phonograph and radio were rarely noise to those who were listening to them, though if the users were teenagers and the volume was turned way up, that would be noise to their parents.”

Then there’s infrasonic sound, which we can’t hear, but that can make our eyeballs vibrate to a point where they “generate visual illusions.” The author imagines parks as a kind of sanctuary from noise, although arguably few are immune from the ambient sounds of town, air traffic, “the shouts of a soccer match or children playing.” Ultimately, Mike favors noise reduction, but is not totally optimistic. The noise problem persists, he writes, through “centuries of attempted control and decades of determined scientific study and legislative grappling.” But he suggests that technology may make for a “quieter tomorrow — if we can work together to build it.”