TC.
You've been around, You've seen me live many places. Oh yes, I move a lot, but nothing gets me up out of there quicker than a noisy neighbor. I feel like I'm so sensitive to it.
And you know, as soon as you tell me, you're like, I can hear my neighbors. I'm like, oh, give her three months, she's gonna be gone. She just needs to find a place. She's gonna be out of there. My friend, uh uh, those ears are sensitive. She don't want to hear none of it. She's not gonna be like, oh, you shouldn't be doing nothing. But she's like, if I can find quiet her neighbor, I will opt for that.
I'm gonna opt for it. I know I have a little sensitivity, but I also know I'm not alone. There's plenty of memes, but people are like the moon walking upstairs, or they're a town stomping or like next door. I'm like, they have to be playing soccer, they must be preparing for the World Cup.
What is it?
What's going on?
Oh my gosh, I'm TT and I'm Zakiyah And this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. All right, we know I'm not alone when it comes to the noise and just sound in general.
M h.
You know, and I think that we also know that not all noises created equal. There's some noise that you can live with where it's like, Okay, my washing machine is loud, but it's fine. But then there are other noises where it's like, uh uh, I can't build this at all, Like nails on a chalkboard.
My equivalent of nails on a chalkboard is people playing YouTube videos and stuff on speakerphone, Like why does it sound so different than if it were coming from real speakers.
I'm just like, why do you think all of us want to hear what you're doing? Just like people have physical space bubbles, I feel like we should also be considering people's sound bubbles. Yes, I'll be trying to be quiet, like I'm like, I don't want to be intruding on people's ears.
I don't know.
Yes, I was also raised with parents that said shush. It feels like nobody ever told some of y'all to shush listen.
We used to be a country. We used to shush people all the time. Now everybody's just running rampant. So considering all of that, what do we want to know? I want to know what makes a sound a noise?
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, Like, it's not just sound anymore exactly, it's a nuisance exactly. And it feels like there's a thin line between what makes the difference between the two. So I want to know where that line is.
I want to know more about not just how we categorize the sounds, but like the intensity of it, So more about volume, you know. I know Apple had that thing on the phone that's like, yeah, you could set up and it'll tell you or your Apple Watch it will be like loud noise. I used to do it in the shower, and so I'm like, when can a sound? And I was like, is that just the sound of the water that is that dangerous for me?
And mine would do it every time I laughed, which I felt like was offensive or acuri.
I don't know, you could choose.
But what decibels do we need to be looking out for or is it just decibels?
Is decibels what.
We should be checking?
You know? I feel like prolonged exposure to noise can drive someone nuts like my friend, but is it deeper than that, Like can a long exposure to noise have other effects on us?
Let's jump into the dissection.
Okay, so today we're talking to someone who has brought the conversation about noise front and center, and they've done that in a way that challenges some long held assumptions. We're joined by Chris Burdick, author of Clamor How the Noise took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back.
And this book really had a side eye everything. They're doing construction two houses down for me, and we want to figure out how our brains brace for sound. It's part science, part history, and all real life implications.
Chris, Welcome to the lab.
Thank you guys so much for having me.
All Right, I'm excited to talk to you.
Okay, because you called noise a major public health threat, and that's a strong claim, but I am in agreement because I feel like I hear.
Noise that other people don't very sensitive and I'm like, what is that?
What did you hear that?
Low hum?
And I think before we even get into the effects of it, I want to say define for our audience what counts as noise because it's not just as you say in your book, is more than unwanted sound. Help us understand what noise is.
It's very tricky to define it.
And one new definition that has come up that I kind of like was put out by the American Public Health Association in twenty twenty one, and they said noise should be defined and as unwanted and or harmful sound. And so they were saying what has been known but has been overlooked, is that whether or not you love the sound that you're listening to at ninety five decibels in your AirPods, it's going to cause damage to your
inner ear. You know, you have interruptions of sleep that you are not aware of from noise from roads and airplanes and et cetera. And that does not require you to not want the sound. It just happens. So there's all sorts of ways that noise can affect us. It is a subjective thing, but there are many many ways that go beyond the sort of simplified way that we've traditionally defined it.
So you mentioned ninety five decibels, and I want to give some context for folks. So around ten decibels is the level of like normal breathing. We go up from their thirty decibels. That's a whisper, and both of those are designated as like safe noise levels. On the other end of that range is like a police siren and that's around eighty decibels, and that is designated as loud. Now ninety to one hundred and ten, that's considered very loud and dangerous if you were exposed to it for
longer than thirty minutes. And so that's stuff like power tools, blenders, anybody has a ninja creamy, I know you know what I'm talking about. And like nightclubs, so you really only need to be in the club for thirty minutes, get you a couple dances, and get out there.
It was free before midnight.
Just go there thirty minutes, get out out, and then one to one hundred and forty decibels that's dangerous noise levels and that's painful. So that's concerts, fireworks, gunshots, jackhammers, ambulances. This tracks for me because the last time I was at a concert, I was like, oh, I need ear plugs, I needed things. I need to open the ear things they put on the babies for safety.
So also in Clamor, you challenge the classic definition and you make the case that it's not always about volume, it's about contacts and perception. And so just like the cure saying, where I will be in her house and she'd be like, do you hear that?
It's driving me nuts? And I'm like, is it me talking?
And she'd be like, no, my neighbors. Can't you hear them? It sounds like they're they're moving something slim.
And cabinets, we're back is something.
I don't hear a thing, and so I don't feel like I notice those types of frequencies. Can you break down how quieter sounds can still cause harm or distraction? And why do we underestimate noise as a population.
Our hearing is a defensive sensory system first and foremost. If you think about when we go to sleep, we shut down for the night, our eyes close, but your ears stay awake. Your ears are still attuned. And then
what they're looking for are signals. They're looking for anything that is a potential danger to you, and we have no idea what the dangers might be, so we are constantly kind of what the sleep research is called having these awakenings, so periods of time when our resting heart rate raises up, our blood pressure goes back up to normal. These happen about twenty to twenty five times a night in a normal night's sleep. The problem happens when sound
that the research says starts around forty five decibels. When that kind of sound is in your bedroom, it can start to increase the number of awakenings that you have. This can lead to a chronic triggering of a stress reaction has all of the same cascading impacts that kind of a chronic stress has and lead to those sorts
of things. So that's one way when you're awake, the same things happen with Say you're in an office space and you're trying to get your work done and your coworkers are chattering on their cell phones with their friends about their weekends or something like that. This is something that's not pticularly loud, but because you can understand them and your brain is looking for those signals, and so your focus has diverted, your ability to do your work
is stymied, and this causes again stress. People who have done the lab work on this show how when people are trying to do these cognitive tasks and they're being interrupted by noise, then their cortisol levels go up and their stress reactions go up.
That means my cortisol is through the roof.
Yes.
Now, when you gave that example, Chris, of being in office and hearing other people chatter, I feel that way about when people are playing like their phones or watching videos on speaker and you can hear it because it's like a high pitch. Do you know what I'm saying? I read rather if it was like musaic or something that I can't pick up every now and then I hear the words and I'm like, what is it?
I hate it?
Well, that's the thing I wrote about restaurant noise.
So there's a there's one issue there where in the nineteen nineties they that they wanted to get rid of all the upholstery and all the carpets and got this new modern industrial look with all kinds of hard surfaces everywhere,
which allowed every sound to reverberate and endlessly bounce. And then you brought the kitchen in from where it was and put it in the middle of everybody, and then you had cranking up the music so this creates a cacophony that people have a real hard time having conversations in. But on the flip side, have you ever eaten in a restaurant that's too quiet where you hear everybody's slurping their soup next to you and you can hear everybody's you know, everyone has to like whisper and they're kind
of afraid to talk. It's excruciating. And so there's a level at which having sound as a background, when you can't distinguish and it's not intelligible, is a benefit to your ability to focus and have conversations or do your work.
Now, I think we're talking about sound and noise as a nuisance, but in your book you talk about noise being weaponized, and I'm curious about, like, what's one of the wildest examples you came across while researching this.
So well, the wildest one was a French I think it might have been Russian originally, that he was living in Marseille and he was a rogue scientist at this lab where he was trying to use infrasound, which is sound that's below our ability to hear. It's really low frequency, and he was trying to use that to essentially kill people.
I mean, oh, what like.
The ear did kind of Okay, So let's talk about frequency before we get into this death sound. So sound is all about vibrations, and they're invisible waves that travel through the air, water, and solids. And frequency is how many of those vibrations happen in a given amount of time, and that's measured and hurts. And the faster the vibrations, the higher the frequency. And that's when we hear a
high pitch sound like a whistle. And on the other side of that, when vibrations are slower, like the deep banging of a drum, we hear a lower pitch. So, in essence, frequency and pitch are two sides of the same coin. Fast vibrations create a high pitch and slow vibrations create low pitch. Okay, So Chris, let's continue with the death sound machine that they were trying to make.
He created this giant whistle essentially that blasted out in for sound at t one hundred and sixty decibels or something like that, so very intense but very low frequency. The problem was he just he didn't kill anybody. The body is too compost the problem.
Okay, this is getting a little dark.
The problem for his theory.
Okay, with you, I'm with you.
And with such a low frequency, that sound wave is like really big, you know, and it would be really hard to actually hit a person with a sound wave that is that big. It's like trying to hit a fly with a jump rope, you know, Like if you're like flinging that jump rope up and down to create waves, like the chances of you hitting the fly is yeah, slim to none.
So the idea being, if you're going to try to harness that much power to hurt somebody, there's a lot easier ways than trying to aim some kind of infrasound gun at them. In general, the sound weapons that are actually working and are out there are based on loudness. They're based on just blowing your ears out, which has some serious long term irreversible damage. These things were developed
by the Navy. They're called the l RAD, which is the long Range Acoustic Device, and they have subsequently been used by law enforcement, and that's been very controversial because, like I said, when you get hit by a sound that loud and it damages your inner ear, you don't get that back. So it's as a crowd control measure. It's controversial depending on how it's used. How powerful.
Yeah, Oh my goodness, I don't think I knew that. I did not know that that's still in use today.
Or protests in New York of it was a police brutality case that was that people were protesting and they came out with this l rad device and they blasted at people. They were holding it right at them. There was a lawsuit where the defense was saying that the police department was saying sound noise is not a use of force, but of course it is.
It is.
It is okay, So the ruling came down that they settled it. Basically, they're allowed to use this advice now to sort of broadcast that please disperse commands, but they're not allowed to use what's called the deterrent tone, which is the super high intensity pain causing decibel tone. That's where things stand. They're still in the arsenal right.
Wow, I think this is a great transition into the biology. You just talked about the extreme effects of really really loud sound, But how does chronic noise affect our bodies like sleep, heart, and stress?
The stress response in an acute way is a potential benefit to us. This is something that when you have a response, you have this inflammatory response where you know, white blood cells and other disease fighting cells come rushing out. When you have this stress response, just in case you know you're about to get bit by a sabertooth tiger or something like that, you need to have that wound
healing quickly. But like any stress response, when it becomes chronic, when you have so much inflammation coming all the time, your arteries get clogged, you have a dysregulation in terms of hormones. Your stress hormones are all out of whack. Basically, stress in a chronic way, no matter what the source, is a toxic thing.
There was a.
Study out of mass General Hospital that was doing pet scans, full body pet scans of people who had cancer and so they were coming back periodically to have to be checked to see, you know, if they still had you know, we're still in remission. And so they did these pet scans, and so these cardiologists looked at the data of seven or ten years of these pet scans, and they looked at where these folks lived, and they decided they sort of categorized them as being in they were stressed exposed
or not stress exposed. If they lived in an area that was high noise exposure based on the modeling of nearby roads or overflights and transportation noise, they were stress exposed. It's part of the kind of stress soup. And I often think about a lot of the non auditory noise that we have to deal with now that's also stressing
us out. All of the overstuffed email in boxes, and we can't get away from the pings and dings of our phones because people are constantly trying to reach us, and then we are scrolling through our social media and that's stressing people out. I think it's of a piece that is weighing on our cognition and on our focus and on our I don't know, peace of mind, for lack of a better term.
We've talked about this a little bit. T T and I did this kind of web campaign that was about looking up from your phone. Just because we get tied in this loop of scrolling and seeing notifications. I have moved to like putting my phone and focus mode where I don't even see the badges that show up on
the apps. I don't even want to see them anymore, you know, because I think those kind of things just build up a little bit of stress and every now then, like especially when you start your morning with that kind of activity, it sets the tone for the entire day. And you know, I was going to ask you to help me understand how anticipating noise, you know, could affect us. But once you define noise as unwanted signal, then it
became very clear. Because I was thinking, I can anticipate, Oh, there's gonna be so many emails, or oh I I have this project, have so much stuff to do, they're gonna message me. Yes, you ever wake up a few minutes before.
Or when somebody's ring tone is your alarm sound the amount of stressed or even like, oh you have a meeting coming in fifteen minutes, that sound, Oh my gosh.
It stresses me out every.
Time I put my phone on silent, and I get in trouble for it because I miss all the calls from my wife and my kids are like trying to get me.
But it's worth it.
You're not stressed out. They are because they can't get in touch me.
That's right.
My court is all is low.
I love that that's so funny.
I think we're talking about silencing our devices, getting rid of some of the noise. This also makes me think about this concept. There's this book about like your address or zip code, and it talks about how almost it's almost like destiny of sorts, where you live in your exposure to yes, chemical and ear pollutants, but sound as well, like you're talking about. And I think it makes me think about is silence always the goal or are there
other types of sounds that are good for us? Because we had a listener Linda who sent me a message asked about sound baths and healing and so can sound be restorative in a way?
Yes, And I'm glad you asked that because another thing that when I started writing this book, when the pandemic really came down on us, I had to cancel all the reporting I had planned, and everything had to be stopped for a while. But beyond that, I was kind of struck by all of a sudden, the cities were emptying out, and businesses were shutting down, and people weren't
going to school and nobody was getting together. And when people measured this different cities, they found a four to six decibel drop during the height of the COVID, and people had a lot of I had mixed feelings about it, of course, it was sort of like, yeah, I love hearing the birds.
That's great.
I do find some solace in that amidst all this insanity. But you can't escape the context that this quiet world stems from people losing their livelihoods, people losing their lives, people, you know, over trauma, a huge amount of trauma. And so I started thinking about what do we really want when we're fighting noise? What is the kind of goal here? Is it just quiet? Because we had quiet? And I
don't know if that's really what we wanted. There are so many ways that sound can be our ally, and when we think about it, especially when we think about it proactively, and we're not just what I call whack a molling decibels. Quiet is not the only worthwhile sonic goal, and silence certainly is not.
Are there long term of differences and people who grow up around a lot of noise versus people who don't. But then when I think of that question, I think of the demographics of people who are most likely going to be in louder environments. There was someone who wrote that the sound of gentrification is silence. So wealthier people weaponize noise ordinances to turn down vibrant cultures, particularly in areas undergoing rapid gentrification.
Can you talk.
About how silence is weaponized and then the effects of silence versus noise on different populations.
First of all, I think two things can be true. I think our interpretation of sound and what we designate noise versus sound is absolutely impacted by our personal histories, our cultural backgrounds, our mood, what have you.
That matters a lot.
I don't know that everybody who grew up in a city feels the same way about sound, or I would certainly not say that everybody belonging to any particular ethnic
groups thinks the same way about sound. But those things do matter a lot, and it's true in the same vein that noise ordinances and anti noise campaigns throughout history have been used to target the particular noise makers, not just the sounds themselves, just to people that if you were in Victorian England, you have all these immigrants coming from southern Europe working in the factories there, and then they were the targets of the anti noise or ordinances
and when you have gentrification, noise complaints go up and they correlate with that change in.
The neighborhood as well. And I know that there is I think there were.
In the eighties, there was an anti noise campaign. There was ostensibly just about amplified music in public, but it basically used to target black youth with boomboxes.
It's the key.
I don't know if you remember, but I talked to you about this because I used to live in DC proper in Shaw and there was a store that had a speaker outside of it that played Go Go music and every day it was blast and it was loud, but it was like the sounds of DC Go Go music exactly.
It's like a lot of percussion, and no one had a problem. We would always just you know, walk past it.
But then there was this luxury apartment that was built like kind of right across the street from that, and someone started calling the police and complaining, and so that store had to move their speaker away. But that was like a staple in the neighborhood, and so it caused like a huge backlash where it started the whole Don't Mute DC movement and sooner or later that speaker was right back out there playing Go Go because we read that.
I think the other thing that I think is true is that there is so much that we share as humans in our reactions to sound.
We share the same.
Delicate inner ear anatomy and connections to our brain. We share the same hair trigger connections between hearing and our fight or flight response and stress. We share certain limitations and our ability to focus. We all need to sleep. I talk to so many people from Washington Heights and in southwest Detroit and areas that have so many other kind of environmental insults aimed at them, and they care
about noise. They care about noise as part of a sort of caring about having a healthy place to live. Sometimes we get caught up in one or the other. We get caught up in noise as just a straight up health threat that is this next second half smoke and we need to stop it, or we get caught up in talking about this is another just another piece of gentrification. I think that these two things exist side by side.
Yeah, as you've been sharing this, I've been thinking about structurally some things we know. I've been thinking about even just accit like even just trees in neighborhoods to absorb sounds, to keep in place, especially I'm in the South, to keep neighborhoods cooler where they have historically been trees and they're able to give great tree cover and to absorb sound. I think about it in the context of, yes, it would be great, you know, the neighbor thing I'm used to.
I have been in a townholl I don't want to say I'm used to I deal with I've been in a townhome or an apartment, but I think that everybody can't be in a single family home. The best solutions are some kind of trade off of yes, hearing noise, but also being close to work, and being close to not just work, but like parks, and being close to
healthy food. Right, and when we have mixed use developments or we have multifamily units and structures that allow that, there may be some noise trade off that comes with that.
TT and I think a.
Lot about soundscapes as creators of audio. She came to visit me at my parents' house a couple of weeks ago, and I was thinking about when I first got there and you were like, oh, we're in the country, and I'm like yes, And I had to just stop and be like.
What do I hear? What birds? Do I hear? What insects trilling? Do I hear?
That?
Feel like home to me? That's part of my soundscape. That would probably be a nuisance to someone else that didn't.
Like what is that? I'm like, that's a frog?
Don't you know that? I don't that near me?
Told us about things you've seen that are creative or maybe even counterintuitive approaches to creating soundscapes that fight noise pollution also allow vibrant living.
Yeah, So I'll tell you about a researcher who she's an urbanist. Her name is Antonella Riddicki, and she created an app called Hush City. Antonella was looking at some of the big cities that have quiet areas, and what she saw was many of them tend to be in the middle of some giant park, or on the outskirts of the city, or somewhere that people have a really hard time getting to them. And so the question is
what's the purpose here. The widest number of people access to a respite from city noise and a place to feel rejuvenated, we should have what she called everyday quiet areas. So the purpose of this Hush City app was the crowdsource what everyday quiet areas would be in your city and what she was doing it as part of a public service, but part of a research project. So the question is, like, what were people identifying as quiet? What did people like? And it wasn't the lowest decibel places.
They liked places that had a different kind of an acoustic feel to your busy, crazy streetscape. Maybe it was a pocket park, maybe it was just a quieter side street. They really liked when they could hear people, not tons of people, like they like places that were conducive to socializing. Antonella said is people are not looking for silence, they want places of high sonic quality. And this approach is kind of, I think, gaining ground at least where people
think about sound already. They're starting to think about soundscapes, They're starting to think about high sonic quality and how to achieve that and what that means. The larger point I think is that sound connects us to our world, it connects us to our neighborhood, it connects us to each other. And when I think about noise, noise gets in the way of that noise is something that interrupts our connections.
I feel like I've learned so much about sound from reading your book and talking to you today, Like it's really just revolutionizing how I'm just moving through the world and the things that I'm paying attention to.
All Right, can you let folks know where they can find your book.
The book is called clamor How Noise took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back. It is out now and available everywhere books are sold. I'll direct people to my web page, which is TRIPLEW dot Chris Burdick dot com, and that will link you to the book and some other writing that I have done. Anything you want to know and be able to contact me through it as well.
That sounds great, amazing.
This is really helping me. I just had some neighbors moving.
I was just complaining to ts she was and so I was like, Okay, this is.
Just part of living. This is important and I'm getting used to it. I'm getting better.
You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast, tt.
Is on X and Instagram at d R Underscore t Shoe.
And you can find Takiya at z said so.
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