I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, an extremely noisy city mostly due to traffic: old vehicles, motorbikes with open exhausts, cars honking, noisy trucks passing by residential neighbourhoods, an airport inside the city (with take-off and landing ramps over major residential neighbourhoods, including one I lived at), etc.
Moved to Sweden more than a decade ago and lived in very quiet places here, nowadays right in front of a forest with a couple of lakes nearby, and I simply cannot spend more than a few weeks back in São Paulo after getting used to the quietness. I feel much, much more stressed just existing there, even inside apartments on the 20th floor, even on the "quieter" parts of the city, it's a physical feeling that I do not shake off until I'm back home in Sweden.
One can get "used" to noisy environments but the difference it is to live in quieter areas is really hard to describe, I don't think I can tolerate living in noisy environments after seeing how life is on the other end of the spectrum...
I also grew up in a Brazilian capital and during vacations I’d go to my grandma’s place in a farm about 2km away from a small city in the countryside.
Even to this day, one of my best memory of that place is the quietness I could experience by sitting at wheeling chair in the front of the house and the only sound you’d hear would be the wind, birds and sometimes chickens nearby.
Nowadays it isn’t the same sadly, because the city grew enough turn the road at the front much more busy. Now there’s a motorbike or truck passing by every 2 minutes, which spoils the whole experience.
I live in São Paulo and I noticed that contrast when I visited the central area of Kopenhagen. It was impressive and delightful how quiet that neighborhood (without cars) is.
Of course I still can tolerate the noise, since I still live here. I am used to it and, most of the times, I don’t consciously care. But I do appreciate and miss the quietness.
I had a similar experience when I moved to a very rural house for a couple of years. It was extremely comfortable.
Whenever I got back to the city, I felt overwhelmed.
I ended up living in the city and getting used to the noise again. I made the conscious decision to do so because I felt like I limited myself a lot in the places that were acceptable.
Comfort is it's own prison.
I wonder, though, if there is some kind of gain I miss out on by getting used to discomfort.
The introduction of electric vehicles has made Spanish cities much quieter. The youth can hurtle around on their electric bikes / scooters in the wee hours without waking everyone up for miles around!
In NY electric bikes haven't made much of a dent in sound pollution, there are still fat slobs on their Harley's disturbing blocks and blocks of residents either at night or during the day. Hoping I can drape this silk over my ears or something...
Interesting? I don't generally find forest to be quiet. The cricket noises, shuffling leaves, etc keep me up. Of course city noises keep me up to but suburbs are often quiet
Suburbs are bad in terms of noise. The biggest sources of noise I heard were (gas-powered) lawnmowers, the weekly garbage trucks, snow plows, car traffic, and air conditioners.
For me it's leaf blowers. For years there was a lawn crew that would run a leafblower outside during a regular conference call I had and I would have to stop what I was saying while the guy went by a quarter mile away from me.
I don't enjoy absolute silence at all, quietness for me is low intensity natural background noise. Shuffling of leaves, birds, crickets, wind through trees' canopy, a stream of water, all of that is very much soothing (and wanted) noise for me.
I've been around a few suburbs in the USA and they aren't quiet to my ears, they sound dead for a lack of a better word. Dead with the odd noise from a car's engine and tyres (usually a pickup truck), lawn mower, leaf blower rushing through it.
Absolute silence is not even natural, it gives me the creeps when I'm in a deafening silent ambient.
You seem to think the issue is noise, but have you considered noise might just be the most noticeable symptom of general city living? i.e. having much less personal space, nature, privacy, and free time to spend in them?
I had a great time living in cities, and still miss it. It's not an objective choice, depends absolutely on your preferences and lifestyle if city living is worth it or not.
Having less personal space, privacy, nature, etc. are trade-offs for what a city provides if you are into city life. I don't live far away from the city centre but have nature around, depending where you live on Earth it's not mutually exclusive to have access to both.
So the issue is noise, the rest are trade-offs one can make but I'd venture to say that almost absolutely no one would choose "noisy environment" as a preference for their lifestyle.
A quieter world is one where the outdoors is quieter because we stop producing so much noise in the first place. This would benefit us and wildlife, which are very negatively impacted by not just our classic pollution but our noise and light pollution too.
You might be forgetting about how loud birds can be. At least twice a week I'll wake up to birds chirping until at least 7am.
They are extremely loud, second only to no muffler cars and sport bikes blasting through deserted back roads.
If you live in the woods with trees, they'll sound as loud as the ocean. If you live near the ocean, well that's always loud.
The biggest offenders are:
1. cars/trucks
2. birds
3. airplanes
4. ac units
5. ocean
6. wind with trees
You'd never know trees sound like the ocean if you aren't around trees. Trains are loud but intermittent. And trains don't run very often anymore where I am.
There is a couple of conected rail spur lines near less than 500yard from my bedroom window which BNSF have decided to uses as make shift switching yard rather than the actual switching yard on the other side of town. Occasionally it is building shakingly load.
Unrelated. To the noise but just as obnoxious,
They also seem to get a pervasive joy in cutting town in half by parking their trains in the main line running through the middle of the town lengthwise. I understand the rail line was here first and the town grew up along the length of the track, but why they cant park their train on the miles of empty straight track outside of town. It boggles my mind.
GP is very right. To this day, I know that if I don't go to sleep until ~03:30, I might just as well stay up - when the birds wake and start making noise, I won't be able to sleep at all. Cars, trams, trains, I can tune out. There's something about bird chirps that makes them impossible for my brain to ignore. It's worse than loud snoring.
Interesting - I love the sound of birds and can go right back to sleep when they are chirping outside and I have the window open. Road noise on the other hand...
If you're nearby any moderately busy road it's not the engine what makes noise but the tires and then air going around the car. Engine/exhaust noise is a problem but easy to solve
> Engine/exhaust noise is a problem but easy to solve
It's easy from a technical standpoint but practically impossible from a human one. The vast majority of people simply don't notice or care that some large percentage of vehicles are intentionally modified to be louder than the legal maximum. Police won't enforce it, and most citizens barely register the noise as present, much less a problem.
Banning ICE vehicles altogether may very well be the only thing that actually gets the problem solved, since that actually has more momentum behind it than enforcement of existing noise regulations does.
I'm not sure "large percentage" is a statement I'd agree with, my searching skills are failing me, do you have any kind of source for that? I'd be shocked if it was over 5%...
I live near a medium-busy street. I haven't seen actual numbers but it wouldn't surprise me if at peak hours there are over 100 cars passing per minute.
If 5% of those are overly loud, that's an average of a very loud noise every 3 seconds, and most of them will take somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds to come and finally go away. If you don't think that's large, we have very different noise thresholds.
I guess "large" is subjective. 1-5% is the ballpark I have in my head based on experience, which qualifies as "large" to me when I get passed by thousands of cars a day.
The hard numbers I'm aware of are about motorcycles, which have much higher rates of illegal modifications than other vehicles. This source documents a bunch of other sources, with estimates ranging from 40-70%:
People that purposefully install loader than necessary pipes on their vehicles ought to be forced to stay awake by having a marching band play nonstop in their bedroom until the loud exhaust pipe is removed
Yep, there are plenty of ICE vehicles that are quite. A large number of cars/small trucks that are loud are designed that way because the roaring engine noise sells the car.
Yes and no at the same time. Tire noise is significant which is also a function of vehicle weight, speed, and tire design. You tend not to notice the tire noise as most of our interaction with cars is in places like parking lots where engine noise is much more pronounced.
Depends what we are talking about. In Europe, uber EV moped drivers are sooooo much nicer than the regular ones. Most of our interaction with cars are on side walks, along moving cars.
99% of noise is cars and motorbikes. The correct approach is not to invent some high-tech workaround but to go after the source of the problem. Otherwise it's like spending time micro-optimising a program that solves the wrong problem.
We don't even need to do anything radical like getting rid of cars. They can be quiet. Just ban loud vehicles. Force the use of quiet tyres on the road. Do not allow modifications that remove silencers etc. to be used on the road. Race tracks already implement a SPL test for cars at the exhaust. It would be dead easy to implement this for road cars. Already you've probably eliminated the need for anything high-tech for most people.
Then, for the next level, we need to keep driving cars out of our living spaces. Considering the bicycle exists, there is no need for people to transport their bodies from the outside of town to the inside at an average speed of less than 15mph[0]. It's insane.
Very true. One of the remarkable things about Dutch cities is how quiet they are. Sometimes I step outside and just hear nothing and it's almost unsettling. Never experienced that in cities at home in Ireland were cars dominante, even in cities less than half the size.
Unfortunately that’s a social problem that one person can’t solve alone. Here in Brazil it seems to be a common problem that individuals looking for attention will modify their motorbikes to be extremely loud and I’ve never seen this kind of thing getting much outrage from other people. They treat it as normal and police seem to have more pressing things to worry about.
Just because there are bigger problems, it doesn't mean there isn't demand to solve smaller ones.
For example, most of the churches where I live have a big meeting room underneath their main worship space. This room has curtains to divide it into smaller spaces for a dozen or more different meetings, including Sunday school, where a dozen (often noisy) children might be in each room.
Having curtains that genuinely reduce the noise between the areas would make a huge difference! It would reduce the demand to build new buildings with separate walled rooms that wouldn't be used most of the time.
Adding flexibility of use to larger spaces with a variety of demands is a problem worth solving, even if it's not as big of a problem as motor vehicle noise in large cities.
It depends on where you live. My apartment building is older, built before acoustic norms came into effect. I can hear my neighbor two floors up wake up in the middle of the night to take a pee.
I have 0 issues with traffic or other city noise, even though I like having my windows open and live in Paris, one of the densest cities in the world.
I live atm in a place not too far from an airport: I see planes at a distance several times a day, big ones.
I cannot hear them: triple-glazed windows everywhere in the apartment. It works.
I hate noise: since forever I assemble (or have the shop assemble for me) PCs that are extremely quiet. Otherwise I will hear it. AMD 7700X CPU in "eco" mode (in the BIOS) and Noctua cooler/fan, Be Quiet! PSU, Be Quiet! tower. No GPU besides the CPU's iGPU (so it's fanless). I cannot hear that thing.
Then I love music. I'll hear that one loose bolt that did detach and is now vibrating in the system ceiling when I listen to music.
Noisy fridge, fans (there's one in one of the toilet), this or that device humming: there are many source of noise inside your place that can be really annoying when your place is quiet.
Besides the triple-glazed windows, the (small) building is well built: no common walls with neighbors on the same floor (it's the stairs and elevator that do separate the apartments). Only 8 apartments. Very smart architecture. Ultra quiet.
> The correct approach is not to invent some high-tech workaround but to go after the source of the problem.
You've never tried a place with properly installed triple-glazed windows: you'll be surprised. I'm not saying cars shouldn't be less noisy but making your living place quieter ain't that complicated: (quality and properly installed) triple-glazed windows and call it a day.
These are all valid points, I also very annoyed at noisy home appliances (fridges...), but I'm always shocked by how loud it is as soon as you step outside. I remember during the first lockdown I would take walks out in Paris and it was so quiet and peaceful; the sheer quantity of decibels originating from motorized vehicles is insane.
Happy for you, most houses I visited in Canada are so poorly insulated (noise and temperatures) that it's laughable and triple glased windows would just move the problem from windows to walls.
Asked a home building company if they build with concrete (not that you couldn't insulate a wood construction though) and they scoffed saying it would take 15 years to recoup the costs through energy savings... Which doesn't sound that long to me, it's a house not a car
Cars aren't the sort of noise that I primarily care about. Neighbors with their god-awful dogs and children that scream and hit the walls 24/7 are far worse.
If you live in the city, sure. But 99% of the noise I deal with is family members going about their lives. Would love a solution to help prevent sound transfer indoors, so that I can focus (and sleep) better.
I moved to a countryside 2 years ago, escaping from city noise. Now, I’m going back (although to the outer, more quiet side of the city) because I’m going mad - lawnmowers, dogs, tractors, diesel generators, dogs, dogs, lawnmowers, dogs, …
Already exists, same as is used for any other soundproofing. Rockwool insulation, resilient channels and a second layer of drywall, mass loaded vinyl, acoustic panels and tapestries (can hide some more mass loaded vinyl in there too), acoustic adhesive, scored screws to kill floor squeaks. They're all quite expensive but hey! Very DIY accessible.
For exterior noise the biggest bang for the buck is replacing windows. I had some soundproof windows put onto my previous house and you could close the door on a parade going by and not even know it was happening.
Curtains add a flexibility to the use of space that walls do not. If I only have overnight guests very occasionally, I don't want to wall in part of my living room to accommodate them, but I'd love to be able to hang a curtain from some removable hooks that would give them some real noise privacy.
Same here. Loudest noise is one of my servers, but after that is birds and cicadas. I wish I could make the birds shut the hell up, but that sounds like the start of a horror movie.
Could you expand on this? Above 20-30mph tire noise is the dominant noise from vehicles [1] and I haven't yet found a reference that shows significant reduction by choice of tires
Personally I think we need to put cars underground - without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever[2]. And imagine the quiet.
> Personally I think we need to put cars underground
Nope, unless drivers foot the bill entirely. Tunnels are horrendously expensive to build and maintain. Projects like Boston's Big Dig cost billions of dollars, went over budget, and move a smaller number of people than a proper subway train system.
> without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever
Also nope. Adding more lanes just induces more traffic demand. We will never solve traffic by building more car infrastructure. We can only solve traffic indirectly - by mixing residential and commercial building, by making streets safe to walk and bike, and by building a world-class mass-transit system.
We live on a semi-main road. Normal engines aren’t really noticeable or annoying. Nearly all of the road noise is generated by tires with a fraction coming from large truck engines and vehicles with broken exhausts.
Only at very low speeds, past 30km/h (18mph) the noise from the tyres starts to approach or surpass the noise from the engine so they're nearly equivalent.
Yes, but then there are few idiots with modified cars (or most motorbikes in general) that are orders of magnitudes louder and can be heard from kilometers away.
There are efforts to attack the car tyre noise problem by grinding groves into the surface of the road. it's called "Next Generation Concrete Surface" I remember hearing about it on the "Twenty Thousand Hertz" podcast [0]
[0] https://www.20k.org/episodes/sonicutopia
EVs are now required to make a noise at low speeds and at high speeds tires dominate. The best option is fewer cars, the second best option is lower speed limits (with enforcement!).
I'm afraid your knowledge is a bit out of date. Even Flynn has given talks about the "reverse Flynn effect" in the past three decades. IQ scores have been going down.
My suspicion on this is not the noise from the device, or even the devices themselves are the problem... It's that we sit on our ass all day watching/listening to them. Brain health is correlated to exercise and movement.
As I read your comment I became aware of just how loud a simple standing fan I have currently behind me is, even on the lowest of settings. Fan design feels comically lacking in this regard. I am sure it could be much quieter even when faster.
Dyson fans are meant to be quieter, but for a premium.
We know quite a bit about how to block and mitigate sound the issue is it's transmitted through the air which we want to move around for other reasons so it's tough to block one without making stuffy areas.
