Zero Decibels

The Quest for Absolute Silence

George Michelsen Foy

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439101049
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Physik

Have our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence an impossible goal—or the one thing that can save us? A lively tale of one man's quest to find the grail of total quiet.---" I don't know at what point noise became intolerable for me, " George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed he is by the city's noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if such an absence of sound can be discovered.Foy begins his quest by carrying a pocket-sized decibel meter to measure sound levels in the areas he frequents most—the subway, the local café, different rooms of his apartment—as well as the places he visits that inform his search, including the Parisian catacombs, Joseph Pulitzer's "silent vault, " the snowy expanses of the Berkshires, and a giant nickel mine in Canada, where he travels more than a mile underground to escape all human-made sound. Along the way, Foy experiments with noise-canceling headphones, floatation tanks, and silent meditation before he finally tackles a Minnesota laboratory's anechoic chamber that the Guinness Book of World Records calls "the quietest place on earth, " and where no one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable.Drawing on history, science, journalistic reportage, philosophy, religion, and personal memory, as well as conversations with experts in various fields whom he meets during his odyssey, Foy finds answers to his questions: How does one define silence? Did human beings ever experience silence in their early history? What is the relationship between noise and space? What are the implications of silence and our need for it—physically, mentally, emotionally, politically? Does absolute silenceactually exist? If so, do we really want to hear it? And if we do hear it, what does it mean to us?According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today's digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places. Inthis respect, Foy's quest for silence represents more than a simple psychological inquiry; both his queries and his findings help to answer the question "How can we live saner, healthier lives today?"Innovative, perceptive, and delightfully written, Zero Decibels will surely change how we perceive and appreciate the soundscape of our lives.

chapter one

the Broadway train

I don’t know at what point noise became intolerable for me. I do know when I decided that, having lived for a long time—weeks, months even—in a state marked by my increasing inability to tolerate high volumes of sound, I decided, with a sudden certainty more characteristic of schizophrenics, or teenage lovers, to seek out the opposite, and track down silence wherever it might live.

I was standing on the uptown platform of the Broadway local at 79th Street, in Manhattan, waiting for the train to ferry me and my children to the 116th Street stop. The Broadway local was taking its time about showing up, and I suppose the charge of frustration stemming from delay was a contributing factor. New York, in a non-Newtonian way, seems to boost the quantum of energy one brings to any event or problem with each additional unit of time spent in the city. Through vents leading to the street above, I heard traffic rush and honk. And the kids were squabbling. . . .

None of these factors would have made me particularly content with where I was or what I was listening to that day, although none of them should have bothered me inordinately either. After all, having lived in the city that never sleeps for ten years, I had, like most residents, evolved a higher threshold of tolerance toward over-the-top input of any kind. At some brute level, higher volumes of input are one reason we choose to live in New York.

I take this ride several times a week. You might think I’d be inured to what was about to happen.

The Broadway line south of Ninety-sixth Street consists of two local tracks, one uptown, one down, with two express lines in the middle. Similar equipment runs on each track but the local trains, which stop at every station and don’t enjoy the long stretches of acceleration available to the express, travel slower. On the afternoon in question, at approximately 4:17, the downtown local screeched into the station, across the tracks from us. Even one train—with its steel wheels mashing steel rail, brakes woefully lacking in grease, ventilators roaring as they struggle to keep the temperature of both motors and passengers in check—hits the ears like an extrusion of New York, in all the city’s unapologetic whaddya, its in-your-face aggression. The level of sound it generates will set babies crying.

That day, however, just as the downtown local was coming to a halt, the uptown local came in; and at the same instant the downtown express entered the station, its seven burgundy-colored cars thundering shrieking roaring at 40 mph between the slowing locals. Immediately thereafter the uptown express, as if anxious not to miss the party, showed up around the curve from Seventy-second Street and blasted into a station already occupied by three other trains, two moving, one now stopped.

The noise was immense. It was gut-pounding. It smacked the cosmos. Without thinking I clamped the flat of my palms to both ears and screwed my face into the scrunched expression of a root-canal patient. I usually despise people who do that on subway platforms. Wimps, I think; milquetoast souls who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for God’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram! But here I was doing the same thing. And still the noise grew, as the express trains slammed past each other in the stone tunnel, and the flanges of their wheels rocked forty-five tons of weight against the edge of rail; the whine of motors; the warning “dings” as the doors of the downtown local closed and ours opened; the grunts and plaints of sardined passengers; and the overamped voice of the conductor yelling, “Seventy-ninth, let the passengers off—stand clear of the closing doors.”

I remember keeping my hands power-glued to my ears, even as we boarded and sat down. My daughter Emilie, who as a teenager is always alert to signs of egregious weirdness on the part of her progenitors, glanced at me nervously. But for once something had cracked the enamel coating New Yorkers must accrete to live in this town, and I kept my ears covered, cringing at the rumble that filtered through my palms; thinking, I can’t put up with this kind of noise, day in, day out, any longer. I mused, This has to damage me in some way, reflected also—because that was the other wheel of this scooter of thought—I need to find somewhere quiet. And the train rumbled slower, and stopped, and the loudspeaker blatted, “Eighty-sixth, let ’em off!” and I thought no, not just quiet; what I want now is silence.

Perfect silence.

No noise. No sound. Nothing.

That was when I thought of the farmhouse.

It’s an old, dark house, smelling of dry rot and smoke, with a fieldstone hearth and thick walls. The farm lies deep in the hills of the Berkshires, far from any roads. It’s the dead of night, at midwinter. The air is frozen and void of wind. Farmhouse, meadows, and woods surrounding are buried in a quilt of snow so deep that everything alive has chosen not to fight, but burrow instead below the white insulation and go to sleep. All is so cold and silent, on that farm in my mind, that the stars, shining against a sky the color of tarnished lapis, seem to give off a vibration that is not sound and not light but something in between—something that is perhaps the essence of silence itself.

chapter two

quest for total sound

The idea of that farmhouse stays with me for days, as does the memory of the savage overdose of noise that triggered it. There are plenty of causes for this obsession. “We can’t go on living like this,” Liz tells me that same week. Liz is my wife, and her words are as good a caption for what ails me as anything. Our apartment is too tight, both kids are crammed into the same room, I am working three part-time jobs to pay the rent. My mother died last Christmas, and her apartment (too small for us) costs a lot to maintain; yet it’s taking months to go through probate, and until it does, my brother and I cannot sell. I suspect even then that my lust for silence is only point man for a platoon of other worries. What I don’t suspect is that this search will flip my life upside down and change my way of being in the world.

I don’t worry about where the search will lead, though; or not at first. For whatever reason, the immediate questions this issue raises are starting to fill my brain to the exclusion of most other, and more practical, matters. For example: What exactly is silence? Is it only an absence of sound? Is a total absence of sound possible in fact? Would total silence be the same as an utter dearth of mechanisms capable of disturbing air? Could a human even live in that environment? If sound is a vibration borne by air, would deep space, where there is no air (except for what comes through your breathing apparatus), be the only place you could find it? All these questions, abstract as they might be, seem vitally connected to what I felt in the subway at Seventy-ninth Street. And it feels important, in just as urgent a way, that I somehow dig up answers to them.

Every question about silence seems to generate a dozen more. Through a reversal of the process by which the explosive roaring of subway trains conjured an image of a quiet New England farmscape, I find myself asking more and more questions about sound in general and the role it plays not only in my life but in the lives of other humans. The questions concern not just sound as a concept but also the hard fact, daily demonstrated to me in the streets, of its use and abuse in the world.

The New York subway system, for instance, carries an average of 4 million passengers every weekday. Almost all of them are the type of rider I used to be, who reckons that protecting yourself in any way from subway noise brands you as a quivering jellyfish, a poor excuse for a human; a non–New Yorker, in other words. But a 2006 Columbia University study measured sound generated by New York subway trains and found that the average maximum noise on subway platforms stood at 94 decibels (the decibel, or dB, being the preferred unit of noise measurement), with peaks of over 100. This is well over the volume of a fully revved-up chain saw held at arm’s length. Moreover, the CU study found, merely spending a half hour in the subway system, exposed to the average noise level of trains, would exceed safety guidelines recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization, potentially resulting in damage to one’s hearing.

To find my suspicions objectively confirmed affords me mild satisfaction, but not relief.

For it is not only subways that generate harmful sound. The EPA estimated recently that 13.8 million Americans are regularly exposed to “excessive” noise levels, defined as anything over 70 decibels, and that 30 million suffer from “toxic” noise where they work. Bad noise is the number one occupational disease in the United States, according to the EPA.

Europeans tend to be more conscious of environmental health, but Europe is hardly immune to harmful noise. The European Environment Agency has set a maximum threshold of 55 dB for average acceptable noise, but the agency estimates that 65 percent of European Union citizens, 450 million people, are regularly exposed to sound levels above that limit. A late 1990s study of noise levels around Amsterdam and Stockholm airports showed that chronic sound around 55 dB resulted in higher levels of both blood pressure and treatment for cardiac ailments. Researchers in Belgrade in 2008 showed that urban residents exposed to more than 45 dB of road-traffic noise suffered increased rates of arterial hypertension.

Some 113 million Europeans endure the effects of 65-dB-plus sound, and 10 million cringe, day in, day out, at sounds of over 75 dB. A German study in the last decade found that 15 percent of the German population was exposed to decibel levels of over 65 during the day. A 1992 report by the Berlin Institute for Water, Social, and Air Hygiene discovered that Germans exposed to sound levels of 65 dB or more during the day had a 20 percent higher risk of heart attack than their better insulated countrymen. Europe and North America, and by extension most of the developed world, are in the grips of a pandemic of toxic or near-toxic sound, and no one, certainly no one I know in New York, seems aware of this. I am willing to bet, based on what I’ve seen of less developed nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, that outside of rural areas people there are even less protected from extreme sound than in highly regulated cities such as Berlin, London, and New York.

The pandemic manifests itself in permanent damage to hearing. That much is well-documented. In the United States, according to the EPA, 30 million people suffer from environment-related deafness; the same figure, although probably not the same exact sample, as those exposed to toxic noise. But hearing loss, it turns out, may be only the more obvious effect of toxic noise. Cornell studies in the late 1990s found that chronic exposure to levels of noise greater than 50 dB—the volume of nearby conversation, local traffic, or rain plashing in a courtyard—results in measurably lower educational performance in children, and lower motivation; what the study calls “learned helplessness.” It also boosts stress hormones, blood pressure, and heart rates.

Some research even suggests that sound, and not even very loud sound, can kill on the spot. Low-frequency noise, such as that produced in large buildings by ventilation and heating ducts or wind effects, can match and resonate with the frequencies of our body cavities. Sounds with frequencies of eight cycles per second, for example, vibrate in time with the chambers of the heart, increasing the potential for thrombosis. Seven-cycle sounds trigger a harmonic with the brain’s 9 Hz alpha-wave frequencies, causing fatigue, headaches, and nausea. Research by Cornell’s Gary Evans suggests that low-level noise in open-style offices results in greater production of the stress hormone epinephrine, and lower “task motivation” as well. A 1998 article in Archives of General Psychiatry mapped out how chronically loud environments shift dopamine levels to hinder activity in the prefrontal cortex, otherwise known as our conscious brain. One of the papers delivered at the Neuroscience 2000 conference demonstrated that noise is registered first by our nonconscious brain, which processes it as fight-or-flight data before forwarding it to the prefrontal areas for deconstruction. This is a fancy way of saying that a million years of living as hunter-gatherers in the wild have conditioned us to react instinctively to sudden, loud events.

All these data are impressive and would convince me, above and beyond my own experience, of the unsuspected but mind-blowing effects that the murder of silence, or at least the crippling of quiet, is visiting on world civilization. But statistics, unlike bangs, don’t pass straight to the emotional centers. Worldwide pandemics are too vast to grasp for minds evolved in small hunting groups.

What shocks me is the case of a man named Lambrinos Lykouresis.

Lambrinos was a retired farmer on the Greek island of Zákinthos. He had complained for years about his neighbor Imberia Boziki, a woman who blasted music on her radio the entire evening when all Lambrinos wanted to do was listen to the news. On May 31, 1996, Lambrinos snapped. He got up from his armchair, grabbed his hunting rifle, rang Imberia’s bell and, when she answered, shot her three times, dead.

This made news even in Greece, which is rated by the OECD as the noisiest country in Europe. In Athens, according to Time magazine, 60 percent of the metropolitan area’s 3.5 million residents are routinely subjected to sound levels above 75 dB—30 decibels over the threshold at which noise causes hypertension. Time quotes a senior member of Greece’s Association for the Quality of Life as saying, “There’s no such thing as peace and quiet here anymore. . . . If effective measures are not taken, Greeks will either turn mad or deaf.”

Lambrinos’s act feels right to me somehow. Of course, blowing your neighbor away with three well-placed 7.62 mm bullets is not “right”; but the correlation between frustration and out-of-control noise is something I know from my own experience, not only in the subway but everywhere, it seems, everywhere in my life. Sometimes, to fight the noise, I resort to a meditation technique I learned in my twenties: closing my eyes, concentrating on my breath, only my breath, I let any thoughts that come, come, until I start to lose connection with where I am and what I’m listening to. I call this subway meditation. Subway meditation doesn’t always work, but it feels good to have a tool, any tool, however imperfect, to fight the noise. And it feels right, in the same way, to be learning about noise. It certainly makes sense intellectually that, if I want to find out about silence, I shall have to learn everything I can about sound.

I go over the basics. Sound equals one’s hearing mechanism measuring pressure waves through either air or water—the only environments we are apt to feel pressure waves in. It is reckoned in units, named for Alexander Graham Bell, originally intended to measure the drop in energy registered in telephone cables. Each decibel (dB) equals one quantum of air pressure hitting the outer ear; thus an increase in decibels means an increase in pressure on the eardrum. Zero dB means not a total absence of pressure waves but the lowest sound audible, on average, to healthy humans; below zero dB the “sound” being measured registers as silence.

The frequency of sound waves is measured in hertz, named for the German physicist who first calibrated them. Pressure travels through air in the form of waves, which like ocean waves have a cycle that includes a peak and a trough, and a rhythm that determines how many of these cycles will arrive at a given point over a set amount of time. One hertz, therefore, equals one wave of pressure arriving at the ear or microphone per second, twenty hertz equals twenty waves per second, and so on. Humans are capable of hearing an astonishingly broad range of sound frequencies, from 20 to 20,000 Hz, although we are much better at hearing some frequencies than others, and the range decreases as we age.

The human auditory apparatus is both highly acute and fantastically flexible, since it can pick up everything from a bomb exploding next door (well over 150 dB) down to the rub of a finger on vellum, or the touchdown of a bluejay’s feather on a varnished tabletop (less than 20). In volume, the spectrum of sounds humans normally hear runs from 30-odd decibels (one’s own breath in a quiet library) through 50 dB (refrigerator, slow traffic), 60 (conversation), 70 (vacuum cleaner), 80 (ringing alarm clock). One gets some idea of the vast range involved when one understands that decibels—in terms of intensity, or the energy expended in making a sound—are measured exponentially: every three-decibel increase equals a doubling in the previous strength level. Thus a jump from 40 to 46 dB is not a 25 percent but a fourfold increase; 40 to 50 is tenfold, and 100 decibels is 100,000 times more intense than 50. A jet engine, at 120 dB, is one trillion times more intense than the softest possible whisper at near zero decibels. Intensity, while it has concrete bearing on what sound will do to the hearing apparatus, is not the same metric as perceived loudness, which doubles with every ten-decibel increase, so that going from 40 to 50 decibels equals a rise of 100 percent. Experts in psycho-acoustics are quick to point out that perceived loudness is highly relative, since it cannot be measured by any instrument other than the observer’s hearing; and also because its perceived strength depends on factors such as frequency, bandwidth, masking (the extent to which one sound covers another), and the subject’s degree of habituation to ambient sound levels, all of which will make sounds of the same intensity appear louder or softer compared to each other.

In the midst of this research I still long for silence. But working on the principle of “know thine enemy,” I resolve to build a compendium of the sounds that until recently I took for granted in my life: an encyclopedia of the aural. It is immediately clear that to gauge the sounds I research—and the silence I will find around and after them—will require serious instrumentation. Therefore on a bright day in early spring I drive out to Stamford, Connecticut, to meet Greg Miller.

Greg is stocky, bearded, in his late forties. He wears many hats. He races stock cars, volunteers for the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and is a partner in a law firm. He also, with his father, owns Gold Line Inc., a maker of some of the most sensitive acoustic-metering equipment known to man. Gold Line’s equipment is capable of measuring any environment down to well below zero decibels, but gear on this level is cumbersome, complicated, and expensive. Greg hooks up a sensitive microphone to his laptop to show me, under a window displaying the yacht-club pennants and hedge-fund hideouts of Stamford harbor, the sine curves and pillar charts that break down various sounds in his office. Air-conditioning, chair creaks, traffic, the click of computer keys, ourselves talking; each sound snaps the waves around, sets the pillars pumping like trumpet pistons. An up-to-date Gold Line TEF analyzer—a decibel meter that factors in time and frequency—would, I learn, require constant calibration, specialized software, hours of training, and between $2,000 and $20,000 a week. I might need finer equipment as I try to find increasingly silent environments, Greg says, but in the meantime an off-the-shelf decibel meter, something sensitive down to 30 dB, will suffice for most of the soundscapes of my life.

Greg Miller, despite his passion for race cars and powerboats, is a connoisseur of quiet. He coddles and cultivates his own hearing faculties and wears custom ear-protectors when racing his BMW. As we eat lunch by the harbor, surrounded by the rush of wind, the clink of rigging, the guffaws of stockbrokers, Greg looks at me with a pu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• chapter one the Broadway train
• chapter two quest for total sound
• chapter three city noise, urban quiet
• chapter four a brief history of silence
• chapter five quest for silence: the country
• chapter six art of silence, silence in art
• chapter seven “the quietest place in the universe”: scientific silence
• chapter eight can we hear “nothing”? silence and physiology
• chapter nine the silence of the sea: how hearing evolved
• chapter ten why Apaches don’t talk
• chapter eleven the silence of the disappeared
• chapter twelve the death of quiet: coping with overload
• chapter thirteen the quietest place on earth
• chapter fourteen the monks of Cîteaux: silence as absolute
• chapter fifteen tinnitus!
• chapter sixteen the farmhouse
• acknowledgments
• notes
• index