People kill other people distressingly often over noise.

Plenty of evidence implies that the planet is noisier than at any other time in human history. What now?

Before attempting to answer that practically – and we will, here, over time – we can begin by ruling out a few well-worn, fatally flawed approaches. Today’s approach is both the most common (by far) and one of the easiest to take down. It is the fantasy of silence.

The Times of London recently gave writer Helen Rumbelow one of those tedious assignments where the journalist is supposed to go out and search for an oasis of true quiet amidst the ubiquitous din of modern urbanity. Conventionally, the journalist either finds a single tranquil place or doesn’t; either way, the moral of the story is that we’ve forgotten the value of silence, and by extension neighborliness, peaceful contemplation, relaxation, and so forth.

In her piece, titled “Silent Night … Is There Peace Anywhere in Britain?,” Rumbelow takes the high road considering that her assignment was essentially a straw man. After moving through the usual tropes of noise control, she makes some great points.

To paraphrase the article, Britain is noisier. People have become exasperated. Noise-reduction experts agree that the problem stems in large part from overpopulation. But too much regulation on behavior (i.e., no peeing standing up in apartments after midnight) can be overkill. Besides, noise is also caused by more and louder technology – including things that can’t easily be limited, like motor vehicles. Such noise is not only annoying, it’s physically damaging to our bodies. Ultimately, since we can’t achieve total silence, perhaps we can overlay nicer sounds – like waterfalls. Finally, it is worth considering that people seem to tolerate mechanical noise better in developing countries. Is sensitivity to noise a disease of affluence?

Rumbelow offers, provocatively, that part of what makes certain sounds tolerable is not only, generically, that they’re subjectively pleasing, but that they signify things beyond human control. Some of the loudest sounds we hear – waves crashing, thunderstorms, forest animals – are usually pleasing in spite of their volume, and even their irregularity. Conversely, the animal sounds that do tend to bother urban-dwellers, like the aforementioned barking, are those that come from domesticated beasts, which people are ostensibly responsible for controlling.

On this, Rumbelow writes:

I have come to think that our relationship with noise is like our relationship with God, or with universal forces beyond our control. We crave natural sounds, such as that of the ocean, that are beyond our power. We long for the incorporeal, and our longing intensifies the more the noises of other people press in on us.

So, then, is sensitivity to noise actually a disease of the triumph of classical liberalism, in which people understand themselves as free actors with the right to control their environments? If we run with this thesis momentarily, we might conclude that nostalgia for silence is really a displaced lust for dominance – in particular, dominance over the actions of other people, which is one hell of a paradox for a philosophy of political freedom.

Whether or not this thesis is true, its mere possibility is one of many strikes against the open-ended idea of noise control animated by the fantasy of silence. This is because every time we choose a target for noise abatement, our choice is not only about volume, but about our own hearing. This doesn’t mean, at all, that the definition of noise is totally subjective and thus impossible to do anything about. It simply means that too few quests for greater quiet have considered the politics of listening in sufficient depth.

Next: The amazing noise map of the entire nation of England

For others, he’s the guy who, back in summer 2006, recorded himself playing the trumpet on his balcony in Beirut while Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on the city. This occurred during the brief but severe Israeli attack on Lebanon. Kerbaj was, like most people around, a citizen not a soldier. The munitions aimed at him were not aimed at him. Perhaps their sound was.

The piece is more complex, compositionally, than trumpets v. bombs. It begins with crickets and a pregnant silence that isn’t disturbed for a while. The trumpet is quiet for almost a minute, and the first bomb doesn’t hit until 1:09. The explosions each echo for a long time, through corridors of buildings, setting off choruses of car alarms and barking dogs. The crickets always return. The bombs shut them out again. The trumpet eventually reminds us of tens of thousands of ears in range – like the musician, impatiently interpreting.

The recording, titled “Starry Night,” is a few years old now, and has been plenty written about. Of all of Kerbaj’s work, it has gotten by far the most gushing praise for what is received almost across the board as an elegant critique of war. However, Rana El Kadi (U of Alberta) presented a paper on Kerbaj’s work last week at SEM that complicates the issue. She interviewed Kerbaj and, as it happens, he is lukewarm about the piece’s reception. It is, he apparently feels, a condescension for American and European critics to hear only metaphors of resistance in his work, while failing to evaluate it on the same aesthetic grounds as the output of a musician from someplace less war torn. He was not returning fire against the war planes, but simply expressing the weakness of his being in the shadow of a violence that threatened to overwhelm him.

My question (unasked) after El Kadi’s talk was about whether any of the Israeli fighter pilots involved in the bombing mission had ever heard Kerbaj’s recording, and if so, how had they reacted? What would their aesthetic criteria be? How would they be affected hearing someone hear them bomb Beirut, which is the gist of the piece? Kerbaj is right – his recording does not fight back. It makes his own audition audible, however, which is volatile in its own right.

First, for the uninitiated, sound cannons (or LRADs) are a new type of crowd control device that riot control officers can shoot at people like a gun. Rather than discrete projectiles, it sends waves of howlingly loud noise, potentially including shrill, siren-like tones or direct verbal messages (“move back” and the like). This video gives a sense of how it works, and especially how loud it can be (fair warning: cover your ears!):

Like teargas, the sound cannon is attractive for use in crowd control because it is non-lethal but immediately effective. Governments can manage discontented people in an absolute fashion without creating martyrs or accruing liability. This is something of a loophole in the ethical treatment of protesters – the human body cannot tolerate sound in excess, but exposure leaves no (visible) scars. Perhaps in a wiser moment, we’ll take stock of the emotional distress such conditions can produce, of the long-term hearing loss that can occur with misuse of the machines, of potentially dangerous levels of stress, and of the disturbing political asymmetry such technology facilitates between a government and its citizens. But for now, sound cannons are perfectly legal.

LRADs operate in the threshold between normal listening, where vibration is mild enough that we experience sound as essentially immaterial, and where we can readily pay attention to communicative and aesthetic content (music, language, texture), and extreme sonic exposure, where vibration is felt as a force throughout the body. The sound cannon is far enough along this spectrum that we react involuntarily to its painful volume, but not so far along that we lose life or limb. It’s pretty brilliant, in a mad scientist kind of way.

In any case, it’s fascinating/macabre to consider what various sound levels can do to us physically. The hardware manufacturer makeitlouder.com has a whole chart.

(Decibels measure the intensity of a sound wave. They do not measure frequency, so for example knowing that a conversation occurs around 50 dbs does not tell us whether the voices are high or low.)

Here are some choice selections:

13 – Ordinary light bulb hum
30 – Totally quiet nighttime in desert – impossible near city
40 – A whisper
60 – Normal conversation
100 – House or car stereo at maximum volume
116 – Human body begins to perceive vibration at low frequencies (imagine standing in front of a speaker at a concert, for example)
125 – Drum at the moment of being hit
127 – Tinnitus sets in
128 – Human hair will begin to vibrate perceptibly
132 – Eardrum flex becomes noticeable
133 – Gunshot at ear level
135 – The air begins to cool from expansion
137 – The entire human body vibrates
140 – Extreme damage to hearing no matter how short the exposure (this, by the way, is how loud the LRAD can be set)
141 – The human body experiences nausea
142 – Chest pounding is intense
143 – Human body feels as if “someone just football tackled your chest”
145 – Human vision begins to vibrate
153 – Human throat vibrates so hard it is almost impossible to swallow
163 – Minimum glassbreaking level
172 – Fog is created
175 – Equivalent to a quarter stick of dynamite
180 – Damage to structures is catastrophic
186.1 – Equivalent to a pound of TNT at a distance of 10 feet
202 – Immediate human death
220 – Equivalent to the largest bomb used in WWII
257 – Equivalent to 1 megaton nuclear bomb

etc.