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“This is a guide to living with sound, and especially with noise. Not constantly fighting battles against it, not inflicting it on others, not hiding it, or yourself, under more layers of sound. This is about being a listener, whatever else you also are.” Marcia Jenneth Epstein, Sound and Noise
Noise surrounds us everywhere we go, even when we ourselves are not fully aware of it. From evening traffic, to chirping birds, to the rustling of leaves, an unavoidable consequence of being alive is that we are constantly exposed to sound. But how do these sounds affect us, and what impact can they have on our well-being?
MQUP author Marcia Jenneth Epstein explores this often-overlooked aspect of the human experience – the relationship we have with the sounds that surround us, and the impact listening can have on our minds and bodies.
In her groundbreaking interdisciplinary study of how auditory stimuli impact both individuals and communities, Marcia Jenneth Epstein gives readers the impetus and the tools to understand the sounds and noise that define their daily lives. Sound and Noise: A Listener’s Guide to Everyday Life is a timely evaluation of the noise that surrounds us, how we hear it, and what we can do about it.
As the covid-19 pandemic spread across the world last spring, so did a new phenomenon: quiet city streets. As schools, businesses, and factories closed, machinery and traffic noise – the keynotes of urban life – no longer dominated. Wind, birds, and water – rain, rivers, and snowmelt rivulets – suddenly moved for a month or two to a delicate foreground of auditory awareness, prompting curiosity in international media about what the change meant. Was the normalcy of noise dulling our senses, making us anxious, preventing sleep? Would the quiet cure us of any of our social ills? Would the pockets of urban silence survive? Eight months later, our lives are getting louder as workplaces open and production ramps up, but a growing awareness of soundscapes – auditory environments – persists, gaining new attention from scientists, journalists, urban planners, and scholars.
Sound is a crucial component of daily existence, giving us information about our surroundings. Our prehistoric ancestors had intimate knowledge of its importance for survival, as do many Indigenous cultures today. Modern life teaches us to block out its messages, masking our sense of hearing with music and media channeled through devices that feed sound directly into the ear canals to provide a seamless wall of distraction. Our mediated modes of communication eliminate clues like tone of voice. We learn to ignore traffic-cluttered outdoor soundscapes as well as the more subtle roars of office ventilation systems. We become accustomed to the verbal evasions of politicians’ soundbites, accepting them as if they were rational discourse. We learn not to listen, relying on dramatic and driven styles of music to break through the sensory torpor.
The result is inattention to sound, which impacts the health of individuals, families, and communities. Examples abound: along with constant use of personal media devices, attendance at amplified music events can give young adults the damaged hearing acuity of middle-aged factory workers. Parents are sold toys capable of damaging their children’s hearing by an industry free of regulation. Annoyance and resentment result from neighbourhood conflicts about parties and music in parks and yards, from the wording of bylaws, and from their enforcement or lack of it.
Even physical health is put at risk by the soundscape of worldwide economic progress, as urban density and traffic increase to amplify stress and interrupt sleep. Because we grow up with a background of mechanical roars and crashes as well as the soundtracks of broadcast urgency, we learn that they are “normal”. Normal does not mean entirely safe, however. Our refined biological alarm systems can be in constant overdrive as a result of ambient urban and mechanical soundscapes as they contribute to a host of stress-related insults to health: anxiety, muscle tension, headaches, insomnia, irritability, fatigue. Like the noise, these conditions have become normal, especially in racialized and impoverished urban districts. Thus, awareness of sound carries an element of social justice, an imperative to provide accessible havens of quiet in neighbourhoods that are also in need of affordable housing and nourishing food.
Of course, sound can also heal: the voices of natural habitats are effective remedies for stress and emotional ills, as well as indicators of environmental health. Conversation is now recognized as a human need, its necessity brought into focus by the emergency of pandemic isolation. Music has been praised for millennia as a potent healer. Silence, a mainstay of spiritual practices and a technique for resistance to oppression, creates space for the mind or spirit’s inner voice to convey its wisdom. My students in a course on sound as communication at the University of Calgary, assigned this year to go on solitary soundwalks without their usual earbuds and report what they observe and feel, describe their love for the crunch of October leaves underfoot and the way their footsteps produce rhythm to enhance delight in being outdoors.
Conscious listening enriches life, making us more aware of its beauty and complexity. It can help at this time to distinguish what we need from what we would be better off without, and to imagine a future world in full health and some measure of harmony. May the events of 2020 – fires, floods, viruses, extinction of species – finally lead us to listen to the states of nature and societies, and strive to repair the damage done by the relentless drives of the anthropocene age. May we listen intently and learn again to hear this planet and its varied inhabitants in robust voice.
Marcia Jenneth Epstein is a musicologist and historian at the University of Calgary.
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