Noisesome Noises

Jacob Bronowski

Are the excess decibels of our Technotopia driving you up the proverbial wall?

My Merriam Webster dates the phrase “noise pollution” to 1966. I no longer find even the jangling traffic noise of Gershwin’s “American in Paris” agreeable. A British acoustic engineer (what a necessary but dismal profession!) named Trevor Cox from Salford University decided to do something about our unsound malaise. He set up a website and gave his potential readers thirty-four abysmal contemporary sounds to rate as to detestability. 1.1 million hits responded to his Shit Parade of Sounds: (Guardian, 11/24/07). Reported by Ian Sample, their science correspondent. The envelope, please:

> Vomiting (for clinical reasons, an actor simulated this noise with a bucket of diluted baked beans!)
> Microphone Squeals
> Babies Squalling (Men scored this much higher than women. As a new father at 79, I find these “noises” signs of life and adorable But I know what they mean, when I hear the mean neighbors..)
> Trains scraping their own rails. (Perhaps skewed by too many Brit train spotters!)
> Squeaky Seesaws. (Hell, I remember that being half the not much fun to begin with.)
> Poorly played violins. (Esthetic violinse?)
> Whoopie Cushions.
> Arguments on Soap Operas!
> Electricity mains humming.
> Tasmanian Devils. (This is either a bad Aussie joke, or a total mystery.)

Tied for eleventh were dentists' drills and scraping blackboards. There was an age factor here: under 10’s and 40 to 50’s rated drills highly, probably from their frequency of appointments.

Cat howling and mobile phones tied at 12th. Not in my acoustic universe. Phones are by far the greatest acoustical evil of the twenty-first century.

Sniffling was rated 15th. (That never bothered me at all.)

There’s an anthropological element in the scraping blackboards at 16th. They remind many of the danger cries of monkeys? I remember hating the blackboard scraping, as it accompanied my teachers disciplining me with public writing assignments.

No matter what your druthers, here, you must agree that noise is one of the greatest afflictions of our high tech existence. Heh, what’s to do?

The BBC World Service has been running a fascinating series for insomniacs. (It also runs on WHYY-FM in the middle of the night.) You can podcast the series at bbc.co.uk.com. One I especially liked concerned a roving reading teacher in New York City who was disturbed by the way the subway noise was damaging the reading skills of her elementary classes. She found that on the side of the school abutting the clanking train, students were a whole grade inferior to their peers on the side of the school away from that noise. And she did something about it. She harassed the subway people until they capitulated and put acoustic tiles in the noisy side, bringing those young uns reading skills up to speed.

The BBC is under intense fire at the moment, as they are lobbying for a hefty raise in the annual TV tax. My wife and I pay German public television $200 euros a year for the privilege of its two channels. The Brits are being thumped for almost twice that amount for five channels. Paul Dacre, the contentious editor of “The Daily Mail” is fighting mad about the unfair edge Beeb has over its competitors (namely him!) It has 3500 journalists and support staff--more than all the national dailies put together! With a budget of 500 million pounds: a billion dollars at current rates. He accuses them of “Cultural Marxism”—with a spurious “figleaf of impartiality”.

Mebbe so. But when I worked at Time Life Films (1968-72) I found the Beeb’s intellectual standards miles ahead of even most of our public TV and radio operatives.(Bill Moyers was, and still is, the Big League exception.) I still remember the rushes Jacob Bronowksi showed us at Ealing in July 1972 for his new series. He explained how he didn’t want to do television. He wanted to write more polymathic books like his science and William Blake classics.

But Aubrey Singer, then head of special projects, kept up a drum beat of his social responsibility: it was his mitzvah to bring the BBC the best TV. Bronowski told us how he had to sit at the feet of Kenneth Macgowan, the network’s premiere cameraman, to learn how you taught on TV. When the rushes were over, and we were babbling friendly nothings, I told him this reminded me of my favorite William Blake aphorism: “He who would do me good must do it in minute particulars!” His eyes blazed: ”Precisely. Precisely.”

And the eggheads running The Third Programme weren’t Marxists, they were Jewish refugees from Vienna, like Stephen Hearst and Martin Esslin. An analogous experience contrasted America’s use of its eggheads in public broadcasting. Newton “The Vast Wasteland” Minow, FCC Chairman for JFK and LBJ assembled a blue ribbon panel of social scientists—Gary Becker from Chicago, Ithiel de Sola Pool from MIT, Bernard Berelson from Columbia and me (a gofer stand-in for Gilbert Seldes, then dean of the new Annenberg School) to advise them on updating the license renewal application forms. Trouble was none of these American eggheads had the foggiest idea that the stations took their renewals as pro forma jokes.

I only knew because Tom Jones, then the stealth intellectual at Walter Annenberg’s WFIL-TV, had been teaching me how to shoot and edit TV cultural news on the weekends when Temple prof John Roberts was filling in. Minow stuck his head into our meeting room and thanked us profusely—for nothing, for not knowing what they should have to formulate sound policy. That’s the day I started doubting Social Science.

The BBC is worth its money, in spite of what the Daily Mail’s editor whines. Even its international radio series keep au courant with series like the current one on Noisesome Noise.