There's a scene in How The Grinch Stole Christmas where the Grinch is explaining to his hapless dog Max why he simply must stop Christmas from coming to Whoville. Being a grinchy sort, he hates all the good will and the presents and stuff, but what really gets him, he says (in that great Boris Karloff voice) is 'the noise, noise, noise, NOISE!' There follow a bunch of animated clips of the Whos down in Whoville playing their Seussian musical instruments and creating an impressive racket.
I gotta say, I sympathize with the Grinch. Not just about Christmas but about the noise. Physicists and information theorists talk about signal (the information you want) and noise (the extraneous stuff surrounding the information you want). Acoustic noise, the noise we're talking about in our Sound Off series, is analogous to physical noise - it gets in the way and obscures the information you want if you don't figure out how to filter it out. And I find that I'm really bad at filtering. Fortunately, like most people, I find I can get used to almost anything, over time.
When I first moved into my dorm my freshman year at Fordham, my room faced the Conrail train tracks. That first night, I thought I'd go mad - trains would thunder by on the express track, or rumble to a stop and then gather steam (well, not real steam, but you know what I mean) if they stopped at the Fordham Road local station. But by the end of the week, the noise was no longer a problem. And in the City That Never Sleeps, that may be the only way any of us gets any sleep.
The irony of this situation is - the noises that bother you the most, that keep you awake at night, are the ones you just don't hear enough. So it seems we have two solutions: one, all noise, all the time, so we get used to it and don't have it ruining our lives; or two, people being a lot more considerate of each other. The bar on the corner of my block now has signs in all its windows asking patrons who step outside for a smoke (another reason noise complaints are up) to keep their voices down while outside so as not to disturb the neighbors. And it seems to work. Hopefully, it'll be an idea that catches on...
Tell us: What noises have you had to deal with - whether successfully or not?
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John Schaefer has hosted Soundcheck since the show’s inception in 2002. He has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (“The No. 1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986.
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