Why Noise Pollution Is More Dangerous Than We Think

[paper crumpling]

A pair of musician's earplugs.

Silicone earplugs.

Sleep buds.

Pluggers.

Hear phones.

When all else fails these are hearing aids.

I'm not really quite ready for it yet

but I have a pair.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about hearing loss.

I have a connection with hearing loss.

My grandmother when she was a young woman,

a suitor took her hunting in a boat

and rested his shotgun on her shoulder.

And fired and deafened her for the rest of her life.

The more I learned about it the more I was amazed.

Not only how hearing works but also that I could still hear

at all given all the bad things that I had done

to my ears through especially in my adolescence.

All the firecrackers that my friends

and I threw at each other.

All the rock concerts that we went to.

All the lawns that I mowed without

any kind of hearing protection.

It's phenomenal given that we evolved

in a completely different sound environment.

It's astonishing that our ears,

anybody's ears work at all.

People who live in New York live surrounded by sound.

You walk down the street there's a siren going by.

There are idiots honking at people

who cannot be affected by a car.

There is somebody with a jackhammer tearing up

the street right next to you.

There are people playing music super loud.

We all kind of think of it

as you're walking down the street.

This is part of what makes New York cool.

But Les Blomberg,

founder of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse,

he said to me that if we could see

the sound that we generate it would look like litter.

It says that we were driving through

the countryside throwing things out of the car.

These noises both individual

and cumulatively have health impacts.

I went to see a group in Paris

that measures the noise pollution

in the Greater Paris area.

One of the things they found is that the loudest areas

are on the transportation paths.

So roadways, train lines, in the flight paths of airports.

People who live in those places have

a significantly higher incidence of a long list of diseases.

Diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure.

Sleeping problems, birth related problems.

Inability to pay attention at work.

Health consequences, life quality consequences

that arise just from being exposed to noise.

The people in Paris and the World Health Organization

have estimates of how much life

is actually lost as a result to sound.

It's measured in years and so

if you live in a noisy area

it actually has an impact on longevity.

In the 1970s up in Innwood

in the northern part of Manhattan

there is a elevated train track that's within

a couple hundred feet of the school

and it bothers the students.

They can't study.

Students on the side of the building that was closest

to the tracks by sixth grade were almost

a full year behind students on the quieter side

of the building in terms of their reading ability.

Every few minutes the teacher would have

to stop for 30 seconds because the train was so loud

that the students couldn't hear her.

The Transit Authority eventually installed

rubber pads between the rails.

The school put acoustic sound absorbing

acoustic tiles in the ceilings of the classrooms.

And remarkably the reading scores then rose again

to where they were the same on both sides of the building.

[school bell ringing]

The world before we came along was a much quieter,

much darker place.

Now over a relatively short period of time

basically since the Industrial Revolution

we've added these extraordinary stressors

to ourselves and then also to all

the other creatures in the world.

A number of years ago a group of scientists

in Idaho did an experiment on birds during migration season.

They played road noise through loud speakers.

[Woman] The road is about 700 meters long

and it's made out of 15 different speakers

that are all playing road noise at the same time.

And what they found was that it had a huge impact.

The number of birds fell by a significant percentage

and then even among birds that stayed

they put on less weight than they should have been

at that time of season.

And it wasn't even a very loud sound level.

I think to a New Yorker

it might almost have sounded soothing.

Where we have an even bigger impact on wildlife

is under the water where we can't see it in the oceans.

Creatures that live underwater they depend

on their hearing.

They can hear for hundreds hundreds of miles.

So sound can play a much more important part

for them than it does for humans.

There was a scientific study in Canada

where scientists were measuring levels

of stress hormones in whale poop.

They had trained dogs that could sniff whale poop over

the side of a boat and they were collecting it.

What they found was that there was

a sudden dramatic drop in the levels

of stress hormones in whale poop.

It dropped and then it picked up again

and what had happened in between was 9/11.

The world got very quiet.

Ocean shipping halted.

The noise levels in the ocean dropped

and when that human generated noise was gone stress levels

in those creatures fell.

The stress levels that they had been measuring

was not normal for those creatures.

It was something that was caused

by human sound generated under the sea.

Sound that we're not even aware of.

The sound of ships going by.

Overhead too ordinarily I'm not even aware

of airplanes flying overhead.

In the week after 9/11 I suddenly saw it is really quiet.

What's different?

And realized that air traffic had been halted.

And so this sound

that I had never really consciously noticed before.

As soon as it was gone

I realized how significant it had been.

[car horn honking]

One difficulty with sound once you decide

to regulate it is how you do it.

New York City has an immense sound ordinance

but is the city suddenly quieter than it was a decade ago

or 20 years ago?

It's very hard to enforce even strict requirements.

The police have to be trained in acoustics.

And they have to be equipped

with devices that enable them to do it.

They have to care enough to actually do it.

There's some researchers at NYU in a program called SONYC.

S O N Y C.

They're measuring sound levels in New York.

They have some sensors that they placed around

in various places in the city and they're adding more.

[slow electronic music]

With help from citizen scientists

you can go online and participate.

They're training algorithms to identify sound sources.

So their hope eventually is to have

a system that monitors sound levels in New York.

It can detect when sound levels

are higher than are supposed to be allowed.

And they can identify exactly what the source is

by having trained this algorithm to know

the difference between the jackhammer and a police siren.

When I was in Paris one of the researchers

that I was talking to said a single person

on a motorcycle in the middle

of the night riding across Paris

can wake up thousands of people.

And you see this one person on one device

at one moment in the night has this effect

on thousands of people.

They all wake up.

Maybe they can't go back to sleep.

They're not able to pay attention as well

and work the next day or at school the next day.

So just this one little act.

A careless act has consequences.

We think in terms of air pollution,

water pollution.

We don't think of these less tangible impacts

that we have but sound is one of them

and loud sound doesn't affect just us.

It also affects other living things.

[whale singing]

[dramatic music]