Field Noise Transmissions: Recent Episodes

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Moe Asch wanted to record everything. So when he started Folkways Records in 1949, he didn’t act like a major label record executive—he acted like an archivist. He didn’t charge musicians to use his recording studio—you could just walk in. His records didn’t come in glossy packaging—they came in rough cardboard and plastic sleeves with photocopied liner notes. And he wasn’t just interested in folk music, or even “music” at all. He wanted to have recordings of animals and car races and steam locomotives and kids singing at summer camp:

These kinds of sounds—what we might now think of as sound effects or soundscapes or ambiences—were actually not hard to find on vinyl in the 1950s. Thanks to the development of hi-fi stereo systems and magnetic tape recorders, there was a boom in the marketplace for recordings of…almost anything. These recordings were often packaged into what were called “demonstration discs,” compilations of field recordings, mechanical noises, and/or bombastic pieces of classical music (lots of Wagner, obviously) meant to push your home stereo to its limits. (The classic article on this, which highlights the masculine nature of stereo obsession, is Kier Keightley’s “‘Turn It down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59.”) Here’s a good example of a demonstration record, produced by Decca in 1958:

Folkways contributed to this genre but also reinvented it. Asch grouped recordings like this into what he called the “Science Series,” which was both a literal and and aspirational title. Some recordings were quite scientific, others were more, shall we say, creative in their approach, yet were passed off as having scientific legitimacy. The most famous of these is certainly Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America, which played in the American Museum of Natural History in the early 1950s to accompany an exhibit on a Peruvian tribe—even though it did not include a single recording made in Peru. I have written about this record and its history in Folkways Magazine, where I argued that by editing nature recordings in this tape collage style, and eventually removing the narrators, Asch created what is in many ways the template for “nature sound records” from the 1960s through today. And I still think that’s the case.

I have been fascinated with the Folkways Science Series for years, so needless to say it is a pleasure when I find someone else who wants to talk about it. One of those people is Brian Hirsch, a neighbor of mine who I met in a nearby park—me out for a walk with my toddler and him with his Pomeranian. (If there is an upside to a global pandemic, it might be getting to meet all of your neighbors with dogs and kids.) I think I was wearing my Folkways hat and Brian happens to host a folk radio show on a community radio station. He has been involved in music scenes for a long time as a player, booker, and live sound engineer.

So we struck up a conversation. As is often the case, I had to explain that my interest in Folkways actually had very little to do with folk music. Brian nodded politely, because he is a decent person, but he also seemed genuinely interested. He asked me to be a guest on his radio show, to talk about the non-folk music of Folkways records.

So I did that. I talked about some of my favorites from the series, and Brian edited in example sound clips. You can hear the audio in the player above, but if you want to do some further sonic exploration, here are Spotify links to the records we talked about:

Charles Bogert, Sounds of North American Frogs

Sound Patterns

Tony Schwartz, New York 19

John C. Lilly, Sounds and Ultrasounds of the Bottle-Nose Dolphin

Sounds of New Music

Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America, and another link to the article I wrote about this record.

Let me know what you think—and if you have any old and weird environmental records or demonstration discs lying around. I’m always up for hearing and learning more.

Talk soon,Craig

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The audio above is a “remix” of a 1979 version of Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale that was pressed onto a “Flexi disc” and accompanied an essay he wrote in National Geographic magazine. I edited excerpts from that recording with additional whale songs, sound effects, and music from Blue Dot Sessions. This week’s newsletter is a deep dive (that’s right) into whale songs and other other underwater recordings.

2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Songs of the Humpback Whale, an album that gives listeners exactly what the title promises: underwater recordings of whales. It was an unlikely hit, especially on college campuses, and brought the haunting and beautiful cries of these ocean mammals into living rooms and dorm rooms across the country. To this day, even though I have heard it dozens of time, it’s still hard to believe that the sounds are real.

There are many fascinating stories around Songs, but I have always been interested in how this record—and other recordings made with underwater microphones called hydrophones—completely shattered the notion that the sea was silent. Renowned oceanographer Jacques Cousteau made that idea his entire brand; his landmark 1952 underwater documentary was called Le Monde du Silence, The Silent World.

But now there was strong evidence otherwise. In the middle of the twentieth century, the ocean went from being silent to being a vast switchboard or concert hall, where important communications and otherworldly music reverberated just outside of human earshot.

The first audible hints of this revelation can be traced back to the 1940s. According to Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us—winner of the 1952 National Book Award for nonfiction—the United States Navy set up a network of hydrophones in the Chesapeake Bay to detect submarines. But in the spring of 1942, that system was overwhelmed and rendered useless by a sound that hydrophone operators described as “a pneumatic drill tearing up pavement.” Soon the sailors realized that the sounds belonged to members of the appropriately named croaker family of fish.

These sounds remained a military secret and were largely unknown to the public for a decade, but shortly after Carson's written account of what a hydrophone could capture, Folkways Records released the unofficial soundtrack: Sounds of the Sea Vol. 1: Underwater Sounds of Natural Origin, recorded by the Naval Research Laboratory. The sounds had gone public, and they were, in a word, surprising.

In the liner notes for the album, C.W. Coates writes, “to think of fishes making noises, holding conversations, so to speak, warning each other or courting each other, as we think of birds singing to each other, is an idea which seems as strange as it well can be...fishes would appear to be among the most silent of all inhabitants of the globe.”

So Jacques Cousteau was pissed. In his 1953 book, also called The Silent World, he railed against these recordings as fundamentally unnatural, not representative of the way a human being actually experiences the underwater soundscape:

"The sea is a most silent world. I say this deliberately on long accumulated evidence and aware that wide publicity has recently been made on the noises of the sea. Hydrophones have recorded clamors that have been sold as phonographic curiosa, but the recordings have been grossly amplified. It is not the reality of the sea as we know it with naked ears. There are noises underwater, very interesting ones that the sea transmits exceptionally well, but divers do not hear boiler factories."

Unfortunately for Cousteau, this ship had already sailed. Much of the record-buying public seemed less interested in how these recorded sounds corroborated with human experience than how they corroborated anecdotal, fictional, and mythological stories about hearing odd sounds at sea. For all of their crackle and static, hydrophone recordings deepened the mysteries of ocean sounds that stretch as far back as Homer’s sirens. One reviewer wrote, “Recordings of underwater sounds of biological origin would have little meaning if we were content to file them simply as a document of science. Yet when related to the past, they stand for more than this: they stamp with absolute authenticity some of the wildest dreams of our ancestors; they corroborate our prophets; they stand back of our poets.”

This sea change (did it!) in our cultural understanding of ocean sounds corresponded with an even broader change in how “nature” records were packaged and sold at this time. Albums like Sounds of the Sea reflect a 1950s “scientific” paradigm, where the specifics of the recordings were extremely important. Check out this track listing, filled with species names, depths, and locations:

But by the end of the 1960s, that model had been almost wholly replaced by things like this:

At the bottom of that image you’ll see, “Side 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.” One track, no location information, very few details. This was the Environments series, which collapsed all nature sounds into representative and generic samples: seashore, rainforest, waterfall. The American environmental movement of the 1960s, driven mad by jet engine noise and armed with the new language of ecology, redefined “noise” as a kind of pollution and “quiet” as a natural resource and even a human right. The result was a notion of nature that was both ecological but also profoundly individual to the point of being interior and psychological. Also, as it turned out, records like this sounded even better if you were on drugs.

This was the cultural moment that Songs of the Humpback Whale emerged into, and was probably the reason why it the best-selling album over the 1970 Christmas season at the Harvard Co-op. But even though the album was part of this new psyched-out nature record moment, its origins were still in naval research and the biological sciences. Though the album is widely credited to American biologist Roger Payne, most of the recordings were done by Navy hydrophone technician Frank Watlington off the coast of Bermuda. Depending on who is telling the story, the recordings were made sometime between 1958 and 1964 and shared with Roger Payne and his wife Katy sometime between 1964 and 1966. Katy and Roger were traveling to Bermuda to conduct their own research and recordings of whale populations, which at this time were in severe decline due to commercial whaling. In a story that Katy has told, Watlington kept these recordings private and shared them with the Paynes specifically to “go save the whales.” And, in many ways, they did.

Even if Songs of the Humpback Whale was good to get high to, it was framed specifically as a way to raise awareness to the plight of the whales and other marine mammals. The music and the message almost immediately took hold in the cultural imagination, especially among musicians. Within months of its release in 1970, selections from Songs of a Humpback Whale had been incorporated into "And God Created Great Whales," a composition by Alan Hovaness, and "Farewell to Tarwathie," a Celtic whaling ballad recorded by folk singer Judy Collins. In 1977, the whale songs actually left earth as part of the Voyager Golden Record. And in 1978, Kate Bush used twenty seconds of Payne's recordings to open her debut album, The Kick Inside.

But for all of their environmental rootedness, the songs of the humpback whale remained to most ears decidedly otherworldly. Songs of the Humpback Whale was almost universally compared to two things: the sounds of electronic music and the sounds of outer space. One reviewer noted that whale songs sounded “so completely otherworldly that they might have been radioed back to earth from a Soviet rocket probe that landed on Venus.” Another reviewer put it more succinctly: “if you didn't know better you would think they the sounds were electronic.” Much like the earlier hydrophone records before them, whale song records were not—could not—be understood in reference to the way they sound to human ears out in the world; they could only be understood in relation to other kinds of recorded sound and music. Unlike Cousteau, few of us have access to the undersea “silent world.” Instead, we dwell on the surface, where underwater sounds remain a strange and beautiful and unknowable music.

Thanks for listening, and talk soon,

Craig

Note: Much of this material is repurposed from a presentation I gave in 2014 at the IASPM-US academic music conference. And if you made it this far, please share with a friend, colleague, or family member who think might dig it. Seeing new people sign up for the newsletter is the fuel that keeps this project afloat (couldn’t resist!).

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Introducing Human Powered

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of Human Powered, a six-episode podcast miniseries that introduces you to people tackling hard problems through community-oriented projects. It’s a show about people making places better.

The show is a collaboration between me and the Wisconsin Humanities Council, who have supported these projects through grants. From discussion groups to photo exhibits to writing clubs to community gardens, these projects demonstrate how the tools and methods of the humanities can be used to address some of the most pressing issues of our time: racism, poverty, climate change, human trafficking, food access, and indigenous knowledge.

A short preview for the series is out today, with the first full episode coming out on September 1st. You can listen at the link above, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, then you can really help us out by leaving a 5-star rating and/or hitting the subscribe button so that you can get the first episode as soon as it comes out.

In the preview and the first episode you’ll meet Tracey Robertson, a Black woman who moved from Chicago to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and found the city less than welcoming. It seemed like everyone in town had the same assumptions about why Black people moved there: either to be closer to the nearby prison because a friend or family member was incarcerated there, or to “escape the ghettos” of Chicago and Milwaukee. But Tracey was from an upper-middle-class Chicago suburb—certainly not “the ghetto”—and had no connection to the prison. And the more people of color of she met, the more she realized just how far off these assumptions were. So she started a series of community conversations around race, and then organized and curated a photo exhibit showcasing people of color—hoping to literally change the way people in Oshkosh see their neighbors.

Tracey Robertson in her office in Oshkosh, WI. Photo by LotusFly Photography.As someone with an advanced degree in the humanities, I’m a firm believer that humanities tools and ways of thinking—historical research, textual analysis, critical thinking, creativity, storytelling—are more important than ever as we try to confront complex social problems. I’m also excited, and cautiously optimistic, that we approached these problems for this series not only from our positions as academics or administrators or media producers, but instead gave priority to the people on the ground doing the work—many of whom are people of color or from otherwise marginalized communities. I was incredibly inspired by the stories that I heard and continue to hear as I produce this show, and I hope you’ll be inspired as well.

I know it’s only three minutes of audio, but feel free to let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more episodes throughout the fall. And I’m excited to start a larger conversation with the first episode in a few weeks.

Talk soon,

Craig

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Earlier in the quarantine, I had a chance to talk to three really interesting music scholars on the relationship between music and viruses, ranging from playful tunes that go viral, like “Baby Shark,” to serious music about viruses, like Bob Ostertag’s piece about AIDS, “All the Rage.” As Paula Harper told me, “There are some ways in which familiarity with the viral circuitry of our contemporary digital lives might help people take things seriously when it comes to the virus operating in our current moment, across the world.”

This is shaping up to be podcast episode number two, which I hope to have out in a few weeks, maybe sooner. Thanks for your patience and support. You can click subscribe right now in your app of choice to be sure you get it right when it drops.

And you can listen to a four-minute preview right now by pushing the play button at the top of this email.

90s Nostalgia: Belly

Speaking of music, my favorite 90s rock band is Belly. They were grungy, poppy, and wonderful, and they only put out two full length albums: 1993’s Star, a certified goddamn masterpiece, and 1995’s King, which is very good. They had two hits off of Star, one of which was the undeniably catchy “Gepetto”:

I also like a Belly song called “Thief,” which was on the soundtrack to the movie Tank Girl. And that, I thought, was that: two albums and this other song.

So, this week I was listening to “Thief” and thinking, “this song is just too good to have only been released on the Tank Girl soundtrack. A quick Google search—like, this took me two seconds, I can’t believe I never did it earlier—took me to the Discogs page of the Now They’ll Sleep EP , which has not only “Thief,” but also two other songs I hadn’t heard before.

This sent me spiraling. It turns out that Belly, in true pre-Napster glory, released a ridiculous number of EPs, CD Maxi Singles, and “remix” records, almost all of which contain at least one original song that didn’t make the cut for one of their albums. What makes all of this even more personally frustrating is that many of these songs were collected for their 2002 greatest hits album, which is structured more like an odds ’n’ends collection than a true “greatest hits.” In other words, I have been alive for way too long without knowing about these songs. So, some weird part of my brain took over and I made this spreadsheet of what I think is every song Belly released between 1991 and 1996. Please, PLEASE, let me know if I am missing something. Something like “Spaceman,” from the Seal My Fate EP:

Now, it’s hard to imagine a band low-key releasing a dozen non-album tracks like this in the streaming era, where every song is playlisted and monetized and YouTubed and where “secret albums” have become the norm. The act of going to a record store to collect every bit of a band’s recorded ephemera seems downright quaint, even romantic, but of course, that too was motivated by sales. One-off releases often had “special” and/or “bonus” tracks as a way to make repackaged material more appealing to consumers. This includes putting new songs on greatest hits records—has there ever been a “new” greatest hits song as popular as “Mary Jane's Last Dance”?—to songs that are exclusive to specific formats, like vinyl-only tracks. As I discovered, the reason my vinyl copy of Counting Crows’ This Desert Life is worth so much is because it has “Baby, I’m a Big Star Now” as a bonus track, a song that to this day has never been released in the US on any other format.

So, while it was fun to revisit this kind of 90s nostalgia, I’m still sort of glad to be alive right now, as I was able to, um, “acquire” all of these Belly songs thanks to the good people of the internet.

Noise in the News

Researchers in Singapore have developed a window unit that acts like “noise cancelling headphones for your entire apartment.” Right now it is unwieldy at best—24 speakers!—but it sort of gets the job done. Here is the NYT summary and the original paper. It reminds me a little of a project in “destructive interference” that General Electric did with a bell in Myanmar, a project that was inspired by a UW–Madison student:

On the other hand, if you want to listen to the sound coming in from windows, then click over to WindowSwap, which is a completely G-rated (promise!) experience of looking out of other people’s windows from all over the world. I’ve spent some time in India, France, and the UK just this morning. These are video recordings, not real-time streams, and not all of them have sound, but the majority do. In “these times,” as we must dutifully say, I actually find it a really a wonderful and evocative experience. Thanks to Marcia Epstein for bringing this to my attention.

I was excited by this headline, which I thought promised some cool inter-cellular sound-making: “This Ancient Sea Creature Builds Its Body With a Whisper, Not a Scream.” Turns out those were simply sonic metaphors for cell signaling, a visual process that is studied under a microscope. However, it got me to google “biological sonification” or something like that, and I found a professor turning DNA sequences into very awkward musical phrases. Here is “An auditory display tool for DNA sequence analysis 03”:

It’s a Date

Not sure if you noticed, but this is the fourth Field Noise newsletter you’ve gotten this month, and the last three have been on Fridays. If you did notice, congrats—you have indeed deciphered my publication schedule. For the near future, expect a mix like what you’ve gotten this month: music and podcast recommendations, short essays / think pieces, links to audio work in progress, etc. The next step is to also get the podcast up and running again on a more regular schedule.

Once that happens, my plan is to turn on the paid subscription options for this newsletter, which means some posts will be for “subscribers only” while the majority will stay free. The goal is to generate some revenue to keep these projects afloat—and I’d like to try to make that happen here on Substack as opposed to Patreon, because I’m enjoying writing and am optimistic that we could build a little community here. Please feel free to share this newsletter with others who might be interested.

Nothing is changing in the short term, though. I will give you plenty of notice and deliver a lot more free content before I ask you for money. Thanks for reading and listening—and remember you can always hit reply to leave a comment or drop me a line.

Talk soon, Craig

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The story of jazz is a story of migrations: the transatlantic slave trade, the Great Migration, the exile of South African musicians during Apartheid. Many of these migrations, of course, were forced—part of the colonialist and capitalist projects that relied on people as property or defined them as being less than human. People carried music with them as they went, and much of this music is African in origin. It includes jazz, but is by no means limited to it—in fact, much of what we think of as popular music in the United States no longer points back to European musical traditions, but African ones. As Ron Radano has argued, “we are all African when we listen.”

Even though you won’t hear my voice in it, I co-produced the most recent episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK) with Anne Strainchamps and Sara Guyer. The episode is a collaboration between their two respective organizations, TTBOOK and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). You can listen by clicking the play button above, or you can find the show on the TTBOOK website or in your podcast app of choice.

Those organizations have a history of collaboration, but they also have another thing in common: I used to work for both of them. So while I hope you’ll enjoy this episode on its own merits, I also wanted to share the backstory to this collaboration—which, if things go well, should last until at least 2024…!

Six years ago, I moved to Wisconsin for a job at To the Best of Our Knowledge. It was a major leap for me in two ways. For starters, it was my fourth geographical move in three years (part of the early-career-academic hustle), but more importantly, it was a move away from that academic career into the world of public radio. It wasn’t too much of a stretch, of course; I had been studying the history of sound and sound recording technologies and also taking classes in audio production. I knew some history, I also knew Pro Tools. It was a logical fit.

Those two years at TTBOOK were eye- and ear-opening. I met some amazing people, heard some amazing stories, and saw the amazing work required to make a weekly radio show. I also saw the less-than-amazing bureaucracy that keeps a large machine like Wisconsin Public Radio running year-to-year.

When my two-year contract was up, the right job for me didn’t exist at WPR, so I moved back into academic work, sort of. I joined the staff at the UW–Madison Center for the Humanities. This work felt meaningful, and exciting, and also a little bit familiar—I was running the programs and dishing out the small grants that were very much like the programs and small grants I got as a grad student. Soon, due to some organizational reshuffling, I found myself working for the CHCI, a global network of humanities centers. That job was also great, in different ways, but in a classic case of “the grass is always greener,” I decided I missed radio. So I left that job and started freelancing. That was two years ago.

Before I left, the idea for doing some collaborative humanities projects with TTBOOK had been discussed at CHCI, and in fact, the Center for the Humanities was already regularly contributing guests to the show. But the idea was something on a bigger scale, a series of shows around some of the academic projects and ideas that CHCI was developing, many of them outside of the United States. Everyone agreed that we needed to bring some of these international perspectives to bear on the current issues facing so many across the globe: the rise of populism and the crises facing democracy, global climate change, efforts at “decolonizing” university systems, and rethinking the entire project of teaching and academic knowledge production. Not coincidentally, many of these topics are the ones currently being explored in CHCI’s Global Humanities Institutes.

Thanks to Steve Paulson and Anne Strainchamps and the whole staff at TTBOOK, we’re able to share these ideas in a much less academic context and expand the scope of people involved to include the artists and thinkers and writers whose interviews have long been the backbone of TTBOOK. I’m honored to be a co-producer / editor / writer / wearer-of-many-hats on this collaboration. We’re hoping to do several episodes a year for the next several years thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

These episodes will be trickling out periodically on TTBOOK and then will be bundled into podcast miniseries at the end of the year. “Jazz Migrations” is from the first series, which we’re calling Voices from Africa. The material is inspired by a conference held in Addis Ababa last year, but also expands well beyond that. I’d love to know what you think—you can always just reply to this email with your thoughts.

Thanks for listening, and talk soon,

Craig

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For the last several months I’ve been working with documentary filmmaker Finn Ryan on an episode of the Field Noise podcast about the noise from F-16 fighter jets over our neighborhood and the public responses to that noise. But as we were gathering material for the story, the Air Force proposed replacing the F-16s with the newer, and much louder, F-35s. Subsequently, Finn and I have found ourselves attending meetings, talking to people and politicians, and, inevitably, taking a side. The clip above is Alder Syed Abbas speaking out against the F-35 at a public meeting on September 12, 2019. And the following newsletter is my attempt to clear up what I find to be some very frustrating sticking points in the public debate about just how loud these new jets will be. Even if you are nowhere near Madison, you might be interested in how the FAA and the Air Force measure jet noise—and what that means for people living around airports.

This month, the city of Madison, Wisconsin, woke up to jet noise. I mean, we wake up to jet noise every day, from the FedEx cargo planes to the commercial flights to the F-16 fighter jets. These jets come in and out of Dane County Regional Airport and nearby Truax Air Force Base, a small but not insignificant airstrip tucked into an area just north and east of our isthmus.

But over the last few weeks, public unease with the sonic impact of a proposal to replace those F-16s with the newer F-35s has evolved from a low murmur into something resembling a full-throated outcry. The Air Force’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), released in August, details significant increases in noise that would occur in the residential areas surrounding the airport. A subsequent analysis by the City of Madison shows that the noise would largely impact lower-income households and people of color. Just in the last week, there has been significant criticism of the plan at both local and federal meetings, alongside, of course, people voicing their support.

Far from being a hyperlocal problem, the debates here in Madison echo larger issues about the difficulty of measuring, discussing, or even defining noise, especially as it relates to planes. In the case of Madison’s proposed F-35s, the conversation largely centers on a map that appears in several forms in both the EIS and the Madison reports. While some people at the public hearings argued that the map represents a “worst case scenario,” the map is actually—and, perhaps, deliberately—both vague and misleading when it comes to how these jets will actually sound to people in Madison. Spoiler: it’s gonna get loud.

At first glance, the map appears straightforward: there are rings of noise levels moving out from the runways into the surrounding area. These “noise contours” range from over 85 decibels (dB) down to 65 dB and below, with 65 dB being the noise threshold that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) considers “significant.”

But what are we actually looking at here?

First of all, we are looking at a model. Not just because it is predicting possible future noise, but because no noise measurements have ever been taken in this geographic area. Instead, noise made by individual jets (like an F-35, or a Boeing 737) is measured somewhere else, under a variety of conditions, in takeoff, flight, and landing. These measurements are then compiled into a model for that particular aircraft, and then the models for all aircrafts in use at an airport are applied to that airport, based on the daily schedule of actual and proposed flights. That’s how this map was drawn.

Secondly, we are looking at averages. The scale here is “DNL,” or Day-Night Level, a metric used by the FAA that represents the average noise level over a 24 hour period, in decibels. As the FAA illustrates on their website, there are many ways to arrive at a number like 65dB DNL, ranging from 1 extremely loud thing to 100 (!!) pretty darn loud things:

Thirdly, we are looking at a logarithmic scale. A increase in 10dB actually means a tenfold increase in pressure; an increase of 20db means 100 times as much pressure. Now, decibels are a measurement of air pressure, not perceived volume (a point we’ll return to), which is to say, a difference in 20db will not sound 100x louder to our ears. And to account for this difference, decibels in this instance and many others are “A-weighted,” which is an attempt to account for human hearing. But either way, it means that as this scale goes up, things are getting really, really loud.

What makes the FAA’s use of this scale even more insidious is this graphic comparing jet noise levels to that of household items or everyday experiences:

The Madison news media has pounced on these comparisons, saying in multiple articles that the noise experienced by people living within the 65 dB noise contour would be equivalent to “running a vacuum cleaner.” And in fact, this language is used repeatedly in articles about jet noise, making the noise seem like a minor inconvenience. In one public comment I heard, a man said something like, “I don’t like it when my wife runs the vacuum for a bit during the Packers’ game, but that’s a small inconvenience for our safety.”

But to get to the sound of a vacuum cleaner as an average, his wife would have to run the vacuum not just during the entire game, but all day every day: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Alternately, that same man could experience 100 events per day that are significantly louder than his vacuum cleaner and he would still fall within the 65dB range.

So DNL tells us nothing about the frequency and duration of loud events that people will experience, but it turns out that frequency and duration are two of the most important factors that determine whether or not people find sounds “noisy.” The DNL ignores over 50 years of research in which scientists have observed that volume is not the only metric people use to define noise. By 1966, psychoacoustic researcher Karl Kryter—who spent 10 years as the Director of the Operational Applications Laboratory at the Air Force—could already assert that “the loudness of a sound as defined by physical measurements does not usually correspond with its loudness and noisiness as judged subjectively” [source].

The reasons people consider sounds noisy vary, but include things like what they were doing when they heard it, whether they were home or at work, what their job is, whether they were awake or asleep, how long the sound went on, whether or not they have an emotional or personal connection to the sound, and more. In other words, noise is human and cultural, not—or certainly not only—the province of scientific modeling and decibel measurements. One person’s music can be another person’s noise.

It’s tempting, then, to dismiss noise as an individual problem—but in fact it is and always has been a collective one. Even Karl Kryter could see that: “It is a matter of equities. This factor cannot be judged on a scientific basis; it is a matter of opinion concerning the rights of individuals to be protected from nuisances, and the welfare of the community as a whole.”

It’s been interesting to hear Madisonians speak out for the welfare of our communities this week. Will the Air Force listen?

Stay tuned for “The Sound of Freedom” on this season of the Field Noise podcast, and be sure to follow Field Noise on Instagram for short videos of sounds in the world.

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