I've long been intrigued by the fact that poor and non-poor people have such different relationships to noise. I'm not talking about Victorian silence or library shushing, just about normal life. Poor people tend to live loudly, throw parties, play music, and squabble with each other. Middle-class folks don't, and they don't want their neighbors doing it either. They really, really don't want to live in the middle of cacophony.
This is not just a sociological curiosity, either. Why is it that so many middle-class folks hate the idea of Section 8 vouchers being available for nearby apartments? Sure, some of it is racism, some of it is fear of drugs. But a large part of it is noise. Middle-class apartment dwellers are convinced that if poor people move in next door they're going to have to put up with nonstop yelling, whooping, partying, loud music playing, and so forth. Their lives will be ruined.
That's one side of the story, anyway, and it's one I empathize with since I'm a middle-class guy who prefers that my neighbors wind down their parties by midnight. But what does it look like from the other side? In the Atlantic this month, Xochitl Gonzalez talks about his freshman year on an Ivy League campus:
Within a few weeks, the comfort that I and many of my fellow minority students had felt during those early cacophonous days had been eroded, one chastisement at a time. The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. A boisterous conversation would lead to a classmate knocking on the door with a “Please quiet down.” A laugh that went a bit too loud or long in a computer cluster would be met with an admonishment.
....I had taken the sounds of home for granted. My grandmother’s bellows from across the apartment, my friends screaming my name from the street below my window. The garbage trucks, the car alarms, the fireworks set off nowhere near the Fourth of July. The music. I had thought these were the sounds of poverty, of being trapped. I realized, in their absence, that they were the sounds of my identity, turned up to 11.
I imagine that if you were brought up in a noisy neighborhood, this feels natural. By contrast, a quiet, middle-class neighborhood seems a little creepy, as if you were living in a library. Where is everybody? What are they doing? Why is it so damn silent?
The folks raised in quiet families feel just the opposite, of course. How can I think with all this crap going on? It's maddening! Will everyone please just shut up? Gonzalez again:
I find many city noises nerve-racking and annoying: jackhammers doing street maintenance, the beeping of reversing trucks, cars honking for no good reason. Yet these noises account for a small minority of all noise complaints. Nearly 60 percent of recent grievances center on what I’d consider lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. But one person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy. As my grandmother used to say, “I’m not yelling, this is just how I tawk!”
I'm not sure what to say about all this. Except for one thing: Don't constantly shush people around sleeping babies. Let them learn to sleep with a normal amount of noise surrounding them. They'll thank you when they grow up.
The first time I went to the Tenement Museum in New York, while waiting for our guided tour, my older son and I saw a video about German immigration in the 19th century (when all of my German great-grandparents came to the US). We were greatly amused by a series of quotes from newspapers of the time, about the awful loud music of the German immigrants, about their disturbance of ‘the Lord’s day’ in their raucous beer gardens, and their refusal to learn English. Heh.
My grandparents Lutheran church still had services in German until the 70s.
We used to spend one or two weeks a month in Montréal with our daughter and granddaughters; we attended St. John’s Lutheran, which has both English and German services. Festivals were combined services mixing English, German and French. The then-pastor grew up in a German-speaking home in one of the prairie provinces. Montréal’s a great city.
I wish to log my complaint about movie theaters. Cranking the volume up to 11 and beyond. Some years back, before The Great Plague, I would report to one of the theater staff when the volume was too high and ask if they might turn it down... and it worked.
Now, forget it. You can go and beg for lower volume, but you'd better bring some serious earplugs, because they just nod and do nothing. The movies I go to have a good number of young children in the audience, whose hearing will be permanently damaged by the experience.
Agree. I won't go unless I have my industrial plugs on me.
Stay home and youtube, movies suck are too expensive too loud people are boorish etc.
Just go to a Sensory-friendly screening at AMC. Low volume, lights up, only mild disturbance by autism spectrum attendees wilding.
I've always labored to keep my noises within the walls of my house (or apartment, in my younger days), and I've always expected other people to do likewise within their houses.
Anything else, to me, is rude auditory trespass upon my living space.
I must be unusually adaptable. My preference is for peace and quiet, but I lived in Manila for five years on and off, where there's lots of noise from early morning to late at night. I soon adjusted. The only thing that really got to me was non-stop broadcasting of religious messages from church loudspeakers all through Lent. They could be heard for miles.
I also found the constant, infantile horn-blowing of New York drivers hard to take.
"I also found the constant, infantile horn-blowing of New York drivers hard to take."
Me too. My inlaws had a studio apartment near the UN that we stayed in sometimes. The first time, the constant honking took me several days to get used to. Then about 3 AM one Sunday morning, I woke up because it had suddenly stopped. The silence was deafening.
years ago, i spent a month in pasig, metro manilla. the only annoying night noise i recall were the incessant neighborhood roosters
Someone at college should realize that he lives next to people trying to study. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the "it's my home too and I'll scream and carry on if I want to" point of view on college dorm life. That strikes me as indistinguishable from the attitude that bodily autonomy trumps public health. In both cases, you're asserting your inalienable right to do whatever you want without regard for the impact it has on others. You do not now nor have you ever had the right to do that. A college dorm is first and foremost a COLLEGE dorm.
I concur 100%. Friday and Sat- ok to make some noise. Weeks nights it is just being rude to your neighbors. That’s the way it was in my college days at Public University with quite a bit of diversity.
Ask most STEM students if they like to work in a noisy environment. Precision thinking is usually better when there are no distractions. That's why when you take a test, no talking is allowed in the room.
Shouldn't we support as a general rule behaviors that are correlated with higher income and other success measures on the grounds that causality is unclear and since many of these behaviors presumably are factors in success we should promote them unless we have strong evidence that they are instead results of success?