NOISE THE DESTROYER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 340, 28 April 1928, Page 12

NOISE THE DESTROYER

MENACE OF CITY’S DIN

EFFECT ON NERVES AND HEALTH ONE of the philosophers of the Victorian era declared that you might gauge the intellectual capacity of a man by the degree of his intolerance of unnecessary noises. The point of this dictum is in the word “unnecessary,” says the “Melbourne Herald.” For a noise, however unpleasant, which is recognised by the subconscious mind as necessary or inevitable —such as the more familiar sounds of Nature — is at once accepted and presently disregarded. But a noise which is unnecessary —as the steady beating of a tin can—immediately becomes an irritant of the most aggravating kind.

Perhaps the jaded father who, after a trying day’s work, finds his home filled with discordant noises produced by his high-spirited children, although he may voice his displeasure, is not seriously disturbed. It is natural for children to be “filled with foolish noise.” At heart, father may even approve. But the noise and strife of our city life are becoming a menace to the health and well-being of our citizens. The grinding roar and rattle of the trams rise as a wall of discord against which all the lesser city noises beat stridently like the sharp staccato of hail in a thunderstorm. There are the shrieks and hoots of motor-cars, the rumble of trams, the harsh changing of gears of motor-lorries, the squealing of brakes, the nerve-rack-ing uproar of motor-cycles, and a myriad other blasts and whistles and banging that tend to make city life intolerable. Will Be Unendurable If noise—and mere noise is a thing against which reason is useless —is to increase as much in the next ten years a 3 it has in the past decade, it will become utterly unendurable. Schopenhauer, in an. essay on “Noise,” said: “The truly infernal cracking of whips in the narrow, re-

We can all of us see that damage done if a man gets a punch in the face, but we do not see the permanent injury done to human nerves and human brains by the constant noise to which we are all subjected under modern conditions of life.

sounding streets of a town must be denounced. . . . No sound cuts so sharply into the brain as this cursed ‘cracking of whips.” Motor horns, needless to say, were not yet invented. But 'if the German philosopher could visit Melbourne to-day and hear its din and babel, he would clap his hands in horror to his deafened and bewildered ears. Modern civilisation takes extreme care to protect us in a hundred different ways, but when it comes to protecting us from outrages on our sense of hearing it fails lamentably. A dozen early morning and noisy milk carts often serve a street of only a score of houses. Mere noise can be most damaging to nervous people. “Health,” London publication says that noise is fast becoming a national danger. “Gramophones, loud-speakers aud raucous music,” says that journal, ‘‘are making life hideous. Apparently noise has become a necessity of modern home life. This causes nervous ailments and breakdowns, neurotic tendencies and mental disorders. ’ It is only fair to add that eminent physicians have challenged this statement. Din Increasing But there can be no controverting the fact that the din of the city's streets is increasing, and that it has a very inimical effect on the nerves and general health of the community. Not long ago the principal of the University High School complained bitterly of the handicap his school suffered through noisy traffic. “We have to endure,” he said, “the crash and clatter of forty trams in forty minutes.” And if our educational establishments are seriously affected by the street noises, what of the sick, the thousands of patients in private houses, nursing homes and public institutions? In the old days of the horse-drawn buses tan bark was laid down to deaden the traffic noises outside hospitals and the like. No effort is made to silence the modern uproar—perhaps because it seems a hopeless undertaking. Professor Spooner, the author of many books on industrial engineering, has devoted special attention to the problem of fatigue due to noise. His conclusions are too elaborate and exhaustive for quotation here, but his main point is that human beings are injured and human progress checked by nerve-racking noise. The fact that noise does not produce any visible effect on the human body possibly blinds the general public to the injury that it inflicts.

Enterprising firms in America and England, and, to some extent, in Australia, are paying attention to the reduction of the noise of machinery in factories. But, in Australia at any rate, no effort appears to be made to suppress or modify the incessant and unnecessary street noises. Motor engineers are constantly endeavouring to make motor-cars less noisy, and they have succeeded wonderfully well, but our public utilities—the trams, for example—are more noisy than ever. In England, as in America, efforts are being made to subdue street noises. A vigorous Anti-Noise Movement in Melbourne would mean to the community an economic gain in thought, feeling, energy, health and self-discipline.