Noise. It is disturbing. It’s everywhere. It is exhausting, stressful and dangerous. It keeps our nerves on edge. We can run from it, but we can’t hide. According to World Health Organisation, noise pollution is the second most harmful to humans right after air pollution. If you live in a big city in Canada there is no escape. garbage trucks, leaf blowers, pneumatic drills, muscle cars, motorcycles, buses, subways and sirens. It is there when we wake up, it follows us minute by minute until we fall asleep. Or try to. The noise is drowning us. Metro Morning5:49 Is it time to get rid of leaf blowers once and for all? Toronto councilor Shelley Carrol is behind a proposal to phase out gas-powered leaf blowers used by city crews. The WHO Directive for proper sleep is less than 40 decibels of sound outside the bedrooms. 2017 study Toronto Public Health revealed that 92 percent of Toronto’s population tries to sleep in a noise environment of more than 45 dB. Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee has been fighting noise pollution, especially excessive street noise, for years. In his column in June he wrote about a friend who woke up at 3:30 a.m. of motorbikes racing each other in a deserted park. Much of the transfer noise is intentional. Muscle cars and some high end luxury cars can be placed special mufflers it is deliberately designed not to reduce engine noise but to significantly increase it. Noise levels in restaurants and bars can be frustrating for many patrons. (Hunter Bliss Images/Shutterstock) For Gee, the demons of noise are cars and motorbikes. For me it’s restaurants. Popular, busy restaurants are expectedly noisy. But to add to the normal noise levels, most restaurants play loud and extremely terrible music. Toronto media owner Moses Znaimer felt that restaurant noise had become such a modern scourge that he launched the Anti-Noise Pollution League in 2011, which included a user-generated list of quiet restaurants. The league’s noble efforts do not appear to have been noticeably effective. When I ate out, I used to carry two sets of business cards, some yellow and some blue. Blue cards are for quiet restaurants without music. The text congratulates the manager and announces that I will recommend the facility to friends. Yellow cards inform management of music restaurants that I will tell friends to boycott their restaurant. In years of asking, I have never met a customer who has asked for music to be played in a restaurant.
How a restaurant solved the noise problem
After receiving a lot of feedback from customers, Nick Politi installed ceiling panels to reduce sound at his Windsor, Ont., restaurant, Nico Taverna. Using the SoundPrint app, Marketplace tested noise levels before and after the change. The war on noise has a long and storied tradition. In 1921, English engineer Henry John Spooner pushed for a “Day against noiseIndia’s liberator Mahatma Gandhi started a practice of spending every Monday in silence. He attended necessary meetings, but communicated with a pad and pen. Florence Nightingale, in the midst of her nursing efforts, referred to unnecessary noise as “the cruel absence of care.” A new book aims to take a clinical look at our increasingly noisy world and designs a way to find its opposite – silence. Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, by Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz, is both a warning and a prescription. But the authors agree that finding a welcoming silence is an uphill battle. They trace the pursuit of silence more than 2,500 years ago to the days of Pythagoras, who exhorted his disciples: “Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.” For Pythagoras, silence was the key to wisdom. All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.- Blaise Pascal But in the noisy hum of the 21st century, we fear silence. We’re just afraid to be quiet. We need constant stimuli to prove something to ourselves. maybe that we are alive and not alone. The fear of silence is the fear of the unknown. Perhaps the 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal was right when he said, “All the problems of mankind stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Zorn and Marz explore the classification of noise through three categories: auditory noise (e.g., cars and trucks), internal noise, and informational noise — the constant inundation of our consciousness with meaningless information. This is the noise of texts, emails and social media. I have been chasing the golden fleece of silence for decades and have mostly failed in the attempt. I have even tried the so-called “Digital SabbathWhen I turn off screens and phones from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday. The Current11:45 This guy swore off the internet for all of 2020. Then the pandemic hit McGill University PhD student Aron Rosenberg in January embarked on a personal project to eliminate internet use for an entire year. Then the pandemic hit. He talks about why he turned off the switch and what he’s learned—about our collective dependence on the Internet and about himself—in the months since. My island of silence and sanity is traveling to the village of Weston in the Green Mountains of Vermont and visiting the Benedictine monks of the Weston Sanctuary. Before COVID-19, I would spend a week in pre-service, usually in the fall, without a phone or computer or any unnecessary contact with the outside world. Meals are taken in silence. The dorms are quiet. I have never tried it for more than a week. One day I will. And I will continue to look for other islands of silence. In a crazy and noisy world, I don’t think we have a choice.
