White Noise

7 February, 2012 at 1:50 pm | Posted in Thinking allowed | 2 Comments
Tags: Noise

Last week writing in my eyrie, a faint but urgent beep entered my sub-conscious. That was strange, too early for the cooker to tell me that my dinner was ready and the washing machine certainly hadn’t completed its cycle, and the tumble dryer was not in use.

The incessant noise continued and eventually the culprit was tracked down to the German fridge/freezer. So engrossed had been your humble scribe that I’d failed to notice a one hour power cut, or outage as the BBC like to call it now.

It would seem that all the white goods in my kitchen have a voice of their own all are programmed to speak for 60 seconds, or more, if like my freezer its little brain gets anxious, all of which forces me to stop whatever else I am doing in exasperation to press “off”.

When I leave for work my cab also has a plethora of beeps: passenger doors open, lights left on and that most perplexing of all, the wheelchair seat belt not secured.

But my white noise is not a new phenomenon, from the late 19th century, as levels of noise rose in an urban environment, its intrusion into our lives was the subject of public debate. The advent of locomotives, early automobiles and the gramophone led to the advent of noise abolition campaigns.

It might be an anathema to my neighbour whose car alarm screams throughout the night, but for those late Victorians noise was seen as uncivilised, anti-intellectual and disruptive. It was even viewed as a sign of loose living and a lack of self-control.

Anti-noise campaigners sought to focus the public’s attention of their responsibility to their neighbourhood, branding it as “noise etiquette”. Pressure from these groups brought about the banning of car horns in a city at night. In New York the Noise Abatement Commission successfully persuaded the city’s radio stations to broadcast at 10.30 each night a plea to listeners for them to turn down their loudspeakers as an act of good manners.

Today in London as noise beyond our control becomes ever-louder and more insistent it is becoming more difficult to deal with. The Mediterranean habit that drivers are now adopting to sound their horns as traffic lights begin to change urging motorists at the front of the “grid” to start moving forward on the red/amber. Police cars which are rushing to non-incidents to a cacophony of sound, the man sitting next to you on the train blithely unaware that the rest of the carriage is listening to a muted version of his music, or the teenagers driving their car with giant bass speakers at full volume, are all what would have been term anti-social.

I recently went to a 40th birthday celebration held in a modestly sized venue, not only was the music so loud that one couldn’t converse, I swear that I felt my shirt moving as the sound waves buffeted my chest.

And yet, I suspect it is not silence that we crave. In the modern world, silence is a condition so rare that it is likely to cause unease rather than bring solace. We don’t live in a village like that portrayed in the BBC drama Cranford where the chattering classes worried about the approaching development of the railway. Our city is going to go on getting noisier, and we may just have to develop our own, personal, self-protective strategies for dealing with it, like improving our powers of concentration and of course, show more consideration to our neighbours.

CabbieBlog is published regularly under a Creative Commons License by a London Black Cab Driver. Powered by WordPress.com.
Take a look round, you might like what you find. Proudly supporting the National Trust protecting England’s heritage and coast.

CabbieBlog uses Technorati Tags: Miele Noise abatement White goods London