(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 537: Creating Positive Soundscapes in Cities

This week we’re joined by Chris Berdik to talk about his book Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take it Back. We discuss the impacts of road noise on health and wellbeing, how our brains process sound, and creating positive urban soundscapes.  We also talk about the problems with open offices and the incomplete story of the decibel.

Bonus link: Designing the sounds of TfL’s buses in London – YouTube

Find Chris at ChrisBerdik.com

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of the show:

Jeff Wood: Chris Berdik, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Chris Berdik: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Chris Berdik: Sure. Well, I am a longtime science journalist.

I have spent some time on the staff of magazines. I was on the uh, Atlantic Monthly staff and Mother Jones, the investigative journalism magazine. I also spent quite a lot of my time as a freelancer writing for many different outlets, mainly magazine features, some radio work. I also spent some time covering science for Boston University, and I’ve authored two books.

One was called Mind Over Mind. And that was about essentially the placebo effect in medical and non-medical contexts. And then now I have a new book called Clamor

Jeff Wood: about Noise. Oh, the medical thing. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. [00:03:00] That’s really fascinating stuff from your new book. I wanna know what got you interested in this idea of sound?

Chris Berdik: I was writing an assignment for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine in 2018, and it was focused on a researcher at the School of Public Health at Harvard who was focused on noise pollution. At the time, I maybe had heard the term noise pollution. I didn’t think much about it. I thought about noise only when I was bothered by it, and I think a lot of people are in that same boat.

When it was outta my ears, I had other concerns, but I started to read the epidemiology related to noise and not only the hearing impacts of high decibels. Some of the broader health impacts from noise, stress, and sleep deprivation. They included heart disease and hypertension and stroke, dementia, mental health issues, you name it.

There was some noise connection and I thought about how about something that is so pervasive and has such big health impacts be from a source that. People often [00:04:00] argue if it even exists, you know, is is it even something that beyond our subjective lens is something that we can measure. So I was kind of intrigued by this idea and that brought me into, uh, writing another couple of magazine articles on different pieces of the noise story I wrote about Restaurant Noise for Popular Science.

I wrote about noise in nature for high country news. I got a grant to go to India and meet with, uh, anti noise activists there. And I wrote that for Undark and it just kept being interesting to me. So I figured a book idea was there and Norton agreed, and that was how it

Jeff Wood: all began. Nice. I’m interested in the words too.

Uh, sound noise clamor, each of them means something different. Where do those come from? I. Traditionally

Chris Berdik: noise is defined as unwanted sound and many people have taken issue with that definition and proposed other ways of defining it. The American Public Health Association in 2021 proposed that we define noise by unwanted and or harmful sound because it was recognized that, you know when you [00:05:00] are.

Kept awake by traffic noise. This is not anything to do with your personal likes or dislikes of the sound of an automobile. This is just a reaction that your body has to a disturbance that triggers your fight or flight reaction, and the chronic triggering of that can have these health impacts. It doesn’t matter whether you like or dislike a sound at, you know.

95 decibels, it’s assaulting your inner ear. It’s gonna cause damage there. So there are all sorts of ways that sound can have an adverse impact on us, whether or not we want the sound per se. So that’s part of it. I think another definition of noise is unwanted signals. I think about that because one thing that people don’t talk a lot about is the noise.

That’s not necessarily the loudest, but that is capturing our attention or shattering our focus When we have a deadline to hit at work or when we’re trying to talk to somebody in a, in a restaurant, or if we’re a, a clinician at a hospital and we’re trying to [00:06:00] figure out which of the beeps really matters for the safety of our patient.

All of these sounds are signals that our brain has to sift through, and the sum total of the effect is fairly exhausting and it’s. Not dissimilar to any other signals from your social media feed or your overstuffed email inbox or whatever. Spam is coming to us now through our phones, our text messages, those don’t necessarily carry any decibels with them, but they are noise and I think more than just metaphorical noise.

I think they’re. For real noise. I stopped there talking about what noise is, and we could talk more about, sound as we think about soundscapes later on.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll get to it. Yeah.

Chris Berdik: Yeah.

Jeff Wood: I also wonder, like, you kind of alluded to this, but like, do people realize how much sound is actually in their lives?

I mean, you mentioned how people are just basically tuning in or tuning out whether they want to or not. To all the sounds and noise that exist in our built environments and in nature, but do people really realize how much they’re processing? No,

Chris Berdik: they don’t. I mean, [00:07:00] our brains are amazing with this because part of our sensory experience is based on learned expectations, and so almost all the time it’s meant to work on automatic and we are not sitting there consciously.

Sorting through all of the sounds and trying to make sense of them, that is just happening. And the great thing about it is that we’re able to ignore a lot of the sonic inputs and as far as sound that can do us harm, again, that’s not really well documented. There are spot checks done at the loudest industries.

Uh, occasionally you’ll have a researcher who takes the decimal meter out to all the subway stations or underneath the. Flight paths of the jets and there will be measurements there. A lot of these impacts or exposures are modeled rather than actually on the ground. So they’ll have just a few real measurements that they then extrapolate.

So a lot of the sound that we’re exposed to, a lot of the noise that we’re exposed to is sort of a black box. I was talking to Rick Knight, [00:08:00] who is a professor of public health at University of Michigan, and one thing he’s very excited about is that he’s partnering with Apple on their. And so they are helping to track the environmental noise exposure as well as the exposure that people have just from listening to their devices with the Apple products through the watch or through your phone to try to get a better sense of the sum total of

Jeff Wood: noise that they’re exposed to.

That’s really fascinating. You talk about the decibels and people measuring stuff, but the decibel, as you mentioned in the book, doesn’t really tell the whole story. It was invented as a measure, but it doesn’t actually give you a full idea of what is coming at you.

Chris Berdik: And I always like to preface, I.

Talking about the decimal by stressing that it is a very useful measurement. It’s not something that I think we shouldn’t measure or that is incorrect. It’s just incomplete. It’s like any or a lot of, anyway, you know, major single measures that we try to use as proxies for complicated realities. You know, [00:09:00] GDP for how well our country is doing it is basically a measure of the acoustic energy, intensity of sound.

So you could have the same acoustic energy intensity of your loved one talking to you over breakfast as you would. A jet flying over your house at five in the morning, waking you up as a spring brook babbling over the rocks when you’re taking your woodsy walk through the local park or the whining buzz of a drone delivering coffee to your next door neighbor.

That’s coming your way, by the way.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, I wanna ask about that. That’s a sound that. People know it. When they hear it, they are like, oh, that’s a drone. Where is it? That sound is so piercing to your existence, and it’s interesting to think that some companies might push to get all of these drones in the air, but it’ll basically break our soundscape.

Yeah, it’s a danger that

Chris Berdik: we should think more about because I think the tendency is, and this is something that [00:10:00] I talk a lot about with traditional noise control, the tendency is to wait until there’s enough decibels coming from some source that it triggers our usual countermeasures that we are now upset about this noise enough to do something.

And by that point. Whatever it is, the automobile, the jet aircraft, you name it, it’s so entrenched in the way we live that doing something about it is a much bigger lift. And so right now drones, the drone deliveries anyway are, are kind of rare. They’re in sort of pilot programs in different cities.

Amazon has a couple going on, a few private. Drone delivery services have done that as well. People don’t consider how much it will change the soundscape if these things become a regular part of it. If the projections by McKinsey and others of how many drone deliveries we’re going to see, and I, I can’t remember off the top of my head, but, uh, it’s orders of magnitude more in fairly short order.

What that will be like. You know, these [00:11:00] things, as you mentioned, are sort of like robot mosquitoes or whatever. They’re kind of these buzzy sounds that Psychoacoustic research would describe as tonal, and that’s just this kind of high energy and in kind of a narrow band. In this case, a high frequency band.

That Psychoacoustic studies show that people just react viscerally against it. So there are some efforts, but not enough to, I think the Los Angeles has done this to sort of think about how to handle drones, not just the noise of them, but. For safety’s sake, for environmental justice sake, where are we gonna put the depots?

Where these drones are gonna congregate as they pick up their packages in return, when they’re done, how do they interact with the other methods of transportation and delivery? All these things are gonna take some forethought and left a chance. The likelihood is that they’ll end in cacophony.

Jeff Wood: That’s the interesting part of the book was that like I started to think about all of these different things that were coming together because you have all of these different sounds in [00:12:00] our urban landscapes and taken singularly, they might not be that bad, but when they all combine together, they start to, like you said, form a cacophony.

I actually read an article recently about. California’s law is about shipping and truck route. They have, uh, specific rules about how you can route vehicles near major facilities like Amazon warehouses or whatever else, and how that’s impacted, not just the noise, but all the pollution that comes from it.

Another thing that’s interesting about the book too is like thinking about noise is not this standalone pollution. It’s usually part of a larger impact that comes along with it. And so now we have trucks. Now we have. All these warehousing issues add onto that. Drones, add onto that. Any other new technologies, self-driving vehicles, whatever else people wanna add to this landscape of sound.

And then you start to get this larger pile of issues coming at you,

Chris Berdik: right? There is a hope anyway that some of the drones would take the place of the vehicles. That’s a rationale [00:13:00] for them. So you have fewer trucks on the road. Because you’ll have more drones. I, I don’t know that I buy that the history would say like, you’re just gonna have trucks and drones.

Um, but yeah, your ears and the rest of the response that you have to sound, it’s a cumulative thing. And so when it comes to decibels, your ears don’t care where the decibels come from. It is all adding up. And when you have a stress response to a noise. Similar thing. These things are cumulative and that’s part of why they’re hard to get people to understand or to think more about because they happen.

In a kind of iterative way, a little bit at a time where you know your body is being flooded with cortisol and the inflammatory response just never stops. Some of the research that I have read on drones is looking at roots. How should we mandate or, or regulate where these things fly? And to a certain extent, sometimes it, it might make sense to fly them.

Over existing corridors, so [00:14:00] over train tracks or over busy highways because those places have like noise barriers for one thing, but also the sound of a drone is lower decibel than a lot of the other sounds, so they would be masked by it. Again, these are all things that need to be studied. I don’t know that the conclusion is, oh, is definitely the the way to go, but to even think about.

What the impact would be? How many people are you gonna expose to this noise if you choose this route over that route? It’s something that needs to be given some thought

Jeff Wood: ahead of time. That sounds like it. Also an environmental justice issue, and you talk about this in the book too, but you know, if we already are polluting this area, why don’t we just continue to pollute this area more?

The communities that live near these highways and other places are already bearing the brunt of the progress of of cities. Why should we add one more thing to their plate? And so that’s a discussion that needs to be had as well. That’s true. That’s definitely

Chris Berdik: true. It’s not an easy answer and there’s always going to be some drawback to whatever you choose.

I spent a lot of time in communities [00:15:00] where, you know, one infrastructure after another has just been piled into their lives. This neighborhood in Detroit. Is between the international crossing over to Canada and a terminal for rail cargo and truck traffic. And these are small residential streets, but because they are convenient cut throughs for these freight carrying trucks, I.

Maybe a truck a minute, I think was the count that they had there. They, they were partnering with the University of Michigan and one big rig a minute is driving over these pothole streets, you know, rattling and wheezing when they come to the stop sign with their hydraulics, it’s amazing to think that this is some people’s reality just

Jeff Wood: day in and day

Chris Berdik: out.

Jeff Wood: And historically there’s the issue of redlining and we just had Leah Rothstein on, on the show talk about the follow up to her dad’s book, color of Law, but the idea of redlining, and then it talks about why the areas were designated the way they were. People saw them as nuisances, why people saw black people as nuisances.

But also the neighborhoods were probably in areas where there was more [00:16:00] city dumps, there were more other toxic hazards. And so the noise issue is just part of that kind of grouping of issues. And so it continues to be that the places that were redlined and continue to face issues today have this sonic persistence as well.

The noise problem that isn’t talked about as much as maybe, air pollution or things like that.

Chris Berdik: Well, they do come as a package quite a lot. Those same trucks I mentioned, uh, their spewing particulate matter and black tar. And so, for instance, another neighborhood in Detroit called Delray.

Which is actually kind of being wiped off the map now due to the new bridge that they’re building across the border, across the Detroit River. It not only had trucking and railroad traffic, but you know, it had this steel mill and a coal fired furnace, uh, you know, electric facility, a waste management area.

So all these places made noise, but they also contributed a lot of other types of pollutants to the environment where they were situated. So noise doesn’t rise to the fore because it’s not going to harm your health [00:17:00] directly most of the time. This is, you know, like I said, it’s usually from stress, which then has cascading impacts, but it’s not like lead in the water or you know, the particulate matter that’s going to aggravate your child’s asthma.

These are impacts that are going to be taking precedent, and I understand that for sure. I think a lot of people that I spoke to who have started to care about noise say, you know, this is one package. We want to have a healthy environment, and even if we’re much more concerned about the combined sewer overflow, uh, getting into our drinking water, we care about the noise.

That’s, keeping us from being able to sleep and keeping our kids from being able to focus on their schoolwork and, you know, all those things. We want our health.

Jeff Wood: I’m interested in that question of health, how noise does create stress, and then how that cascades and and impacts health over the long term.

You mentioned things like asthma, but what are some of the impacts of that stress and the persistent noise over time? I.

Chris Berdik: [00:18:00] So there’s research that looks at the noise sources that are easy to track. And so that generally is transportation noise that’s mapable and there’s decent data on it over, you know, large geographic area over time.

And most of the studies actually have been done in Europe. They tend to find, you know, like a meta-analysis of, I think 14 of these studies found that for every 10 decibel. Increase of transportation noise at night. There was about an 8% rise in the incidence of heart disease and there are similar findings for heart attacks as well.

And usually what it is, is our hearing system is constantly on alert. It’s evolutionary, it’s, it’s a defensive, sensory system. When you close your eyes at night, your ears stay open and they are constantly scanning. The environment for potential threats. The researcher that I interviewed about sleep, Mathias Basner at University of Pennsylvania, he researches a phenomenon called [00:19:00] awakenings, and these are unconscious.

You don’t actually wake up. You are just your body’s physiology, your your heart rate, your blood pressure, your stress hormone levels, your brain activity, which are all kind of in relaxed restorative mode most of the time perk up. They will do this naturally every now and again as kind of a check-in on the world, maybe 20 odd times a night.

But if you add noise to your environment when you’re sleeping, the number of awakenings speeds up and accelerates, and this can have a lasting impact because you will now not get that restorative time when your blood pressure is lowering, your heart rate is relaxed, your stress hormones are under control.

As I said, it’s a chronic effect that has these health impacts, all the same health impacts that chronic stress has, you know, on hypertension and risk of stroke, and you know, your heart health.

Jeff Wood: Sounds like a, like a mechanically induced apnea almost. Yeah. Not something that’s just part of your physiology, [00:20:00] but something that’s induced from the outside, which is a really interesting way to look at it.

That makes me interested also in the social aspects of this health discussion as well. You know, how not being able to hear impacts your social life and also how much noise and sound impacts you over a long period of time, even if you might not realize it.

Chris Berdik: So the people that I really enjoyed talking to on the hearing side of things.

Talked a lot about, in general, we don’t care about our hearing until it’s gone. When you think about your audiogram, when you’re doing the hearing screening, you have the headphones on. The beeps are coming one after another at at different frequencies, and all that is, is testing your ears ability to sense beeps.

And that’s not what hearing really is. That’s not what hearing does for us. Hearing is involving our brain much more than just sensing. Sound inputs. When we think about what hearing means to us, it’s the connections that we get from our hearing [00:21:00] to our world and to one another. One of the researchers I spoke to, Charles Lieberman at Mass Eye and Ear.

He focuses on noise damage to the nerve endings that are on the base of our hair cells inside our cochlea. These nerve endings are the things that convey fine grained bits of information about the sound that we’re hearing that can help us located spatially, that can help us differentiate one person’s voice from another and distinguish the signal from the background noise when we’re trying to have a conversation.

These things start to degrade before the hair cell goes away. So you could still be passing your audiogram with flying colors, but you’re gonna start having trouble having conversation in a noisy environment. So that is something that I think it would be nice to focus on a bit more. I think it would give people an idea of what hearing loss is.

What are we losing? Another person I talked to, Deanna Minke, who runs the Dangerous Decibels program, which is kind of just an educational program to talk to kids about protecting their hearing. [00:22:00] She started to ask people, what is your favorite sound? People had to think about it quite a lot because we just don’t think about our auditory world, the way we do our visual world, and what it means to us and what it would mean to us if we lost it.

So over time, when you start losing these connections, this can have other impacts. At least the correlational data suggests that hearing loss is linked with increased risk of depression and dementia. Because we start losing these connections with other people, it becomes harder to engage and we start to withdraw from the social exchanges and from, you know, the intellectual stimulus.

Jeff Wood: I love that story you tell in the book of the guy who loves fly fishing, and he damaged his ears a bunch. And finally the scientist was asking like, he said, what, what is that sound? What is the sound you like? And he’s like, well, I love that sound of the kissing of the fish when it finally gets the fly.

And she’s like, well, if you don’t take care of your ears, you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna hear that anymore. And then they finally started taking care [00:23:00] of themselves that science part. I will also tell you that it’s probably like a third of the way through the book maybe. And then I got up and my, my daughter.

We use a sound machine for her to sleep, because otherwise there’s like little bangs and noises and stuff that wake her up. But I’m always kind of worried that it’s a little bit too loud. And so I got through that part of the book and I downloaded like a decibel meter as the best way. I knew how to like measure a sound and I took it into a room and I, I was like, okay, it seems like it’s okay.

But I was instantly worried because I don’t want her to have a long-term hearing impact. And so I hope that more people kind of start to understand like. From the science that you talk about, which is the damage happens over time, but the actual impact of it doesn’t happen until much later. And our ears are super intricate as you write about in the book, like the hair that actually listens for the sound and all that stuff.

It can be damaged very easily. And I guess people just don’t realize, uh, how fast it can happen or how easily it could happen.

Chris Berdik: Yeah, no, exactly. Because if you think about how we screen for hearing loss. If we screen for loss in the same [00:24:00] way the eye doctor would just sort of point at the next line down and say, is anything there?

Can you see anything? Wouldn’t ask you to read out the letters. And so I think when we pass our hearing tests, uh, you know, it’s, we’re normal hearing. Uh, that’s good enough for most of us to say, I have done no damage and, and, uh, I’m good to go. But Charles Lieberman and his group would say there is still damage that is potentially

Jeff Wood: being done from the noise.

It’s hard to fix, right? I mean, it’s actually impossible to fix. I mean, there’s hearing aid companies, there’s new companies that are focused on earing enhancement, but they all seem to have problems with the room where everybody’s talking. Uh, the cocktail problem, as you mentioned in the book. What is that and why is it so hard for them to kind of fix that problem?

Chris Berdik: Oh, I’m glad you asked about this. This is one of my favorite studies. There’s a British engineer who was on sabbatical at MIT in the 1950s, and he decided to study how our brains process signals. And he basically had people listening to two different [00:25:00] sentences from different voices in their headphones.

One would come in the left ear, one would come in the right ear. The challenge was, can you repeat these sentences? I. People really could not, they would say, well, this person says something about a book, and this person was talking about having tea or something, but I don’t really know. They couldn’t get it.

So then he said, well, just listen to the one in the left ear. Don’t worry about the one in the right ear. And it was still challenging, but they eventually could recite the sentences that were coming into one ear when they focused on it. But then he would say, well, what about the other ear? Or anything from there?

They could not remember anything. They couldn’t even say if, for instance, the sentence had been in English or German or French, which you know, they would do, they would switch the language up or maybe it hadn’t even played at all. They had no recollection. It was like their ears stopped working because they weren’t paying attention to it.

And so being able to hear and carry on a conversation is huge, and it’s really not something that a hearing aid is able to replicate. The hearing aid doesn’t know when you’re talking to four [00:26:00] people in a restaurant, which voice you want to listen to. At that particular time, there’s been some shortcuts.

They do something called beam forming, which has multiple microphones. At different parts of the hearing aid to kind of triangulate when you’re turn. ’cause most people will look at the person they want to hear, but those conversations just carry on way too quickly, switching from one person to another.

Uh, as you try to track those voices, the hearing aid cannot, uh. Figure it out. So they’re limited in that they can do some things, like they can differentiate between a human voice and an air conditioner, and they can target the air conditioner sound for, uh, diminishment while they amplify a, a voice sound.

But compared to what the human brain and ear combo can do, it’s still very rudimentary. And the damage that noise does to the inner ear is so far irreparable. People are working on this. People are trying to find the genes that might help our ears regrow some of these pieces because there are species that can do [00:27:00] this.

Famously, chickens we’re the first ones to be discovered with disability, but mammals especially, you know, once they’re no longer neonatal mammals, cannot regrow their hair cells or the nerve endings connecting them to the auditory nerve.

Jeff Wood: I was just thinking about like sitting in a room with family members and my grandmother, who at the time was in her hundreds, she lived to 109, but over that last kind of nine years or so, even maybe a little bit before that, it was hard for her to hear.

So she would just kind of sit and you could see that she was a little bit in her own world some of the time and she couldn’t see already. So. That was like her way to connect with everybody was hearing, and so if you did talk to her, you had to direct your voice towards her and then she would pick up.

But it does make it a little bit harder in social situations for people to stay engaged if they can’t understand or hear everybody else in the conversation that’s happening.

Chris Berdik: Exactly. And you know when this starts to happen when you’re older and you’ve already, for instance, done all your schooling or other pieces of brain development, it’s a frustrating thing.

It’s a stress [00:28:00] inducing thing, but it has perhaps a lower impact than if you have a similar damage and you still have to navigate all the learning required in a school classroom. There’s reasons why studies show schools that are exposed to more noise from flights or other transportation sources have lower test scores.

And it’s partly due to just the sheer, uh, what they would call energetic masking of these sounds that kind of just stop your ability to hear. But some of it is informational masking where you are unable to follow, figure out which signal is the important one, which is you know, your teacher’s voice. So these are some serious downstream impacts.

Jeff Wood: I’m interested in the impacts of sounds on the built environment. Obviously there’s a couple of discussions you have in the book, the open office automobile sounds, and then a new one I was thinking about was like this persistence of new data centers and some of the problems that have been happening with those.

There was an article discussing a data center or power plant that was fueling a data center. That was causing all of these [00:29:00] impacts. Local residents weren’t sleeping, their dogs weren’t sleeping, they were having problems with their health. They were going to the hospital more often. And then there was another instance in Phoenix, I think this is in the Atlantic number of years ago, where there was a drone of some sort and people couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

But there was a guy who basically had to leave his house because it was driving him crazy. And so all these, these impacts of these new. Technologies, but also just the ways that we design things seems to be impactful. And so the question I have is, why don’t we think about how much these things impact us from a design perspective when we think about the physical design, but not necessarily like the design of the sounds that come from these spaces?

Chris Berdik: I would love to talk about data centers, but I’ll first talk about offices just because here it seems fairly clear because people have. A long history now of complaining about this resulting noise from open offices and. Digging into kind of the beginnings of this craze, people wanted to have a boost in [00:30:00] collaborate.

They had just different priorities. So the idea was, uh, if we get rid of all the walls, then people will collaborate. That’s what these new tech companies are doing. You know this, that’s what Google is doing and we’re definitely not a tech company and, but we’re gonna be like Google, so let’s follow their lead.

And um, so down came the walls. People suddenly realized what that impact was going to be. Sonically, I mentioned before, there’s energetic masking and there’s informational masking, and when you are in an office, you have all these people talking and usually they’re talking on their phone. And so you only hear half their conversation and your, your brain is searching for patterns.

Everything that it, that it sees or hears. And so here’s half a conversation. It just latches onto that. And so now some of these offices have to invest in soundproof booths. This is a whole new office amenity where you can actually get out of the den. I’ll also mention that, you know, Harvard Business School has studied open offices extensively, looking at the [00:31:00] switch from a regular office set up to open offices, and people actually do not communicate face to face more.

I. When there’s an open office, they email each other. They, they hide away. They get in those boozes I was talking about, they put on their sound canceling, noise canceling headphones and try to escape it and, and they’ll email and text each other. So the sort of hoped for collaboration, people might have even thought, oh, well if, if it’s noisy, that means people are collaborating.

But it actually just meant it was noisy. And so that’s offices, people wonder why they’ve persisted. And part of the reason is economics. It’s cheaper to cram more people into smaller square footage, uh, if you don’t have to deal with walls and doors and things like that. You know, even today with office space being not the most premium thing anymore, uh, it is still an economic decision as much as anything else, but I.

There’s a growing recognition that it’s not healthy, that it’s [00:32:00] not good for productivity, and there is more and more of an effort to kind of introduce soundscaping, not just white noise, but different sounds that will kind of mask some of the, uh, coworkers talking, et cetera, and to have some sound absorption that will help control this.

So I think it’s. It’s shifting to try to make a healthier indoor environment, at least in the, in the office workspaces. Data centers are funny because their big issue noise wise is that the noise is constant. It never stops. It can’t stop because the source of the noise is all the air handling and air conditioning that is keeping these servers from frying and keeping that data safe and moving about.

And they’re very new. They’re popping up all over the place. They’re building them in Virginia. The most data centers per square mile of any place on earth, and the noise that comes outta them, the noise inside is so loud that you have to wear hearing protection, but outside it’s not loud [00:33:00] enough to trigger the usual, you know, municipal noise ordinances.

But it is this buzzy sound. Usually low frequency, so you’re kind of feeling it in your chest as much as you are, hearing it, and it never stops. And that is the, I think, one of the biggest issues with it. And it’s also, these places are often in kind of, not always, but often in, in rural areas where there’s not sort of already a, a highway sound or some other sound that just kind of masks this buzz that is, you know, now invading people’s lives.

So yeah, that is a big problem.

Jeff Wood: In the book, you say the most harmful sounds aren’t the loudest, but the most persistent.

Chris Berdik: Yeah. If you can’t control it and it’s going on constantly, that will ratchet up your stress. If it was just a really loud sound that happened every so often, you know, it might startle you.

But being exposed to something that that you know is never gonna stop, you can’t do anything about, that’s a piece of context that doesn’t [00:34:00] deal with the decibels, but that. You know, has some serious ramifications for how we would experience that sound.

Jeff Wood: That seems to be a reason why road noise is so, trying for people as well and why roads in cities and highways and, and kind of higher speed spaces are a little bit tough for people from a sound perspective, but also from like that just general public health perspective.

When they get bombarded constantly with the sound of tires, the sound of the air going over the vehicle and the sound of the movement itself.

Chris Berdik: I’m not an urban planner, but from what I’ve heard from people who are, if you really wanted to improve a soundscape, you get rid of the cars, the areas of cities that people have shut down.

From traffic. They are some of the most peaceful, relaxed places. You, you can’t just do it because so many places, you know, small businesses, et cetera, need to have people to access them. But where it has been done, and like in, in many European, I just read a piece about [00:35:00] Leipzig. This is why it’s top of mind.

It’s as close to the answer as you get.

Jeff Wood: I’d be interested to hear one of the recent policy miracles that we’ve been talking about on the show and uh, just around the water cooler that has social media is, is congestion pricing. And I’d be interested to hear about, I mean, I know that there’s less noise complaints, uh, in New York City, but I’d be interested to hear like what the health impacts are overall for folks over the next year as they.

Are less subjected to that cacophony that you’re talking about, the horns and the sound of cars driving and, you know, idling and, and whatever else it is because people can get through faster. The number of cars and trucks is, is reduced 10, 15% or whatever the number is. Uh, that’s come out recently. That’d be interested to look at.

Chris Berdik: Yeah, I would be interested in that too. ’cause a anecdotally it’s shangrila, not necessarily in in lower Manhattan, but in these other areas where they’ve reduced or eliminated

Jeff Wood: cars. I’m sure Paris sounds pretty good right now too. Yeah. In many ways. Well, that gets to my next question, which is about [00:36:00] the coming of electric vehicles and the need to increase the sounds from them because they are so quiet, it’s harder for people who are hearing impaired to hear them.

People with disabilities might have trouble. Detecting that they’re coming. And so, you know, there’s a need to create a sound almost to make sure that people can recognize that they’re coming. And so I was really fascinated by this item that you talked about from London. Where, where TFL, basically a transport for London basically created its own sound for the buses that are gonna be electric.

Chris Berdik: Yeah, and, and what’s interesting is at first, and this speaks to what we were talking about before, with the built environment, with the indoor soundscape, you know, at first all transport for London wanted was a sound that followed the regulations. They needed a sound to keep the buses safe. Safety was, you know, the thing they were doing this for.

They asked for proposals for this sound, and all they said was, you know, it has to be two tones of a certain decibel and it has to go up in frequency when the bus is accelerating and go down in frequency when it’s decelerating [00:37:00] and that’s it. And so Anderson acoustics, when they met with these transportation officials, said, okay, so what do you want these buses, these tens of thousands of buses that are gonna crisscross London to sound like.

And they said, well, we don’t know. We have no idea. We haven’t thought about that. And it, it spoke to the idea of sonic, uh, I don’t know what you would call it, shortsightedness, that thinking about sound only when it is a bother to us, when it is, you know, loud and crosses this decibel threshold that we need to control.

Has kept us from, from considering the possibilities of sound as an ally, as a piece of the built environment that works to enhance the built environment. And so they began working with the acoustics firm, plus some sound designers, plus some other, I mean, there’s a big collaboration including stakeholders.

So they included people who had vision impairment and elderly people and cyclists who [00:38:00] would have the greatest need of hearing the sound. They also include people that drove the buses who didn’t need to hear the sound. They were in the bus driving it. Uh, and they would nevertheless be hearing it constantly.

And so they would go over the sound and then they would not only. Play the sounds, but they would play the sounds in a soundscape of, of where a bus might be. So it would have the other sounds of the city. So you would really get a sense of what this would be like to have buses sound like X, Y, or Z. They asked, uh, the people in these groups, all kinds of questions about what the sounds conveyed to them, whether this sound was more pleasant or not. And if it was something that kind of would differentiate a bus from something else, et cetera. And then they would go back and they would change the sounds based on the the answers. And then they would listen again.

And then eventually, by the time they got to test the sounds in a sort of road test, they had really almost a consensus about what they wanted. These sounds to [00:39:00] be. And the workshop group even went beyond what the regulations called for, because the regulations only called for a beacon sound to kind of warn people that a bus was coming.

They added an idling sound to let people know that a bus was waiting. For instance, if you went to catch the bus, or you know, if you have buses that were parked at a bus depot, that the bus is present. So these sounds have started to be rolled out as they increase the number of electric. Buses. I can’t remember how many they have now, but one of the things about them is nobody is claiming these are the perfect sounds for end all, be all.

They will be changed. They can be changed. And that’s one of the beauties of them. If you pay attention to them and you decide, they don’t need to be quite so loud now because now you know there are fewer sources of internal combustion noise and, and the overall soundscape is not quite as loud.

You can do that, you know, you can just change it because it’s time for a freshening up of the sound. So it’s an exciting idea if you can consider it and then see these sounds for [00:40:00] what they can be rather than just. Ignoring them until they are bothering you.

Jeff Wood: I thought they were quite pleasant and, and since this is a podcast, I’m gonna try to insert these sounds Oh great.

Into here so people can hear what we’re talking about. But I thought they were quite pleasant. I watched like a YouTube video from the company that designed them describing where they came from. And after reading this section of your book, I was like, okay, I gotta look this up. ’cause this is really great.

Now you can listen to it. Thanks to Zelig sound.

Speaker 3: This is the sound of the bus when it’s stationary

and we add the beacon layer as soon as the bus moves.

Jeff Wood: There were really pleasant sounds. I was like, oh I do actually like this sound. It does speak to the idea of not just like taking, sounds like just like taking the beating that’s coming to you, but like making a place pleasant and a place that’s a joy to be in because there are like. You mentioned earlier, I mean, there are sounds that people like, and I’m sure there’s city sounds that people [00:41:00] like, whether it’s like, maybe it’s the bustling of a busy marketplace or kids playing in a playground or something.

Some people like, but other people may not like. Obviously not every sound is, is for everybody, but just kind of creating a soundscape that people might enjoy is something, you know, I, I think we don’t place enough value on creating joy rather than saying no to things.

Chris Berdik: Yeah, we’ve done a lot of saying no and shushing and, uh, coming in after the fact and complaining and, I, I think there’s a place for noise control, but when that’s all we do, we are missing out.

We are short changing the whole idea of what fighting noise is for, you know, it is not just for, you know, shutting up. Things that are annoying to us, but it’s for enhancing the spaces that we’re building, the cities that we’re living in. Uh,

Jeff Wood: it can have that impact. There’s some tools that are being created.

I read about the one from McGill University that will allow designers, urban planners to think about soundscapes a little bit more comprehensively. [00:42:00] What do those tools mean for trying to create better places for people to sit, stay, uh, live and have a good soundscape?

Chris Berdik: So these are tools that the one you mentioned at McGill, and then there’s another group at the University College of London who’s working on a tool of, of this sort.

And they are, you know, very much at, at the early stages. I’ll mention that it’s not that they’re, commercially out there for urban planners to just take off the shelf, but the idea of the one tool at McGill is. To have kind of a quick way of listening to a soundscape in a place that you haven’t created yet.

The guy calls it a sonic sketchpad, and it creates a kind of an immersive audio world based on the sound sources. That are gonna be in this place. Maybe you have a road of a certain size with this much traffic on it. You have, you are going to have outdoor seating at restaurants, you’re going to have trees with birds in them.

[00:43:00] You’re gonna have a small park with music, performances, et cetera. And it takes the parameters of this place. So is it a place of. Dense six story buildings or is it an open area, uh, where the sounds are not gonna be bouncing here and there, and it puts that all together and it allows people in kind of a quick way to get a sense of how, let’s say they were planning a small pocket park, or they’re planning an urban plaza, or they’re planning a courtyard between, you know, medical buildings to hear what that’s going to sound like and to say, okay.

That is not what I want this place, I want this place to be joyful and this place sounds dead and monotonous or I want this place to be tranquil. And this is, I, I am hearing that air conditioning and it’s driving me crazy. I. It gives just a very quick idea of what the perception of a soundscape will be, which most urban planners don’t have at their hands at this point, at their fingertips.

The other group is doing something kind of even more sophisticated. They’re using machine learning and and [00:44:00] AI to try to create a model that will predict the perception of a soundscape. Based on some small number of inputs, just like LLM AI models do now in, in their own esoteric ways for answering all of our questions that we put to them.

You could say, well, I’m going to do this infrastructure work to part of a city to. Put in a few pieces of information about the amount of greenery that’s gonna be there and what the major noise sources are and who’s gonna be using it, and who knows that this is what they’re still trying to figure out.

And it would spit out, okay, this is how people are going to generally perceive soundscape. Again, it’s not gonna be everyone perceiving it in the exact same way, but when you ask a thousand people. How they perceive this soundscape. You’ll get a trend. The responses kind of group together and finding that group, predicting where that grouping will be is what this tool is meant to do.

When I talk to these guys and gals, I. [00:45:00] It’s interesting. It’s a really useful and cool idea. There are these pieces of it that they’re still trying to figure out, like do you have to have a different tool for every type of soundscape you’re creating? Because they’re based on data that was collected at, let’s say, a major urban park.

Will that model work? If you’re designing a busy marketplace, will that translate? Will it work if you’re talking to people to build a model who are in England, but you’re doing your work in China? There are these cultural differences that will weigh on our perception and so. They’re trying to hash that all out.

Uh, and

Jeff Wood: they’re still hashing, I’ll put it that way. What was the most exciting thing to learn about this idea of sound and, and soundscape while you were writing the book?

Chris Berdik: When it dawned on me about what this book was going to be, that was exciting to me because. It actually happened that I got the book contract just before COVID descended, and at first, [00:46:00] before COVID, you know, uh, my interest in noise was just, this is a fascinating topic.

Nobody can agree about what it is. It has all these crazy impacts. Let’s go on a journey to together to explore all the different things about noise, all the contours of it. And then as I was getting ready to go out and do the reporting for this in person all over the place. COVID hits, everything has to be canceled.

And not only does everything have to be canceled, and so the book is delayed, but this weird hush descended on many parts of the world. You know, as cities emptied out and roads cleared, and businesses shut down, and schools were closed, and people had many different reactions to this quiet, my reaction was prior to doing this work, if you had asked me what the end goal.

Fighting noise should be it’s quiet. Quiet is what a lot of people would say they want. They want a quieter world. That’s why they [00:47:00] care about noise. And we had in many ways achieved this quiet world. Took a global catastrophe to do it. And the context of that quiet, I realized how much that mattered. It wasn’t just, lower decibels are automatically good and.

Everything else, you know, set that aside. Context mattered a lot. I decided that, you know, what I really wanted to do is focus this book on the end game. What is our goal? What can be our goal when we are fighting noise? And I started to meet all these people who showed me that it can be so much more than quiet.

That quiet matters a lot. There’s nothing against quiet, but we can actually. Broaden what we want from our sound and what it can be for us. So that was really exciting. You know, there were little nuggets in the book and the reporting that were fun, but I think in the grand scheme, that was the biggest thing.

Jeff Wood: Is there something that people ask you about a lot versus things that they ask you very little about? People ask [00:48:00] me a

Chris Berdik: lot about the harms of noise. It’s surprising to me that at this point people are. Flabbergasted that no noise might have impacts on our heart health. This is something that, there was an Office of Noise Abatement and control at the start of the EPA in the early seventies, and one of the things that it promulgated were studies showing how noise can impact heart health.

That office was defunded by the Reagan administration, uh, after it’s always the Reagan administration.

Jeff Wood: I’m finding that out. A lot of my episodes. Uh, it’s always the Reagan administration.

Chris Berdik: Yeah. Well, they, you know, they kept the office around, uh, you know, I’m sure somewhere in the EPA there’s a door with the ONAC acronym on it, but nobody’s there, uh, they don’t have any money to do their work, but these impacts.

They’ve been studied so many times. Every now and again a new one will come out, showing a particular wrinkle in how noise is harmful to us beyond our hearing. But it is [00:49:00] amazing to me that, I get asked a lot about, how does this happen and can it really be so people don’t ask me as much.

About soundscapes. They don’t ask as much about what we could do to make it possible to talk to each other when we’re out to dinner at restaurants, or you know, what we might do to make the soundscapes of our hospitals better for clinicians to do their work and better for patients to heal. That is a piece of this book that I really cherish.

It would be great to have more interviews that get into ’em. Thank you for spending quite a lot of time on those. That’s what I’d say.

Jeff Wood: Oh, that’s awesome. Well, I do recommend, you know what, this book has been great because I think it brings to light, like you said, there’s obviously harms from sound, but then there’s positives you can get out of it.

And I think it’s something that we as planners, don’t pay as much attention to as maybe we should. And so. We talked about a little bit of what’s in this book, you know, there’s so much more. There’s, uh, what happens in underwater places, what [00:50:00] happens to whales, for example, and the underwater soundscapes.

Whether the global impact is of that is you mentioned hospitals. There’s a discussions in here about the hospitals and all the beeping that happens as somebody who spent a bit of time recently, uh, in some hospitals with, uh, older members of the family. I did wonder about that and that there’s a lot of answers in here, but also for planners specifically, there’s a lot of positive stuff in here about what can be done to help cities and buildings be more positive soundscapes.

And so I really appreciate that. And so that leads me to making sure that people go and pick up the book. So where can folks find it if they want to pick up a copy, which they should. Oh, thank you.

Chris Berdik: Yes, this has been great. Uh, the best place to go is probably my personal website, which is just ww dot Chris Burdick.

Com and bur is spelled B as in boy, ER, D as in David, IK. There’s no C in there. Awesome. I’m guessing that’s the same place where people can find you if you wish to be found as well. That’s right. You can check out the book, you can check out some of my other writing, and [00:51:00] you can contact me all through that website.

Awesome.

Jeff Wood: Well, Chris, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Chris Berdik: It’s been great. Thanks so much