Decibel Fixation

Two years late, I finally watched the pilot to 'Walking Dead’ on Netflix. Interestingly, what struck me the most was the quietness of our world without humans. With humanity dead, everything seemed silent. This made me think, how did we grow to build our world with so much extraneous noise? Do we enjoy loud sound?

Naturally, all animals create noise, and to examine ourselves without material objects, we seem fairly average in comparison with the rest of the animal kingdom. Our vocal chords chatter and our feet scuffle, but nothing too out of the ordinary. Why, then, are the objects we create so loud? Car horns, telephones, mufflers, lawnmowers, jack-hammers, radios, trains, highways, alarms, microwaves –all are sounds society is accustomed to. Humans evolved to accept endless background noise as normal and day-to-day, to the point where utter silence can feel uncomfortable and eerie. And yet we ourselves aren’t overly loud. What could have caused this decibel fixation?

From first glance, movement creates noise. And we are constantly on the run. Perhaps hundreds of years of increasing movement naturally entail higher sound levels. Horse-drawn carriages pale in comparison to airplanes, and that’s not to say the sound of an airplane is a pleasant sound. Yet we accept it. Do we acknowledge noise as a slightly irritating frustration in the face of an improved technological world?

Intriguingly, certain situations even lend us to exalt sound, to create the perfect blend of noise. Careers are made based on how well sound is balanced, for example in music recording. Just like a young child slowly acclimatizing his ear to rock music, perhaps over the years we acclimatized to white noise. 

Imagine a time when lawnmowers sound pleasant and funding funnels into examining sound from a critical perspective. This could be step one. Step two ventures even further, to a time when zombies mow lawnmowers in utter silence.