Noise Vs. Sounds
We all expect to hear increased noise on the Island every summer. (Are you ready for Motorcycle Weekend!?!) And it’s not just from the increase in traffic. If past summers are any indication, increased noise pollution (a neutral term in this context) over the next months will come from all the expected sources.
Our summer noise can be celebratory—getting loud being the whole point—or just the byproduct of work or pleasure. It’s hard to object to people celebrating, getting stuff done, or having fun, so we don’t usually criticize noise unless it feels excessive or lasts too long. We all manage to get along with some simple, informal rules and a dose of mutual respect.
But notice how we apply these commonsense norms to ourselves only. Beyond worrying about our pets on the Fourth, we tend not to think of the effects of our noise on other species. Turns out those effects are stunning.
Maybe we don’t get the difference because we as a species are, relatively speaking, severely limited in what we can hear. The natural soundscape other species know well and rely on is simply beyond our hearing’s acuity.
But the gap might be closing. The scientific research on plant and animal sound-making and sound-perceiving is opening up a fuller sonic spectrum to us. Older assumptions about sound and its purposes in these kingdoms are being shattered. Even the once-grand distinction between human beings as a language-making species and all other species as only signalers at best, is long gone. Machine learning promises ways to comprehend (or maybe just admire for a complexity that’s incomprehensible to us) plant and animal communication.
This being so, we’re starting to realize noise pollution matters way beyond whether we humans can tolerate it or not. Our noise, put up with in our human community, may be downright painful and confusing to our plant and animal neighbors. It might even be a death knell (pun intended) to some of them as they try to pick up predation warnings but can’t, for all our acoustic interference. We humans aren’t even aware of all the noise pollution we create because we can’t hear a lot of it. But plants and animals can, and in ways beyond what we’d normally think of as “hearing.” All sound is waves, organized energy travelling through matter. It vibrates matter as it goes, and those vibrations are picked up by organisms in all sorts of ways necessary to their thriving. Members of at least one species of turtle decide to hatch when they pick up the infrasonic vibrations of their nestmates, a collective signal to start the prison break. What’s the effect of our noise on that sensitive dynamic?
It's hard to tell which feels more stupid, in the original sense of the word—"in a stupor”: our heedlessness in making harmful noise or our cluelessness about the intricate soundscape around us. How do we start limiting our noise and start hearing sounds?
