Monday, July 23, 2012

Noises Off


In the past year I’ve becoming incredibly sensitive to noise. I don’t exactly know when it started to bother me but it has been relentless. In the early stages it had to do with the endless cachophony in my office. In a space of open cubicles it was really easy to hear the phone discussions and conversations of almost everyone in the aisles surrounding me. It made it hard for me to concentrate. So I resorted to listening to my ipod to drown out the noise.

Sadly in the time between it seems to have gotten worse. I moved locations but have been surrounded by a number of very loud talkers who are often on the telephone. I still turned to my ipod for assistance but I found that I was turning the volume up higher on my gadget to drown out the noise. One day when I got a headache from having the volume turned up too high, I decided to take some action. I actively told the people around me to please watch their conversational and call volumes. I am sure I made no friends by doing so. In fact, in a lot of ways I think they have gotten louder just to spike me. Even with ear plugs in at almost all times while I am at work, there isn’t much filtered out of the discussions and phone conferences happening around me. 

I began to wonder if it wasn’t just me. I made an appointment with the doctor to have my ears checked and nothing came out of it. Luckily my ears are fine but that is both a problem and not a problem according to the doctor. He said that people are talking at higher decibel levels and that is what I am experiencing. It’s not that I am more sensitive per se, it’s that they are getting louder and louder. I hear conversations on the other side of subway trains, the music on other people’s ipods, etc. It is just short of maddening. 

I decided after a while that I would just have to deal with this for the rest of my life until I saw a recent article in The New York Times(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/nyregion/in-new-york-city-indoor-noise-goes-unabated.html?ref=nyregion).  The article claims what my doctor and I had suspected all along. The noise levels in the city and probably around the world have gotten higher. And the constant exposure to these levels is too much for our ears to handle. The article mentioned how certain locations have bought in sound proofing experts to control the noise levels. And this is great news. I wish that more people would make this effort especially in office buildings and on the subway!

1 comment:

M said...

In addition to a higher noise volume, you might also just have less tolerance for ambient, background noise than you used to. In high school, I always had the radio on when I did my homework. Now, I need complete silence to be able to concentrate.