approximately 194 decibels, the pressure is twice the pressure of the atmosphere. That means there are no more air molecules to disperse. There is no more back-and-forth cycle. There is no more sound. There is only a forward-driving force of further compression. If SPL or Bass Race competitors one day hit 194 decibels, they will succeed in creating a shock wave. This is the realm of sonic booms and earthquakes.
Even after all of the explanations I’d heard of why people were drawn to the sport of loudness for loudness’s sake, I was still missing something. I got that there were more rules and regulations to car-audio competition than I would ever have dreamed possible, and that competition—however arcane the terms—was driving the amplification. But I pressed Thompson to give me his take on what lay at the core of the obsession.
“It’s just so sensual!” he moaned. “It’s sound! It’s feeling! It’s the attention you get! There’s so much to what you’re doing when you add a subwoofer to your car! And once you do it, you always have a taste for it. You find someone with louder, and you say, ‘Wow that louder is better than my louder.’ Every single guy out here wants to be louder. Nobody out here says, ‘Wow, that’s loud enough.’”
That made sense. Yet of course this sensuality, the sensuality of “hair trick” or “balls to the wall,” was not, to put it mildly, everyone’s sensuality. And, to an extent, Thompson’s analysisamounted to saying, “These people are just born this way.” True enough, but I craved an answer with more reverb. I was standing next to Thompson sucking on the beer I’d been offered by Big Red’s Lady, pondering what, if anything, it would mean when scientists identified the genetic marker for “noise fetish,” when Thompson, who’d been waxing on about the feeling of 150 decibels inside an automobile, abruptly cried, “The entire state of Florida is designed to be driven around in! You can’t walk anywhere! You need a car to conduct your life down here. Every sixteen-year-old in Florida looks forward to getting a car! The car is your
life
.”
And suddenly the click came. What was that sixteen-year-old listening to before he got into his first boom car? When his headphones were off and his ears were naked to the stagnant air, I mean.
Let’s leave the boom-car drivers demoing that special something in the egg-frying parking lot. We need to find somewhere quiet where we can think about this a little harder. Thompson’s last throwaway lines point deep into the sound of our age—all the way to the realm of acoustical weapons. And even to the blessed white inner sanctum of the iPod. Another way to think about the noise we make today is as an effort to immunize ourselves against the noise pain we’re all suffering from anyway. Another way to view our new noisiness is as a diverse global initiative in soundproofing.
CHAPTER NINE
Home Front
At this point I thought that I understood a little better why our world sounds the way it does. For a combination of evolutionary, commercial, infrastructural, and sociocultural reasons, there’s more continual, inescapable noise than ever before. And the new noisiness that’s tipped us over the edge into the land of loud may be the hardest to mitigate of all. Why? Because we ourselves crave that noise to keep us feeling energized, youthful, focused, free, fast—and protected from all the other noise we can’t control. But that doesn’t make the need for silence any less profound. How can we opt out of the world of noise? What can we do in practical terms to soundproof our lives other than by just making more masking noise?
In a summer of a thousand bass-heavy thunderstorms, I traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, to attend Noise-Con 2008 . The conference billed itself as an event “facilitating interaction among awide spectrum of noise control professionals.” I listened to lengthy papers on subjects it had never
Even after all of the explanations I’d heard of why people were drawn to the sport of loudness for loudness’s sake, I was still missing something. I got that there were more rules and regulations to car-audio competition than I would ever have dreamed possible, and that competition—however arcane the terms—was driving the amplification. But I pressed Thompson to give me his take on what lay at the core of the obsession.
“It’s just so sensual!” he moaned. “It’s sound! It’s feeling! It’s the attention you get! There’s so much to what you’re doing when you add a subwoofer to your car! And once you do it, you always have a taste for it. You find someone with louder, and you say, ‘Wow that louder is better than my louder.’ Every single guy out here wants to be louder. Nobody out here says, ‘Wow, that’s loud enough.’”
That made sense. Yet of course this sensuality, the sensuality of “hair trick” or “balls to the wall,” was not, to put it mildly, everyone’s sensuality. And, to an extent, Thompson’s analysisamounted to saying, “These people are just born this way.” True enough, but I craved an answer with more reverb. I was standing next to Thompson sucking on the beer I’d been offered by Big Red’s Lady, pondering what, if anything, it would mean when scientists identified the genetic marker for “noise fetish,” when Thompson, who’d been waxing on about the feeling of 150 decibels inside an automobile, abruptly cried, “The entire state of Florida is designed to be driven around in! You can’t walk anywhere! You need a car to conduct your life down here. Every sixteen-year-old in Florida looks forward to getting a car! The car is your
life
.”
And suddenly the click came. What was that sixteen-year-old listening to before he got into his first boom car? When his headphones were off and his ears were naked to the stagnant air, I mean.
Let’s leave the boom-car drivers demoing that special something in the egg-frying parking lot. We need to find somewhere quiet where we can think about this a little harder. Thompson’s last throwaway lines point deep into the sound of our age—all the way to the realm of acoustical weapons. And even to the blessed white inner sanctum of the iPod. Another way to think about the noise we make today is as an effort to immunize ourselves against the noise pain we’re all suffering from anyway. Another way to view our new noisiness is as a diverse global initiative in soundproofing.
CHAPTER NINE
Home Front
At this point I thought that I understood a little better why our world sounds the way it does. For a combination of evolutionary, commercial, infrastructural, and sociocultural reasons, there’s more continual, inescapable noise than ever before. And the new noisiness that’s tipped us over the edge into the land of loud may be the hardest to mitigate of all. Why? Because we ourselves crave that noise to keep us feeling energized, youthful, focused, free, fast—and protected from all the other noise we can’t control. But that doesn’t make the need for silence any less profound. How can we opt out of the world of noise? What can we do in practical terms to soundproof our lives other than by just making more masking noise?
In a summer of a thousand bass-heavy thunderstorms, I traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, to attend Noise-Con 2008 . The conference billed itself as an event “facilitating interaction among awide spectrum of noise control professionals.” I listened to lengthy papers on subjects it had never
Similar Books
