The monster of lake loudness

I recently stood at the Park St. station of the Boston T waiting for my train to get back home. Suddenly a horrible, piercing,  incredibly loud sound started. I tried to move away from it only to find out that it was impossible. A “network” of boxes similar to that small red one on the top left corner of the photo. They were spaced  about 5 m from each other and provided a completely homogenous sound field from which one could not escape. I moved through the platform and grabbed my iPhone —running a wonderful app named SPL which turns the iPhone into a sound level meter— and measured about 106 dB at 2-3 m. This value is not 100% accurate, but it gives you a fair idea of what was going on.

All the passengers seemed to reflect the disturbance this annoying sound caused, many tried to protect themselves by covering their ears with the hands. 

I don’t know if this was some sort of malfunction, a drill or a real accident but everybody was trying to run away from this inferno, and the expected communicational value of this “signal” soon became totally lost.

I cannot imagine any MBTA official, or the  “acoustic” engineers who “designed” this system to deliberately expect that such an aberration can actually work, or give credit to a poorly designed emergency system like this one. On the other hand, they might have their ears in such a poor condition that they themselves don’t realize how harmful this is to their passengers.

Anyway, if you happen to be in Boston, have to take your 5 o’clock T and find yourselves in the middle of this incredible cacophony, you’d better carry some really heavy duty hearing protectors or prepare to sue the company. 

This way they might have to redesign the entire system...

We’re still awake and still singing

According to the Media Daily News “The (American) Senate may green-light legislation compelling advertisers to turn down the sound on commercials. But although much of the public is annoyed by the high volumes, a minority feel the government should get involved in the issue.”

Daniel Levitin writes in his wonderful book The World in Six Songs “The surprise, predawn attack was a gruesome innovation in prehistoric warfare. The attackers would wait until their opponents were in deep sleep and attack just an hour before dawn, sometimes in complete silence, sometimes with a fanfare of menacing instruments, creating as much noise and mayhem as they could to terrify their victims. (...) Those bands of early humans who were unable to develop a strategy for fending off such attacks were killed. Their genes did not endure in the population.”

Whatever compelled bands of primitive people to turn that volume knob increasingly up during commercials we will never know... 

What we do know however is that, still according to Levitin, “A few clever humans did develop countertactics —no doubt as a direct consequence of the increased size of their prefrontal cortex (...) These countertactics may well have involved staying awake at night and singing as a way to broadcast, ‘We’re awake, and we are here.’ “

Still singing after all these years...

Pilgrimages

I always find it fascinating and moving to watch music students carrying their instrument cases, going to or coming from their music  school, to take their classes or returning home from them. It is the same all over the world. I’ve seen it in Boston, Utrecht, Budapest and a few other great music centers. They flock into their schools with the sole goal of learning and mastering their instruments to make music. 

It looks like a godless religious experience where they tenaciously pursue these rites with the discipline and devotion of an acolyte. But they are not driven by the fear of committing any sinful act, to avoid possible punishment or as a consequence of a fabricated code of conduct. They worship  music. 

Music is to me a far more enrapturing experience, more capable of enticing the righteous attitude, of bringing out a sense of togetherness and communal feeling than any religion. 

Astute religious leaders have taken advantage of this power of music, long before their faithful followers did, only to surreptitiously add a spurious, useless and parasitic role to the music: to serve their religious experience. But music is the (a) religious experience! 

As all the music students, carrying their instruments in and out of their music schools, have always known...

Fortunately I am not blind...