A Brief History of Complaining About Noise

An archive of grievance

There turn out to be a great many of them. The oldest noise complaint in the Halbridge city archive dates from the 1690s and concerns a cooper on Rope Walk whose hammering on barrel hoops, the petitioners wrote, “begins before the bells and ends after them.”2 The town’s answer was an ordinance confining coopers, smiths, and anyone else who struck metal for a living to the hours between the morning and evening bells. Rules like it were common in the towns of medieval and early modern Europe, where the trades that hammered were often pushed into particular streets or out beyond the walls, and work at the anvil after dark was frequently banned outright. The first noise laws, in other words, were not really about noise. They were about where certain people were allowed to be, and when.

Go back further and the grievance is already ancient. A satirist in one of the great capitals of the classical world complained that the carts, banned from the streets by day, rumbled all night beneath his window, so that only the rich, in their houses set back from the road, ever got any sleep. I like him enormously. He is funny and furious, and he noticed the thing that nearly every complainant since has noticed and most have preferred not to say aloud: that quiet, already, two thousand years ago, was a property of wealth. The carts had been moved to the night so that the day would be pleasant for the people who mattered. The noise had not gone away. It had been rescheduled onto someone else.

The archive’s middle centuries are full of bells. Churches rang for services, for deaths, for fires, for the hours, and for reasons of their own, and from the 1700s onward the city’s letter books fill up with polite and less polite requests that they ring less. The petitioners were often ill, or said they were; a recurring figure in the correspondence is an invalid on the street behind St. Aldric’s whose recovery the bell is said to be postponing. The church’s replies take the line that its bells had been there first, which was true, and that anyone who disliked them should not have moved beneath them—which is, nearly word for word, what the owners of a music club on the harbor said last year about the residents of the new apartment block next door.

Then came the 19th century, and the city grew loud in ways it had no vocabulary for: steam whistles, iron wheels on granite, the riveting gangs of the shipyards, whose racket carried, according to one letter, “across the water and into the Sabbath.” Yet the most passionate complaints in the archive from that era are not about industry at all. They are about street musicians. Halbridge, like most large cities of the time, had organ grinders, brass bands, ballad singers, and men with dancing dogs, and a whole class of professional residents—doctors, clergymen, lawyers, and, I regret to say, writers—campaigned against them for decades with a ferocity the shipyards never inspired. The shipyards were where the money came from. The organ grinders were merely poor.3

The 20th century added motor horns, gramophones in open windows, motorcycles, transistor radios, jet engines, car alarms, and the ice cream van, each greeted in its turn as the final assault on human peace. Halbridge formed a noise abatement committee in 1928 and has reconstituted it, under various names, roughly once a generation since. Reading its reports in sequence is a peculiar experience. Every one begins by observing that the present age is noisier than any before it. Every one recommends some combination of limits on hours, limits on volume, and more inspectors. And every one is, in the narrow sense, correct. The city has, on the whole, grown louder. It has also, on the whole, grown better at complaining.

The map of complaint

What do three centuries of grievance teach? The first lesson is that every generation believes itself the first to be denied its quiet, and every generation is wrong, and every generation is also a little bit right. The sounds change; the complaint does not. The second lesson is less comfortable. A noise complaint is almost never only about sound. It is about who is making the sound, and when, and by what right. The cooper’s hammer, the bell, the barrel organ, the leaf blower: each is a noise, but each is also a person—at work, at worship, at play—in a place that somebody else regards as theirs.

Acousticians measure sound in decibels. Complainants measure it in grievance, and the two scales correlate less than you might expect. Halbridge’s noise office keeps a map of its complaints, and the planning department down the hall keeps a map of measured noise, and when I asked to see them side by side, the officer who showed me, Priya Lund, laughed before she had finished unrolling them. Of last year’s 4,212 complaints, 61 percent came from three neighborhoods on the hills above the harbor, which are, by measurement, the quietest parts of the city.^* The loudest districts, along the ring road and beside the container port, file almost none.

“People complain about the noise they think they shouldn’t have to hear,” said Lund, who has worked in noise for 19 years and describes herself as a professional listener to people who are upset. “Up the hill, they expect quiet, so a leaf blower is an outrage. Down by the port, nobody expects anything. They shut the window, if the window shuts.” A complaint, in other words, measures not noise but expectation, and expectation is a measure of power. The people with the firmest sense of their right to quiet tend to be the people who already have the most of it. I live, I should confess, about halfway up the hill.

Who gets the quiet

In June I went down to the courtyard at 7:30 and met the man with the leaf blower. His name is Dario Kesk, and he works for a grounds contractor that looks after the shared gardens of 14 buildings on our side of Carrow Hill. He starts early because the contract pays by the site, not by the hour, and he has to clear six courtyards before lunch. A blower does ours in 25 minutes; a rake and a broom, he estimates, would take an hour and a half. He knew exactly which windows the complaints came from. He had been shown the letters. “I’d use a rake,” he said, without any particular bitterness. “Ask them if they’ll pay for the rake.”

It is the right question, and it is the oldest one in the archive. Quiet has nearly always been bought with someone else’s time. In the 19th century, when someone in a prosperous household lay seriously ill, it was common to have straw spread thick on the street outside, so that wheels and hooves would pass in a muffled hush. In the Halbridge letter books I found a receipt for one such delivery, dated 1871: “two cartloads of straw, laid and afterward removed.”4 Somebody laid that straw. Somebody came back and swept it up. The silence in the sickroom was real, and it was made, like most silences, by labor that did not get to enjoy it.

The leaf blower runs the same arrangement backward. It made clearing a courtyard cheap by making it loud, and so it moved the cost from the people who pay for the gardens onto the people who have to listen to them—including Dario, who wears ear defenders six hours a day and says he can no longer hear his daughter from the next room. Quiet could be had again. It would take rakes, and more hours, and a contract that paid for them, and by Dario’s reckoning it would cost each household in my building about the price of a coffee a month. When I put this to our residents’ meeting in July, there followed a long and thoughtful silence, of exactly the kind we had all been asking for.

The vote is in October, and I do not know how it will go. But I have stopped lying awake at 7:40, partly because I know now who is in the courtyard, and why, and partly because the archive cured me of the idea that I was being singularly wronged. Every age has had its carts and bells and organ grinders, and every age has had its petitioners on the hill. The question was never really whether a city could be quiet. It was who would be allowed to have the quiet, and who would be paid, or not paid, to lay the straw.