How Noise Took Over the World - Chris Berdik - Clamor

Julien: Welcome to Fighting Noise, where we explore how innovation can help reduce noise and its impact on our lives. Once you start fighting noise, you realize something surprising. Very few people are truly working on this problem. But in almost every conversation I've had, people say, "oh! I didn't know about that." "I'll start caring more." That's what impact looks like. My guest today is part of the same fight. With his new book, I believe he will make a real difference, I hope, impact. Please welcome the American journalist Chris Berdik, author of Clamor How Noise took over the world and how we can take it back. Hello Chris, good morning.

Chris Berdik: Hello Julien thanks for having me on.

Julien: I'm really glad to have you here today. So good morning to Boston, I think, or to East Coast anyway. live from here Boston is close enough, perfect. And here from live from Germany, from Europe. Chris, in Clamor you show that noise is not just a load of annoyance. It's a public health crisis, a design failure, kind of, and a challenge for how we live together. So what was the turning point for you? When did you realize noise was...

Chris Berdik: Boston, close enough.

Julien: much more than only a sound.

Chris Berdik: think there were two major turning points. The first was when I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine about a public health researcher at Harvard focused on noise. I had never really thought about noise as a widespread systemic pollution. I had thought about it as something that bothered me from time to time, certain sources that bothered other people, more episodic, almost personal issue. Then I started to read the epidemiology that links noise with not just hearing problems, with cardiovascular disease, with hypertension, stroke, that links noise with problems of mental health, dementia, depression, development issues with children. And this really struck me, the widespread impact of noise in public health. from a source that people still argue about what it actually is. Some people maintain that it is sort of a social construct, that it doesn't exist in its own right. So that sparked my interest. then the second revelation for me was once I had written a few articles about noise, different aspects of it, and I saw that it was worthy of a book exploration, that contract, was signed just before COVID hit. So this was late 2019, early 2000 or early 2020. And in subsequent to the pandemic, there were of course, cities emptying out and the skies were free of airplanes and the streets free of cars. And nobody was gathering together the sort of decibel levels where people were testing it were dropping.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: four to six decibels or so. And there was this hush that descended and I think people had mixed feelings about it. I certainly did. There's a joy in being able to hear birds again that you couldn't hear before in great numbers to not have cars everywhere. I think people took some solace in that, but it really hit home to me that there's this

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: quieter world, but there's context, how important context is to all of this sound and what it means to us. So that was the second piece of it where I thought about what is our sonic goal if we fight noise? What are we aiming for? And how different that is depending on whether you're talking about a city park or a restaurant or your home office. That is kind of those two revelations really brought it home to me.

Julien: That's great. We started directly in and I have already a lot of questions for you listening to that, but maybe let's start with the first thing first. Let's introduce yourself. Chris Berdik, who are you? Let you introduce yourself.

Chris Berdik: I am a journalist currently. I'm a freelance journalist. I write about scientific topics and education topics. I've been freelancing for more than a decade or so. I have a previous book under my belt called Mind Over Mind, The Surprising Power of Expectations. It's more or less about the placebo effect in both medical and non-medical areas.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: Prior to this decade of freelancing, I had worked on staff at magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and Mother Jones, which is an investigative journalism magazine. I had worked for several years covering science and the medical school for Boston University. So I have written for many different outlets. typically, science really is where I spend most of my time because I have found it is It fits my personality. It rewards curiosity and it suits the sort of reporting that doesn't depend on breaking news and beating other people to the scoop of the day. It really is a, adage used to be that these sorts of stories don't break, ooze. And I am drawn to that kind of coverage and I think my writing suits it as well.

Julien: I do confirm on the last one. You wrote another book and first book, but what first drew you to write this book about noise? I spoke about impact in the introduction. What's your hope or your objective with that book?

Chris Berdik: Yeah, my objective with this book is to try to broaden this fight against noise. As I mentioned, the way I used to think about noise is the way I think a lot of people think about it. It is one noise problem and then another noise problem. Your noise problem is your noise problem. Mine is mine. People who are dealing with noise from traffic, if I'm not dealing with that noise from traffic, I don't think twice about it. I think there's generally been what I call a sonic short sightedness where people, let's say in architecture or in urban design or in product design, don't think about sound. Certainly don't think about it first. ⁓ I'll skip ahead just to say, know, I, one story I was really taken with was

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: these product designers at Philips who are major creators of patient monitors in hospitals. They decided a few years ago, 2018 or so, to take a look at and redesign the sounds that their alarms made on these patient monitors. Hospitals have a big problem with way too many alarms that all sound the same, many of which are false.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: And they heard a talk by a sound designer who was working on this issue and said, you know what, let's look at these sounds. These are products, these patient monitors that have undergone millions and millions of dollars of research and development over decades. And they found that the source of the sounds that these monitors still use was from a cassette tape from 1981. So I think that is, you know,

Julien: Hehehehehe

Chris Berdik: systemic issue where the choices that we're making, are inviting sound into our, I mean, inviting noise into our lives. And if we were more aware of the impact of our sound environments to make our hospitals function better, to make our restaurants do the job that we restaurants to do, which is to help us socialize with one another, for instance. to make schools better places for learning. If we thought about these things in a broader proactive way, I think we would make some progress where just chasing down decibels after the fact is still necessary, but I think it's too narrow and too reactive.

Julien: In Europe at least, I think everywhere in the world, regulation is limiting sound by intensity, limiting a certain level of decibels. Mostly 80, 85 is the limit where sound is or noise is starting to really to hurt. hearing divider ear. But you say in your book that measuring noise with just decibels isn't enough. You even compare it, and I will quote you, blind men grasping different parts of an elephant. So meaning we don't really understand what noise is. We are kind of blind in front of this. Why isn't loudness or intensity alone a good way to understand noise?

Chris Berdik: Well. It's because I'll say exactly why it does matter. Within the three centimeters of the human cochlea, decibels are all that matters. The power of that sound, it doesn't matter whether you are listening to a sound you love or hate. If it is loud enough, if it has as much acoustic intensity, enough acoustic intensity, it will cause damage to your ear. Once you leave that three centimeter space,

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: many other things start to come into play. So the timing of the noise, there is some attention to that even in normal regulations, nighttime noise is more heavily regulated. But beyond just nighttime noise, does that noise ever stop? There's a big problem now, especially here in the States where we're building data centers as fast as we can. And these data centers need to have constant air conditioning and air movement to keep the servers from overheating and inside this is super loud you have to wear ear protection but outside it's not the decibels are not anything to be triggering a municipal noise code violation they may be you know in the 60 65 decibel range but they are low frequency and it's like a hum it's sort of a thing that you feel in your chest

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: and the noise never stops. So these are aspects of sound that, you know, do not, that are broader than just how intense it is that matter quite a lot to our ability to ignore the sound or, you know, mask it some other way. There's another, I'll become one other piece of research, which is

Julien: Yep.

Chris Berdik: a researcher from Finland who was trying to deal with open office noise in his nation where because they love quiet so much when the open noise problem started there many of the first approaches were to add sound absorption everywhere and to have tighter regulations for how many decibels the air conditioning and heating could be and so

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: by quieting the background, it actually made the problem of the distraction from the office noise worse. So we have this, we have many situations where

Julien: That's the high-flare log effect you mentioned as well in your book, where you realize other sounds in a way deeper perspective because the rest of the room is quiet.

Chris Berdik: Yes, the half of this. Yes, exactly. Cause our brains are looking for patterns all the time, looking for information and a half a log, which is, you know, just half a conversation when somebody's on the phone, uh, you know, is the ultimate, uh, lure for our attention. Uh, we want to be, we are curious about that in an automatic way that, um, you know, if you had, if you're overhearing a conversation in a language you don't understand or that's garbled enough,

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: to be distorted that you can't follow it, you will be able to ignore that much easier.

Julien: I call it psychoacoustics, that's the effect of unwanted sounds which are sometimes way below the limit of 80 decibels. You mentioned the cochlea, it's very interesting because the cochlea is our receiver but behind the brain is subjectively transforming that information, that signal. into another information and we look for something. So it's really hard to appreciate. I need to ask you a question when I read your book and listen to you. Are you optimistic about our capacity as human beings with our brains and subjectivity to tackle the issue of noise?

Chris Berdik: think I am optimistic. I think it really depends on what our goal is. I think we will never be free of noise. There's a tendency, I think, now that we all have noise-canceling headphones and the ability to, you know, filter out the people on social media that we don't want to hear.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: and listen to and all these ways of kind of cultivating our own sonic bubble, information bubble, what have you, to devalue our shared sonic spaces. And, you know, I say I'm optimistic, but that's the piece of it that makes me pessimistic that we have this capability to retreat and and have these sort sonic sanctuaries that, you know, as much as we struggle, you know, people like myself and others who think noise is a big issue to kind of make people care about it. Having people care about, you know, the common sonic spaces that we inhabit is a huge part of it. I think people are, however, increasingly able to connect these formerly disparate noise issues to one another and to, not just to one another, but to bigger, I call them bigger just because they are more expansive issues. I'll take for example, the healthy buildings movement, which is being led by a research center at Harvard to focus on, well, you know, we had this big push to have buildings be

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: more sustainable and greener. But we spend 90 % of our time indoors and we could make these indoor spaces be healthier, both by better ventilation and the water quality and make sure there's no mold, et cetera, but also for having a healthy acoustic environment that isn't going to hurt ears or cause chronic stress. There's a rise of sensory ecology in the environmentalist movement. you know, looking at how human noise, in addition to artificial light, is creating this sort of sensory smog that is degrading habitat. So creating these networks of connection, of caring, that broadens what noise is, what we define the noise problem as. It's not just a sound problem. It's a problem connected to how we

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: interact with the environment, how we design our buildings, the healthiness of those spaces. I think that bodes well for making progress in this area.

Julien: You mentioned different specifics I want to dive deeper in, but no, doesn't affect everyone equally. you say that you mentioned healthy birdings. But why is it also question of justice and of inequality? is it birding? We don't live all the same way. And you look at low income populations, for instance. they don't think about healthy buildings, they don't have this possibility. As you speak about ANC and noise-cancelling headphones, it's kind of the same. mean, we both have very expensive devices on our heads and we can't allow ourselves to buy it, but for the most population in the world, it's not something accessible. So maybe... Can you give us a few examples out of your research about these inequalities, in the sense how it matters in terms of justice?

Chris Berdik: Yes, so. I'll start with the research that I've seen, is basically, it's mostly US based, looking at neighborhoods and cities that were what we would call redlined. This is a practice in the 30s and the 40s where an organization that guided investment in cities would grade different areas of the city in terms of the risk.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: for investment and they graded them to a large extent based on who was living there. If you had more recent immigrants or more people with brown and black skin, then you were graded worse. Like this is a riskier place to invest. And the worst grade was to, these were graded but they also have color coded maps and the worst areas were red. So they call it red lining.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: This went on for decades, but it was eventually outlawed in the 60s. Nevertheless, that kind of lack of investment became cyclical and you had these, you know, concentrated areas of poverty, not just from redlining, but this is part of what triggered it. And so there's been a lot of research now looking at, well, what happened to these places? All other things being equal if they were redlined in the 30s and 40s. because of their population. And they have much higher health issues and much higher levels of pollution exposure from air, water, you name it, and noise. These are noisier places. And the reason is pretty simple. They lacked investment. They needed to welcome whatever jobs or attention they could get from from infrastructure, they were the places of least resistance for a highway to come running through the middle of them, or the waste incinerator plant that was going to be sited somewhere, it would be sited there. So these are all sources of pollution that include noise, but not exclusively noise. Almost all of them have particulate matter or other pieces of pollution. emanating from them. So, you know, the research shows this, what they call the noise gap, is pretty prevalent across the United States. So I'll start, I'll start with that. And then we can kind of talk about another piece of this, which is the vulnerability part, which, which you touched on. So, you know, I may be exposed to the same level of decibels outside from

Julien: Yep.

Chris Berdik: planes flying over my house or what have you as somebody living a mile away from me. But that person does not have the quality of housing that I have, does not have the ability to maybe access a green space park or what have you to take some refuge from that noise. They don't have air conditioning, so in the summertime they have to keep their windows open and that noise gets in more than it does into my house. more exposure and more vulnerability that has, you know, comes into play.

Julien: And vulnerability in terms of health more generally, maybe as well, because you need to change that. And we speak about vulnerable people. We didn't mention here, I don't know, did you, in your work, you tackle this neurodiversity and neurodivergence and the way neurodivergent people are maybe more? sensitive to specific noises. It's something we discussed in another episode where I interviewed Sarah Zinsel, is an expert on neurodiversity at workplaces and it was very interesting discussion as well about that topic. Did you have an interaction to that topic too? See some research or?

Chris Berdik: No, I didn't. That was a thing that I did not get into. as I subsequent to writing the book and seeing that issue crop up a lot, for people who have autism or other neurodiversity considerations, people who have had brain trauma. It's a major issue. I haven't done the research. I didn't include it in the book and I regret that. But I think now, yeah, for the next one. I will mention one thing that has sprung to mind. Here in the States, we passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. And that was focused on accommodating

Julien: Clamor 2 for the next edition.

Chris Berdik: people with disabilities of every type, you know, you know, that's why we have all the curb cuts in our sidewalks and we have ramps that allow people in elevators to access train platforms, et cetera. When that was passed, the government commissioned a study of restaurant noise to see if they should have quiet areas to accommodate people who had hearing difficulties. And

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: They decided not that the evidence didn't support the need for that because at the time the peak noise levels they were finding were 68 decibels, which is within the range of normal conversation. ⁓ That's different now. We can we'll talk about restaurant noise, perhaps as we go along, it it restaurants by and large when they've been measured are quite a bit louder than that and quite a bit.

Julien: Yep.

Chris Berdik: harder for diners who want to talk to each other over their meal.

Julien: It's a topic we discussed in the first episode, I think, from Fighting Noise, with the founders of Silencio, Web3 startup, trying to map noise. all over the world thanks to a specific app, a very interesting app and it's interesting to see the difference in restaurants in case at some point we'll be, I hope we'll be able to pick our restaurant according to the average level of noise. I say average level of noise, mentioned the green spaces before and I want to mention that as well. There are a few... actions and I want to speak about positive actions now, but I ask myself, having quiet spaces in the world and you mentioned that as well, it's not everyday spaces. I mean, it's great to have a green space in your city, but I don't know your life, in my life, I don't have the daily opportunity to spend one hour or two in a quiet space of my city. My everyday life is going from home to work to the school of the kids. So it's a lot about mobility noise, in fact. And I have the impression that we have some regulations which are not low enough. And we have these quiet spaces, these parks, national parks or green spaces in cities where we think, OK, but there are quiet spaces, so people can't complain. What do you think about that? What can you tell us about that duality between both lives, the real life and the life regulation expected from us?

Chris Berdik: Well, so I, you know, am speaking about this living in the United States as I do, but knowing that Europe has had regulations on the books for more than a couple decades now for large cities to not just map their noise, typically from transportation, but to identify if the city is large enough, areas that are quiet, quiet areas. as you mentioned. These quiet areas by convention are just defined by a certain decibel threshold. And so to qualify, usually it has to have an average below 55 decibels over, I think, a 24 hour stretch. What that means in practice is that many of these quiet areas that are singled out for protection and become this, I don't know, background of quiet preservation in cities. They are these hard to reach places, as you mentioned, deep inside some large park or on the outskirts of the city. And I spoke to a researcher named Antonella Radicchi who took a hard look at these quiet areas. and said, you know, what is the purpose of them? Is it just, are these just ornamental, quiet areas where we can point to them and say, look, we've kept Noise at Bay here in this nook of a giant park, or are they meant to help, you know, the most people possible find some sonic refuge from the noise in their daily lives? And if it's the latter, then we need to have them be. more accessible and she came up with this idea of everyday quiet areas. And it was hinged on the fact that quiet is not necessarily just about the decibel threshold. You know, I'll say just from my perspective, I was recently challenged to define how I think about quiet and I think about it as kind of a space of uncluttered attention. where my sensory and cognitive abilities are able to expand rather than be constantly batting away signals. Antonella created this Hush City app where she crowdsourced everyday quiet areas and she did a lot of it in Berlin. Actually, that was where her major research work was.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: where people went around and identified areas within easy walking distance that they found that quiet feeling. And many of them were, you know, they were obviously in green spaces with, you know, trees and some birds and some water, let's say, creating a background masking sound, but also places where people were, these places that felt, people felt relaxed and at ease.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: desolate and silent. so Berlin did take up her work and partnered with her and created a at least a an attempt to start identifying everyday quiet areas. I think there's still work being done to sort of say, well, if we're not going to define it by decibels, you know, we need some rubric for how we will define it. And that is a challenge. But

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: You know, that is, I think about that work a lot, what we want from quiet. Why is it good for us? Is it just, you know, keeping the noise at bay like a noise wall? Or is it, does it have its own function for us? And I think it's the latter.

Julien: In the book you mentioned as well as the initiative of having kind of a noise budget. I think it's an initiative used by national parks. Can you explain it? And behind the question is, is noise budget a solution which could be applied on way more than national parks in terms of regulation?

Chris Berdik: Hmm. Okay, this is something that I know a small amount about. So I'll tell you what I know, which is it's an attempt by the National Park Service to balance and create an adaptive noise management for the parks. So for any of these national parks, you have this tension because you want... people to come and enjoy these parks. You want them to value them and, you know, experience them. And some people experience them by coming in and just walking quietly and listening. Other people experience them because they want to go snowmobiling or tour the place by helicopter. And, you know, they have a choice. The managers and the regulators here. we could ban all of those activities and create these sort of natural museums of wildness where you're only allowed to come and look at them and then go on your way. Or we can create them to be flexible so that we allow people to access and experience them in different ways, but we maintain a

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: reasonable level of noise intrusions. And so they've done as many times created a sort of a noise budget for any, let's say, operators of noise making things like snowmobiles or helicopters or whatever in the parks. They'll cap it at a certain amount of sound that they are allowed to create with their devices and encourage them to say, well, if you want to, for instance, have rent out twice as many snowmobiles as you do now and grow your business. Invest in quieter snowmobiles. That way you maintain...

Julien: because you don't extend your noise budget. So as a business has a limit of the noise budget, you are applied to the activity.

Chris Berdik: Right. It encourages innovation. And there's still dissension and argument and people are, you know, this is not, it's not pleasing everybody, but it is, I think, an attempt to be flexible and adaptive in how sound is managed beyond just sort of banning things or free for all. Beyond the, I don't know.

Julien: But yeah.

Chris Berdik: how exactly it would work beyond... a sort of a contained place where, know, in national parks, the national park service has control. You know, they could not license you to operate there if you violate their, and they're able to have three or four, you know, air tour companies or whatever operating in the parks. And so they're able to say, we know how many decibels. are from you. I don't know how it would work outside of that.

Julien: But I mean, in a city like, if you look at or listen at noise of a stadium, for example, a big stadium could have kind of the same noise budget and having to find solutions to consent that noise to us because you have inhabitants around that place and they know there is a stadium here. I mean, you can't know that. You know that before you move in. Still, at some point it's a thing because that's repetition which is disturbing. As there is in this movie, and I forgot the name, I could put it in the comments, there's an American movie about noise pollution and they mention a lot this military planes issue. There is a base very close to a city. I don't know if you've seen that movie. think the founder of Ben & Jerry's invested a lot into that topic. It's really going to share the link with you if you didn't see that. they complain because these aircraft, these planes are very loud and people say, yeah, but it's just six minutes per day. So it's not a lot. but it's six minutes per day at a level which is, I don't know, maybe 120, 150 decibels. It's very noisy, that's a lot of low frequencies as well, so it's really disturbing. So six minutes at 150 decibels, you could say, okay, we have a certain amount of decibels, and what's the rest of the day? And I think if you apply this to stadiums, if you apply this to...

Chris Berdik: Right.

Julien: I don't know, in Germany you have lot of outdoor swimming pools, for instance, doing a lot of noise for the rest of the city because you hear that, even from schools. But if you apply it to factories for the blue workers working inside of this factory and saying, regulation is not about no machine above 80 decibels and not a question of just average, but also a question of you have a specific budget in total per... day, per hour, per week, per month, I don't know, something to research. That could be a solution to support innovation and to support people to look for innovation as well, which is a bit beyond the current regulations we have. That was the salt based on this.

Chris Berdik: Mm-hmm. Okay. Yes, yes. Yes. By the way, I remember the movie now. It was a documentary about noise in Vermont, right? Okay, yes. Okay, right. Yeah, no, I think that, especially when you mentioned the stadiums, there was a big fight here in Boston about Fenway Park, which is the home of the Boston Red Sox. the Red Sox have, I mean, over the season, it's 130 odd games.

Julien: A documentary, yeah. In Vermont, exactly, yeah, yeah.

Chris Berdik: that they play. They don't play them all in Fenway, of course. Half of them are there. But there's still a lot of crowds coming in and noise from that stadium. And then the stadium, when the Red Sox aren't there, decided they wanted to host rock concerts. And, you know, it's a pretty dense neighborhood there. And the question was, you know, how many

Julien: Yep.

Chris Berdik: Rock concerts should this stadium host over the course of the year? And I think having that kind of a noise budget saying, okay, well you've got X number of baseball games. Your noise budget is, know, whatever it is. How many rock concerts can you fit under that cap? Is worth approaching as kind of a management.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: as a management approach. I think with factories. It's interesting because I know that there is a lot of attention paid to the time that workers are exposed to the decibels, not just the ultimate level. So if you have a certain level, like 80 here in the States, 85 decibels, when, when, when that is averaged over an eight hour workday, then the, you have to have the, protection and the hearing screenings.

Julien: It's having, yeah.

Chris Berdik: And then they say, well, if it's over 90 decibels or something like that, ⁓ it's, you you can't, the time that you're, you could be exposed to it without harming yourself is cut by, you know, every three decibels, I think it's cut in half. ⁓ So there is that attention, but yeah, as a regulatory structure, don't think that's how they do it.

Julien: It's far worse. ⁓ But yeah, exactly. Yes, it's just a way to understand that and to be able to be honest, 85 decibels is something for more than eight hours. I measured that level mostly at conferences or fairs, big fairs. And you go at a fair, speak with professionals on the booth and you explain them, you know, we have 85 decibels now. So if you stay here for eight hours, it will be humming your ear and you're clear for forever because you can't repair that. And people say, but I'm here for nine hours already since this morning, I'm here for two more days. And that's people really understand that we are not living in the right way and we need to do something about that. But let's keep positive and maybe to end that episode, I want to speak about innovation. Did you identify in your...

Chris Berdik: That's right.

Julien: research work in all these years because you told me you started to think about this book to sign the book in 2018 so it's been at least six years you really research or you are aware about all this. Did you identify innovations which should have more visibility, more awareness which could be great solutions in general or both specific branches specific problems of noise and noise pollution or the consequences of noise pollution like clean inter sensor.

Chris Berdik: Yes. Well, there are pieces of innovation. I think I would defer to you. I obviously heard a lot about the noise cameras that are being put in place in many cities, particularly in Europe. I don't know how well they are doing. If anybody has actually studied some overall decibel decrease in certain areas of the city through their use, they seem to be solving a problem that has existed in enforcement for quite some time, which is how ephemeral the an episodic these noises often are and being able to have complaints trigger some kind of measurement that actually captures the noise problem is has been a big problem. I know that in New York at NYU, they had created this these distributed sensors that would be backed by kind of a artificial intelligence brain that could identify one noise from another so that you knew that, yeah, that is a jackhammer. And it would do the same thing that these noise cameras do for traffic noise. But when I looked into that, there's a huge gap between having a sensor in a lab that can distinguish

Julien: Yeah, and one more.

Chris Berdik: noise A from noise B from having a sensor that at scale can do the job of decreasing city noise. And that cap is immense. I talked to the people at NYU about how many sensors they have been deployed and it was, you know, a couple dozen, something like that. Yeah. These things are not quite ready for prime time. I think that they are very promising. but my, my sense of where things are with them is not to get, and not to overhype them. I'll put it that way. ⁓ What I looked a lot at in my research were technologies that allowed the rest of us to harness and amplify our power as consumers to show

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: companies and services that we value our acoustic environment. The one that I talk a lot about is Soundprint. You may be aware of it. It was started by a person in New York who has hearing difficulties and he was a single person at the time trying to go on dates and he couldn't find a restaurant that was quiet enough to actually converse with his dates and he decided to create this app.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: that allows people to, it sort of acts as a guide to quiet restaurants, bars, retail, any sort of venue. You can go and take the sound measurement and contribute to the map in any city you're in that I think brings this, brings it visibility as a thing that people care about. because I think a lot of restaurant owners, they didn't care or they didn't think that people cared enough about it to get beyond the fact that they wanted to have this modern look and strip out all the sound absorption and crank up the music because we want excitement. But no, we actually also want to be able to talk to each other. And these apps are a way of showing that. And the other thing that's in sort of innovation that I really looked at was if we're going to go beyond the decibel in terms of being proactive and think about what our soundscapes can do for us, we need to have tools that allow architects and urban designers to work just as easily as they do with the decibel number. A lot of innovative work right now around city soundscapes and going beyond just counting decibels. It's sort of, it's these bespoke projects that are very particular to, you know, one small park in a city and how they approached it. And to scale it requires

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: some kind of standardization in terms of how you understand a soundscape and how to measure it and how to reach a goal. So there's a group at University College London who are part of this international project called the Soundscape Indices Project, and they are doing a similar thing with AI where they kind of extensive sound measurements and photographic

Julien: Yep.

Chris Berdik: records of different types of places like parks or business corridors or any type of urban space with interviews of people experiencing those spaces, know, trying to kind of create a large model. Yeah, of kind of so that when people are trying to predict when they're doing urban projects, what the what the soundscape will be like and how it will be received.

Julien: To make sure the psychoacoustic side, yeah.

Chris Berdik: they can just take a few metrics and just sort of plug them in and be able to work with that rather than just sort of leave it up to intuition.

Julien: To intuition and then to invest into rework since after they've built this and went to the end and discovered that there is an issue and there is a problem they need to solve and rework is a lot of investment. I always say that the mix between regulation, education as well because I mean you could do a lot in terms of just being more respectful and being aware about the noise we emit ourselves in different ways.

Chris Berdik: Exactly.

Julien: and innovation. And for innovation, I like the positive ways of finding a positive soundscape, as you mentioned, is a very interesting way. And I think if we do invest more, and that's why I created NoNo, is if we do invest more, bringing this innovation from the lab to bring it at scale, is something possible with way more investment. It's just a question of where do we invest? And if you look outside right now, 2025, June 2025, we don't have a lack of investment. We just don't invest into this topic. So I guess we could accelerate this innovation, put it at scale with right investment. And that's one of the goals I have. I could and I think so you do, we could discuss that topic for hours. But as a We still have not a noise budget but a time budget today to respect. As a last question, what can individuals and institutions or businesses actually do to make soundscape healthier in your opinion? What would be your one recommendation for the listeners that can have impact? You can have impact right now. I hope much more with your book. and ordering your book is the first we would recommend, but what would be the second step they can actually do.

Chris Berdik: I'll mention it again quickly, which is that ability to harness our power as consumers, not just to complain about noise after the fact, but to reward companies and services that show they value the sonic environment. I think that's really important. It's not idealistic, but I think it has power. That's one thing. I think and I hope that a lot of people will... read the book and see that they actually have a pivotal role in the soundscapes where they work and live. The folks at Phillips who worked on that patient monitor, those folks have huge power to affect the soundscape of hospitals. The people that are working in the restaurant business, actually if they thought about

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Chris Berdik: how to design their restaurants and there are these tools now to have sort of immersive audio of a plan space, they could solve the problem. I think people have a lot more leverage than they think they do. if they think about sound and they don't just think about the noise that's bothering them in that given moment.

Julien: That was Chris Berdik, author of Clamor How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back. It gives a lot of hope when I listen to you and when I read your book and even see the name of your book. We need to take it back. Thanks a lot Chris for your time today. The book was just released in late May so you'll find the link in the comment of this episode to order the copy or to order the book or the ebook even. depending on your choice. But I hope a lot of listeners will take lot of insight out of these books, out of this interview today. So I want to thank you personally for the time you took just after the release of your book. I can imagine you jumped from one interview to the other, but it was really interesting to have you. I say here in Europe, because the most listeners are European, in France, Germany, UK, or whatever in Europe. and we can take a lot of good insights for this. I'll you the last word of the interview and on behalf of all the listeners, thanks a lot for your time. Please, you may end the interview.

Chris Berdik: Thank so much. Thanks very much for all your listeners time as well. I think the hope here is that we can understand that we are not going to live in a noise free world, but we can do so much to not just make the world sound less bad, but potentially better. And thank you again.

Julien: Thanks Chris, thank you everyone.