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Background Noise

Fechner’s1 law state that our senses are logarithmic, in other words, our senses react to new stimuli according to the intensity of the previous stimuly. We can all observe this, for example, when we are in a very dark room we can perceive very mild changes in light, that we would be incapable of perceiving when the room is bright. Another example is when we are hearing music and switching volume from one low level to another, the change is a lot, but when changing from one high level to another it feels as there is no difference at all.

When it comes to hearing, we often hear things that are over a given threshold, and everything that is below that is too far (logarithmically speaking) to even be realised. There is really a lot of background noise that we often don’t realise. I have two experiments to be conscious of the level of background noise.

  1. Wear noise cancelling headphones for a while, preferrably turned on and with no music and take them on the same environment. For a little while, your ear is adjusted to the quieter medium and before it adapts to the new environment you get a feel of all the noise that is in the background, and it is a lot! This strategy could also be adopted with passive noise cancelling muffs.
  2. Wear bone-conducting headphones. The strategy here is slightly different, as the hearing channel is open to the background noise (there is no covering of it that will dampen noise) you are listening to music AND hearing the noise at the same time. Then I cover the channel by putting my fingers in my ears and suddenly music becomes much cleaner, loud and high-quality. This is what music would sound like if there was zero background noise, and also allows me to appreciate the amount of noise that we are exposed to by default.2

By doing this two experiments one realizes that the level of noise that is taken for granted is a lot, and it becomes uncomfortable, especially so when you realize how much of it is artificially created by us humans. Trying to minimize this background noise is a very complex task, because fridges, computers or roads (even if distant) are ubiquituous and arguably essential. For my case I can deal with these levels of noise, but I don’t like to aggregate on top, for example fleeing home whenever the vacuum robot starts to clean.

  1. Weber-Fechner Law ↩︎

  2. There could be some other factors at play in this strategy, for example the fact that by covering the hearing channel with fingers vibrations have another point where they can ressonate against thus increasing the intensity of the music, but I neglected this effect. ↩︎