Noise: The Human Element
by Ben Fischer
There’s nothing quite so spine-tingling as those first few moments of a record. The needle, dropping with a light thud, finds its groove and then coasts along the outer track. In these moments before the first song, each spare electron and minute particle of dust contributes to the sound that sits above the silence, the noise. The feeling it inspires is comparable to the experience of listening to the bathtub fill in the next room, imagining the warmth—the anticipation might be better than the real thing. In fact, the so-called “warmth” of vinyl is largely attributed to the random crackles and pops of the medium, and even the low frequency rumble of the turntable itself. This comforting noise, present throughout the record, is center-stage in these first seconds.
Today, however, we rarely hear this noise. With the convenience of iPods and the internet, vinyl has become more or less obsolete. The long-play (LP) record as we know it has been around since 1948 and has been the first format of many legendary albums, from Sgt. Pepper’s to Pet Sounds. Developed in Columbia labs by Dr. Peter Goldmark, the new disc boasted longer play-time and better sound quality than its predecessor. Despite their eventual decline, records managed to carve out a niche as a DJ and audiophile technology and never completely went under. With better frequency response and dynamic range than a CD, the record’s only drawbacks were its portability and its ever-present noise floor. But why did we try so hard to get rid of the noise?
Noise surrounds us everywhere we go. Stop reading, turn off the music, and take a moment to listen to the sounds of your environment. There could be a vent humming, people talking, or traffic honking. Pure silence just doesn’t happen to us normally. We only come close to it in the vacuum of space or within a well-treated anechoic (no-echo) chamber. In one such room at Orfield Labs in Minneapolis, Minnesota, thick, dense walls made of steel and concrete prevent external sounds from entering the space. Three foot-thick fiberglass wedges prevent internal sounds from reflecting off the walls. Turn off the lights and the sensory deprivation could drive you mad. For a body suspended in the depths of outer space, the only audible sounds become your heartbeat, swallows, and jitters. In this extreme setting, a total lack of noise increases anxiety and can even cause aural hallucinations. To us, silence is unnatural, eerie, and uncomfortable; when the birds stop chirping, we look for the predator. If you need a quick fix but don’t have access to a record player, a YouTube search will give you millions of results for noise: ten-hour-long videos of continuous white noise, pink noise, brown noise, rainfall—even the continuous whoosh of an airplane cabin. Each type of noise is distinct, and YouTubers espouse the many therapeutic effects of their noise of choice. One may increase focus, one could help you to relax or fall asleep, and still another may smooth over your bowel movements (okay, that myth was busted). Next time you’re feeling anxious or having trouble sleeping, your thoughts racing and body turning, take comfort in some noise and zone out to a five minute lecture on the properties of wood or the sounds of the rainforest. Better yet, mix and match until you find yourself on a pirate ship listening to a blank record during a thunderstorm. Put a little noise into your life!
A major goal of technology has been to eliminate and overcome noise in all of its forms. In communications, for example, noise presents a challenge to decoding. What is noise and what is real information? The drive to eliminate noise is certainly a noble quest; miscommunication can mean death in certain circumstances. Noise reduction is needed for creating powerful, reliable systems that can transmit vast quantities of information with minimal error. It has made possible cellular networks, the internet, and even planet discovery. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that quieter media usurped their noisy predecessors. The transition from vinyl and cassette to the Compact Disc essentially eliminated the noise associated with music playback, resulting in a noise profile that more closely matched that of the original recording. As recording technology advanced as well, switching from analog tape to digital bits, even the noise associated with recording disappeared. What were we left with?
We live in a world in which we have succeeded in eradicating most inconveniences from our lives. We don’t need to try very hard to ensure that our daily routine varies by less than a snooze button. In the American temple of convenience, the mall, we experience, far from aural silence, an increasingly deafening cultural silence. Just as records gave way to the more consistent experience of the CD, so too have independently owned, local businesses given way to uniform national franchises. In choosing the artificially consistent, we dampen the natural variability of our lives. We silence life’s background noise.
The very stuff of vinyl crackle— dust, dirt, and lint—can now be filtered and ionized out of the air before it even touches your lungs (or your precious records). In the modern kitchen, each surface is wiped barren with disinfecting agents, destroying any viral or bacterial threat. Hand sanitizer dispensers abound, insisting “You’ve got trouble on your hands!”, warning against the horrors of the common cold. Removing small inconveniences may make us feel safer, but could actually work against our body’s natural biome. According to the hygiene hypothesis and a “mounting body of research,” the observed increase in allergies and autoimmune diseases in western countries could be due to our obsessive avoidance of infectious diseases. When the body isn’t allowed to develop its own immune system, the argument goes, it becomes more susceptible to other forms of illness. Our man-made bubbles of silence and sterility seem to work against us. As we try to remove the noise from our lives, we distance ourselves from what it means to be human.
Of course, there is a time and place for silence. Thankfully, surgeons sterilize their scalpels—but then, there’s nothing distinctly human about the scalpel. It cuts and slices us open, reveals our messy mechanical innards, and must be wielded by an expert with no room for error. The scalpel is not human; it never claimed to be. To be human is and always has been to be imperfect and, well, noisy. Noise is encoded in our DNA, in the billions of random mutations that inched us along, all the way from sea serpent to homo sapiens. In all aspects of our lives, the global trend has been to increase efficiency and to optimize, reducing the noise of day to day life.
The noise we see as our enemy is imperfection and chaos, disagreement and miscommunication. Eliminating noise makes sense from a technological standpoint, but in doing so we inadvertently erase the human element. What makes records so appealing today may just be that they are imperfect in a world where perfection is the ultimate goal. The crackles and pops on a record render it human, prone to error, and more relatable. Put on a record, and welcome the noise back into your life.