The Pandemic Made Cities Quieter, But Not Less Stressful
There’s more to taming urban noise than lowering the volume.
Before the pandemic, the London street where I live was a rare patch of calm in a noisy city. When the lockdowns of 2020 arrived, that situation flipped like a switch.
Riding into central London on my bike, I saw that many streets were deserted and quiet. My own road, by contrast, seemed to get much louder, even without the usual hum of cars and planes. It wasn’t just the weekly “clap for carers” session—when people applauded on doorsteps to show support for the National Health Service—or the occasional ambulance siren. With most residents now always at home in their 1920s row houses, I couldn’t help hearing a teenage boy screaming at his computer games beyond my living room wall, while our upstairs neighbors compensated for missed social opportunities by dancing drunkenly above our heads. Next door, two families grilled and played salsa music in their shared garden at what felt like eccentric hours.
Delivery drivers, busier with most stores closed, staged daily shout-offs as they struggled to pass on our narrow street, provoking its three new lockdown puppies (one of them mine) to bark and howl in chorus. The feral parakeets feasting on the cherry tree next door seemed to screech louder. Perhaps they were afraid of being upstaged.
With even backyard birdsong sounding newly abrasive, it dawned on me that mine might be a case of heightened sensitivity, as my ears tuned themselves to an acoustic environment newly stripped of the urban background hum.
If so, it wasn’t just me. A University College London study confirms a distinct phenomenon: During last year’s lockdowns, average noise levels did indeed drop across London. There was also a dramatic change in noise complaints—but not in the way you might expect. They went up more than 47%, according to an analysis by the same UCL researchers, and were overwhelmingly occasioned by neighborhood noise.
Nor was London or the U.K. an outlier. Increases in noise complaints were reported from New Zealand to Brazil. Traffic—by far the biggest culprit behind high urban noise volumes—may have calmed, but around the world, shut-in city dwellers were clearly finding one another more grating than ever.
As normal city life slowly returns, the phenomenon is worth reflecting on. Lockdowns, though stressful, gave many urbanites a chance to attend to their immediate surroundings more closely, to discover (or rediscover) their local communities. Some got a reprieve from commuting and now plan to continue to work from home at least part of the week. That will please urban planners who, even before the pandemic, sought to integrate the disparate places where people lived, worked, shopped, and relaxed. (For example, Paris’s “15-Minute City” planning model imagines city residents meeting all their immediate needs within a short walk.)
The result of all this may be fewer soul-sucking commutes, but also more friction—not just among neighbors, but among residents and businesses. While the imminent switch to electric vehicles will make cities somewhat quieter, it will also bring neighborhood noise—if the lockdowns are any guide—more to the front of people’s consciousness.
So sound seems a key part of the post-pandemic urban rethink. Beyond certain thresholds, noise can cause real physical harm: Researchers have linked it to hearing loss, stress, high blood pressure, and other ills. But much of the time, simply reducing the volume of noise in a space, as the experience of lockdown suggests, doesn’t in itself make people more at peace with their surroundings.
If we’re going to promote an acoustic environment where citizens can coexist happily—and we have to believe they can—we should change our approach. In place of the tendency to fixate on the quantity of sound in our environment, we should think a lot more about its quality.
We’d be following a school of thought that’s current among many acoustic researchers and theorists: the soundscape approach. It can help us think with more nuance about how cities should sound and how they can remain places where people want to linger. And it’s starting to shift the way cities are managed in Europe, influencing planning in Berlin; Valencia, Spain; Limerick, Ireland; and London’s financial district, the City.
Businesses as well as urban planners need to consider these niceties. (Some already do: Retailers pay attention to how music affects customer behavior, and some airports use piped birdsong—softer and less grating than Muzak—to provide an overlay to plane noise and encourage people to relax.) A more deliberate way of managing sound could help revitalize shopping streets bathed in traffic noise and placate residents near stadiums and other places where loud crowds congregate. Not to mention that employers who want to lure hesitant workers back to open-plan offices are likely to find their task easier if they think a little more carefully about aural surroundings people actually like.
According to Francesco Aletta, a researcher at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, assessing an acoustic environment solely as loud or quiet is like “judging a soup only by its temperature. Of course, if it’s too hot, you need to know,” he says. “But if you want to think about spices, flavor, you need a different approach.”
That means wading deep into a pool of subjectivity, since attitudes to sound vary widely according to age, class, cultural background, and hearing ability. Many factors besides volume determine the degree of pleasure or distress a sound gives us.
The boom of a live orchestra can reach 100 decibels, roughly the same volume as some jackhammers. But it’s a sound many love. It’s intended to please, and the audience has actively chosen to hear it for an agreed duration of time. By contrast, a person might be tortured by the much fainter sound of a beeping smoke alarm in an empty apartment next door, excruciating because it’s inescapable and endless.
Moving away from simple volume, soundscape researchers might ask whether an environment is “eventful” or “uneventful” and whether people in that space find it pleasant or not. These two axes—pleasant/unpleasant and eventful/uneventful—more closely describe the actual lived experience of sound. A quiet park on a sunny day is an “uneventful” soundscape that’s almost universally perceived as pleasant, while a deserted nighttime street, equally uneventful, may feel unpleasant because it seems unsafe. Likewise, an “eventfully” busy road backed up with throbbing traffic is unpleasant to most ears, but a bustling street market with a good street musician might sound delightful.
The issue for urban planners is that not everyone agrees on what a pleasant sound environment is, in terms of either volume or sound profiles. People in a North American suburb might be bothered by volumes experienced as normal by city dwellers in China. Yet they might also balk at the high degree of calm prized in Switzerland, where a federal law discourages people from doing noisier chores such as vacuuming and laundry during evenings and lunchtimes and on Sundays and holidays.
There’s no consensus about the types of sounds that are intrusive, either. Research comparing the U.K. with China and Taiwan has found marked differences. When residents of Sheffield, England, were asked which sounds they preferred coming into their living area from outside, 71.4% of respondents chose birdsong and no one chose music. When the same question was posed to residents of Beijing, 60% chose music first and only 17.5% chose birdsong.
It may not even be about the sounds themselves, suggests a co-author of that 2013 study, Jian Kang, an acoustics professor at the University of Sheffield. Public music may connote community harmony in China, an association stemming from activities such as square dancing—which is especially popular among seniors. And whereas birds have positive associations with green space in the U.K., Kang says, in Beijing, high levels of pollution mean that urban birds aren’t necessarily perceived as bucolic. “It’s not about the sound of birdsong itself, it’s about what the sources of birdsong are associated with,” he says.
Class and age differences can also come to the fore. Another study Kang co-authored found that younger people in Sheffield valued quiet in their surroundings significantly less than older people. And the higher an area’s property values in Sheffield were, the more likely residents were to consider quiet important. London, too, shows a clear correlation between an area’s relative wealth and the number of noise complaints it generates: The greatest number per resident are lodged in its wealthiest borough, Kensington and Chelsea.
This isn’t evidence that people on lower incomes mind noise less. The generational and social differences “pose questions about environmental justice,” Aletta says. “Maybe if you live in a more degraded area that has other serious issues, noise isn’t such a priority—but if you live in a slightly richer area, then you might be more likely to [complain], because you see noise as a violation of your privacy.” A planning culture driven by noise complaints may favor the tastes and wishes of those with closer access to power—the older and the better off—while disadvantaging the young, the poor, and people from ethnic and racial minorities.
The idea of using one sound to mask another is not new. Designers and builders have been adding sounds to improve environments for millennia, planting songbird-attracting trees and installing fountains in public spaces to make them more restful. The use of fountains to mask the noise of motor traffic dates at least to the 1960s, when Manhattan’s pocket-size Paley Park was designed with a crashing waterfall to soften noise coming from 53rd Street.
Simply embracing some noises as desirable can boost business. This is the thinking behind the strategy of the City of London that protects and encourages church-bell ringing as a key marker of the area’s historic identity and encourages local workers to take “sound walks” to assess their surroundings. The district has become more lively in recent years, with pubs and venues open later in an area previously shunned after nightfall.
Recently, cities have experimented with adding or transforming sounds electronically. In 2016, Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology tried to make two parks in Sydney and Melbourne, both flanking highways, more appealing by running the traffic noise through processing software. Sounds collected from microphones in noise barriers were converted into more obviously pleasant noises, hinting abstractly at the sound of rushing waves or the rim of a glass being rubbed. These were then transmitted at low volume via speakers. The site-specific overlay to the sound of vehicles shifted local habits: Nearby residents suddenly found it possible to leave their windows open, and the principal of an elementary school near one of the parks said her pupils could use it as a recess space for the first time.
The main tool of the soundscape approach is very simple. Invented in the late 1960s, when composer R. Murray Schafer launched the World Soundscape Project (WSP) at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, the sound walk invites participants to listen attentively as they go through a space, then discuss their impressions. Initially a form of activism to highlight noise pollution, according to WSP pioneer and composer Hildegard Westerkamp, the objective is not just sharper awareness of one’s surroundings but also “an opportunity to examine our relationship as listener to the environment.”
A sound walk in my neighborhood post-lockdown provided me with a different picture from the one I’d formed when everyone was working from home. Most striking was the background hum of traffic—because it wasn’t a hum at all when I listened closely.
The traffic noise I heard was a brash ensemble of ill-harmonized instruments: groaning double-decker buses, the high-pitched rattle of scooters, the thunder roll of trucks. Even a single car, I noticed afresh, makes many noises. The wheels whoosh, the axles squeak, and the engine growls, with a different tone for each maneuver. (When EVs become the norm, engine noise will drop sharply, but other road noises will remain.) That we perceive traffic noise as a background drone seems less a reflection of its actual monotony than of our ability to screen out annoyance.
The best example to date of a realized soundscape plan is Berlin’s Nauener Platz, an unprepossessing plaza at a busy intersection, redesigned in a collaboration between local residents and Berlin’s Technical University in 2012. Registering their impressions through sound walks, locals requested more natural sounds and noise reduction that didn’t block views with high walls, so parents could still monitor children using the playground. As a solution, the redesign lined roadways with chest-high barriers that provided shelter for seating areas but could still be seen over. These areas became quiet islands where ambient noise was overlaid with natural sounds such as birdsong or rattling pebbles. While traffic noise was still present, more families returned to the square, which became quiet enough to host a cafe terrace.
Because it acknowledges cultural and social difference, soundscape planning highlights how negotiations over matters of sound can build more neighborhood harmony. “A colleague once said to me that good community relations are as good as a 10-decibel noise reduction,” Aletta says. “What people don’t like is soundscapes being imposed on them. But if you give people the feeling of control—letting people know before an event is happening, restricting it to a specific time spot, and encouraging people to participate—it will make that conflict much more tolerable, because they were part of the negotiations.”
If local governments and property managers consulted those who use their spaces more, they’d only be doing what neighbors have always done. My own experience suggests just how much good community relations can do to make the sound of other people more bearable. One Wednesday last summer, my neighbors had a family garden party during an afternoon too hot to keep the windows shut. Unable to hear work calls, I leaned over the fence and asked them if they might keep things quiet until 6 p.m. Not understanding me, they did the opposite of what I suggested: kept the music pumping at full blast, then turned it off at 6 on the dot.
It didn’t rescue my workday, but it still melted my heart. The family clearly wanted to be good neighbors and were just trying to have some fun during a difficult time. Sensing that I could negotiate a happy medium with them if I needed to made me feel better.
Cities, businesses, and urban planners can’t manage sound levels just by popping their heads over a fence. But they can eschew a one-size-fits-all approach and develop noise policies that foreground community relations over simple quantitative measurements. Cities may rattle our eardrums at times, but if you tune in attentively, the sounds they make can be beautiful.