It was a good question, and this was my best answer: I chose to write a book about noise because it is so easily dismissed as a small issue.

And because in that dismissal I believe we can find a key for understanding many of the big issues.

Noise reminds me of a Norse myth in which the god Thor is invited to wrestle with a giant king’s decrepit old foster mother. Though Thor is one of the mightiest of the Norse gods, he is unable to gain any advantage over the crone. He cannot lift her, throw her, best her in any way. Only later is he told that he was wrestling with Old Age itself. Noise is a lot like Thor’s mysterious opponent. It appears lightweight and even frail at first glance, but once you try to pick it up, you discover that you are trying to heft the whole world.

A “WEAK” ISSUE BECAUSE IT AFFECTS “THE WEAK”

To say that noise is a relatively weak issue because it is less momentous than world hunger or global climate change is to make an incomplete statement. Noise is a weak issue also because most of those it affects are perceived, and very often dismissed, as weak. The ones who dismiss them, in addition to being powerful, are often the ones making the noise.

In using the word weak I am not referring to personal capabilities, to someone’s IQ score or muscle mass, though these factors may come into play. I am thinking rather of a person’s social standing and political power. Make a list of the people most likely to be affected by loud noises (though not all noise is loud), either because of their greater vulnerability to the effects of loud sound or because of their greater likelihood of being exposed to it, and you come up with a set of members whose only common features are their humanity and their lack of clout. Your list will include children (some of whom, according to the World Health Organization, “receive more noise at school than workers from an 8-hour work day at a factory”), the elderly (whose ability to discriminate spoken speech from background noise is generally less than that of younger contemporaries), the physically ill (cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, for example, are often more sensitive to noise), racial minorities (blacks in the United States are twice as likely, and Hispanics 1.5 times as likely, as whites to live in homes with noise problems), neurological minorities (certain types of sound are especially oppressive to people with autism), the poor (more likely than their affluent fellow citizens to live next to train tracks, highways, airports), laborers (whose political weakness has recently been manifested in weakened occupational safety standards), prisoners (noise, like rape, being one of the unofficial punishments of incarceration), members of the Armed Forces (roughly one in four soldiers returning from Iraq has a service-related hearing loss) — or simply a human being of any description who happens to have less sound-emitting equipment than the person living next to her (who might for his part have car speakers literally able to kill fish) and no feasible way to move.

Consider a toddler holding a toy capable of emitting 117 decibels (on a par with the sound pressure of a rock concert or a sandblaster) at the length of her stubby arms and a combat-fit Marine exposed to weapons fire and explosive devices that may produce sound levels as high as 185 dB and you seem to be looking at two very different categories of human strength and weakness. Take a closer look and you see two human beings who have less say than many of us do about what goes into their ears. Consider an elderly person living in a noisy tenement, a patient in the notoriously noisy wards of certain hospitals, a studious undergraduate living in a typical college dorm; then consider the likelihood that any one of them could improve his or her situation by complaining. What they rightly perceive as helplessness, some others around them will readily perceive as entitlement. A person who says “My noise is my right” basically means “Your ear is my hole.”