And here, we begin our return to the problem of our own wailing siren technology. Critics of the Sirens spotlight their role as distracters from purposeful activity. The Sirens unravel our worldly ambitions by mesmerizing us with music that sucks us down into the depths of a seductive melancholy—the kind of mood indigo that Robert Burton refers to in the introductory poem to his opus when he writes, “All my joys to this are folly, / Naught so sweet as melancholy.” Poets and philosophers founder on the question of whether the misery of the human condition might not demand the kind of engulfing aesthetic experience proffered by the Sirens as a remedy for the pain of existence. Sometimes the saddest song is the most effective vaccination against despair. DC police chief Lanier argued that new technology, by proffering an endless supply of “something to distract folks,” made people oblivious to their surroundings. True enough. But dominated by traffic noise, infrastructure roars, crashes and shrieks, along with countless auditory come-ons from commercial interests, our public spaces have devolved into ghastly sonic dumping grounds. It’s often only in the individualized sound bubble that we can escape from the distractions of the auditory wasteland we’ve been condemned to and find solace for the fact that we already inhabit a Noise Underworld. “The Rumbler,” remarked Lanier, “helps shake that distraction” endemic to the age of technology. She did not add that it does so by creating a distraction more disruptive of interior life than any vehicular sound before it. (Though once we learn to protect ourselves against that noise by blocking it with some yet noisier private sound sealant, the Rumbler will no doubt be superseded by a still more piercing siren: the Disembowler, perhaps.) Schopenhauer declared that the superiority of a great intellect depends entirely on the capacity to concentrate; its strength vanishes instantly when diffracted by disturbance. “Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption,” he declared.11