“quiet zone,” like the Amtrak quiet car: no phones, soft voices. It
reduced the background noise there by three decibels, which is
enough to double the listening area. So instead of hearing birds
something like 10 yards in front of you, now you can hear them 20
yards away. That’s a lot more birds.)
Now Newman and Taff run experiments out of the university’s
Acoustics Social Science Lab, the acronym of which, people noticed,
resembles asshole, so they’re switching the name around. Among
other things, Newman and Taff and their colleagues have discovered
that human-caused noise actually makes parks look worse, not just
sound worse. Visitors hearing loud vehicle noise rate parks as 38
percent less scenic than those who don’t hear it (and motorcycle
sounds had the most impact, followed by snowmobiles and propeller
planes). Counterintuitively, the soundscape was affecting the
viewscape. Just imagine all the beauty we’re missing out on.
(Opposite effects are seen in cities, when people rate urban settings as
more attractive when they can hear birdsong.)
Veering into human health, Newman and Taff decided to team up
with Joshua Smyth, a biobehavioral health psychologist also at Penn
State. He’s interested less in how sound messes with your psyche and
more interested in how it can make you feel better. Can some sounds
be an intervention or an antidote for stress and depression? This
appeals to Newman and Taff because natural sound is a resource the
parks need to save before it’s too late. If it’s good for you, they want
to know. They were familiar with the literature on nature as
psychologically restorative, and it seemed to them that sound was a
potentially powerful but underappreciated component of nature.
To tease out the sound piece, and to see how it worked for me,
Smyth ran me through his current experiment. First he hooked me up
to a heart rate monitor, which I would wear throughout. Then he gave
me the Weinstein Noise Sensitivity Scale test, which asked a bunch of
questions about my attitudes to various types of noise from things