It feels a bit off to me. I'm sure all these sounds exist, but this makes it seem like the norm is the peak of a workday in an industrial area or market, which would be noisy now too.
Country farms, even with animals, and horses pulling carts and whatnot are nothing like the 10,000s of cars a day going by in the background of a modern city, nonstop gas powered road construction and yard maintenance, etc. I'm sure there were loud times but the article doesn't convince me, I think it would have been way more peaceful, especially on a farm.
> 10,000s of cars a day going by in the background of a modern city
This is covered in the article, however for the sake of added color. Modern cities have a lot going on but are sprawled by comparison. Medieval cities were very compact for foot travel limitations and defense. Families were big and practically everyone went to church so there were many Churches in a small area. The bells would go off every few hours or more for the Angelus, the start of Mass, the consecration, and the end of Mass multiple times a day. You can still experience this in Malta and maybe parts of South America. The article goes into more detail about industry etc. It was noisy!
>The bells would go off every few hours or more for the Angelus, the start of Mass, the consecration, and the end of Mass multiple times a day.
I'm fairly sure those had practical timekeeping concerns aside from their religious values. Nobody had clocks back then, so someone had to keep track of the time and announce it far and wide.
For that matter, we also used the bell towers - each different, village from village - to orient ourselves in travel... Massive signposts on the horizon. Of course if you have to do something, do it with reason and wits.
Likewise in term of practicality, the bells could act like the "clock" on a motherboard: regulating collective activity.
> Country farms, even with animals, and horses pulling carts and whatnot are nothing like the 10,000s of cars a day going by
Completely different noise. Those combustion and pistons engines create a texture¹, while the animal voices have been naturally developed to call for attention. A thousand motors create a background; one or a thousand dogs or deers are one or a thousand "Hey!"s, impacting sounds made to pierce the background. Like a thousand hums vs a thousand snares.
¹(Assuming, as the poster suggested, we are speaking of the continuous flow and not of single reverse-muffler-from-hell that pass nearby in their trail of havoc and Doppler)
A harsh 75 dB+ of engine noise "texture" is abrasive and stressful. A pre-industrial farm background of wind, animal calls, bird songs, water flow sounds like paradise in comparison. A word, incidentally, that means garden. Places full of pleasant sounds. No one ever thought a city center 2 pm on a Monday a fitting metaphor for 'most pleasant place conceivable'.
> A pre-industrial farm background of wind, animal calls, bird songs, water flow sounds like paradise in comparison
No. It just "«sounds»". I am typing in real time a couple dozen yards from a stream, it is much more annoying than a motorway at reasonable distance (which, as others have noted, means "kilometers" - as people who got unused to the outdoors lost the idea of how easily sound propagates without barriers). It includes even more annoying parts like the rumble that falls create through the landscape acoustic. Animal calls here are the typical obtuse racial slurs barked from villas (occasionally cries of terror from the woods). Wild boars are fortunately very polite sound wise. But birds, with their shrieks, up to cuckoos deejaying around, can be the most annoying - even more when you suspect that they are advertising for mating, the fixated things. But speaking of texture: oh the insects. Go into the right woods in the right season, and see if your thought can be louder than the buzz. Speaking of natural background can be as "innocent" as dreaming of that fashion model unaware of her halitosis.
> paradise ... most pleasant place conceivable
The idea of the "garden" was coined by people who lived surrounded by sand, burned their feet on sand, ate sand and drank sand juice. And thought "If only I had the luxury to live through picking fruits and enjoy a bit of shade".
> No one ever thought
Just generalization and evident pitfalls, there was a guy who loved the smell of napalm in the morning.
It's 75 dB+ inside my home if I open the windows. Roadside it can breach 100 dB.
I won't pick your comment apart as you did mine since in my opinion it comes off as rude. But it's weird imagining 'gardens' are pleasant only from the point of view of some weird caricature of Arrakis fremen when paradeiso was a Persian word. I.e., from nomadic peoples traveling the highlands and mountain valleys of central Asia.
I hope you can escape from the nature sounds you find so unpleasant. I won't dispute the fact that soundscape preferences are subjective. We obviously disagree on that.
> paradeiso was a Persian word [...] nature sounds you find so unpleasant
Do not miss that that that word meant "enclosure", "a walled thing" - your garden, something you manage: they probably wanted to leave out moles, shrieking bellbirds, drumkits an possibly even clamouring carts.
So, it is not a matter of choosing "a hit in the head or a poke in the eye", it is that sounds can be annoying, you have to be proportionally thick skinned to bear them, whatever they are, it does not matter if artificial or natural, it matters if the pattern rhythm insistence frequencies and loudness are more disturbing than not.
> It's 75 dB+ inside my home if I open the windows. Roadside it can breach 100 dB
You are strongly suggesting that your diet overly rich in salt makes you crave for sugar... But it remains like in Bertrand Blier's Buffet Froid: "It's the cement everywhere, the city, the alienation, that is making me insane! I want to hear the birds...". Next scene: all laying in the countryside. "It's humid!..."
Obviously this is not the intent of the article, but it would be interesting to compare actual decibel levels of the mediaeval world and today. I strongly suspect that despite all of the sources of noise noted, the world would on average have been much quieter.
I wonder if there are better ways for comparing sounds levels in relation to human comfort. I think variety, pitch, information content, etc are often more important then sound power. Like the old thing about whispering being more disturbing than quiet talking. Or personally I'm way more annoyed by bass from my shitty neighbors playing music in the middle of the night than something like the air conditioner which is louder.
That logic doesn’t quite follow because even if overall population is higher, high density living situations are not new. I imagine the inside of a long house in the early evening would have been filled with animal, child, and work sounds. Definitely louder than my modern single family kitchen.
Back then cities were more dense and, as well, individual households were more dense. It is possible, maybe even likely, that those pockets would measure louder than anything we're accustomed to today. But, at the same time, you would also have more places completely free of human activity to balance that out and then some when computing an average.
People had a lot more kids and those kids were around all the time. Just cry from babies and toddlers must have been around much more then today - today you barely ever hear it and many adults are unable to handle hearing it.
8 billion today vs one third of a billion one thousand years ago: the place has gotten crowded.
Which also means, must have been much easier in the past to isolate oneself, within reasonable horse distance. Nowadays, many countries are simply clogged with presence and to find a "desert" is almost impossible (also considering air traffic).
The limit on isolation was your survival. As in, it was not easy to survive isolated. Pretty much any land you go to belonged to someone who has own opinions on land use.
I don't understand the thing about church bells, since that's still a thing. It's not obnoxious in modern life IMO. This article seems to try to make a point but... I don't see it. Where there's people there's noises, that's universal.
I was recently looking at an old map of the township that my family farm is located in from the mid-1800s. Quite interesting! Anyway, included in that map was location of all the churches that stood at the time.
Around my family farm, at that time, there was a church every 100 chains (1.25 miles). This is out in the middle of nowhere farming country, then and still today.
If they had enough people to fill a church every mile or so, imagine how many churches the densely populated urban areas must have had in close proximity. And then if they are all ringing bells...
Church bells are still a thing, but churches are not nearly as thick on the ground. Someplace like Venice, which was never fought through or bombed, seems to have parishes about five American blocks square. I know in Washington where to go to hear church bells, but it's a lot farther between them. I suspect that four of five Roman Catholic parishes do not have bells to sound, or anyway don't sound them. Are the Baptists big on church bells? I have no idea.
> I suspect that four of five Roman Catholic parishes do not have bells to sound, or anyway don't sound them.
Why do you suspect that? At least here in Germany almost every church, Catholic or not, has bells, that are rung every hour (often times with short ringings in between every 15 min).
H.L. Mencken said that Baltimore was a lot quieter in his maturity than it had been in his childhood. For one thing, the earlier Baltimore had been supplied by carts with steel tires rolling over cobblestones.
Have a look at Babbage's quarrels with and over street musicians in London.
Some of the comments here mention the noisiness of modern sprawling western-style developed cities and speculate that it's probably worse than the noise of the middle ages would have been. I don't personally know the deep past, but i'd beg to differ. In many modern latin american towns and smaller cities, the sheer cacophony of people, animals, street hawkers, sellers, churches and social events is its own world of constant shifting sounds in a way that compares only to the most central, densely commercial parts of the largest North American cities.
You'd think that some largish, say, American or Canadian city's traffic, construction and commercial activity would be louder than that of some small densely packed developing world towns, but you'd often be very wrong. It's not just the scope of it in these compact, crowded places, it's the sheer blazing variety too. I wouldn't at all be surprised if a medieval city of twisting lanes between jam-packed buildings surrounded by a great thick wall were the same, despite there being no cars or modern gas-powered and electronic machines of any kind..
One thing I’ve pondered occasionally is what we would notice that we hadn’t thought about if we warped back a few centuries. One that’s always stood out to me is the sheer number of birds. What exists today is a fraction of their population before industrialization. And one mockingbird or crow means you can have a bad time in your back yard now… imagine 20 of them.
The first-ever comprehensive assessment of net population changes in the U.S. and Canada reveals across-the-board declines that scientists call “staggering.” All told, the North American bird population is down by 2.9 billion breeding adults, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by 53%, or another 720 million birds.
Before West Nile Virus hit, there were an awful lot of crows in the Washington, DC, area. I saw a statement in the newspaper that a stand of trees at Rockville Pike and Randolph/Montrose Road was home to half a million crows. That seemed improbable on its face; but it you were on that stretch of Rockville Pike about dusk, and saw the stream of crows, it gained probability. But West Nile Virus more than decimated the crows, and that stand of trees is gone. The crows are making something of a comeback now, after maybe 15 years of invisibility.
Plus I doubt townhouses, inns, homes, whatever they were called back then, had air-tight windows to block out the sound in the cities. A friend of mine lived in a new-ish apartment in NYC upper-west side and it was 100% silent with the windows closed. Way quieter than my house in a suburb on a main street.
I'm currently living in a town with church bells every hour and horses that clank by on cobblestone streets at every hour of the day or night. It's unbelievably noisy. But just like modern noise, at some point you stop consciously perceiving it.
The house I grew up in was immediately adjacent to a convent. They would have bells ringing around the clock.
After a while you just don't notice, though I did often wake up during the night when we moved away from there - I imagine I was expecting to hear the bells and getting confused when they didn't ring.
I imagine its the same as living next to train-tracks, or similar. Regularly repeating noises start to get tuned out.
Somewhat off topic but we have also moved noise into the ocean via commercial fleets which is very noisy ("which is louder even than a jet engine at take-off") for all the marine life who use sound to communicate [1] and I assume there was almost no human-caused noise in the ocean in the Noisy Middle ages.
This is where I wish humans would be a better species, we have absolutely no respect for other creatures IMO.
From putting baby roosters into a grinder en masse to stuff like this...we should just slow down a bit and stop being legit assholes, we can't though because we're compulsive and anxious.
Country farms, even with animals, and horses pulling carts and whatnot are nothing like the 10,000s of cars a day going by in the background of a modern city, nonstop gas powered road construction and yard maintenance, etc. I'm sure there were loud times but the article doesn't convince me, I think it would have been way more peaceful, especially on a farm.