![]() Electric motorcycles, cars, trucks, and vans are legally mandated to replace all internal-combustion-engine (I.C.E.) vehicles in New York, L.A., and other cities by mid-century-a shift that will profoundly alter the acoustic texture of urban life. The electrification of mobility presents humanity with a rare opportunity to reimagine the way cities might sound. Far from blending together into a kind of acoustic ecosystem, city noises tend to compete with one another to be heard-an auditory cage match wherein the loudest sound eventually wins. Other, more aggressive sounds, such as back-up beepers on trucks, have been designed to resist assimilation, because that would diminish their efficacy as audible beacons. The beeping emitted by the new Walk / Don’t Walk signals, which were recently installed on the corners of my block, initially struck me as abrasive now I tune it out. In a 2005 paper, Ellen Covey, a psychologist at the University of Washington, and her co-authors identified these subconscious arbiters of sound and noise as the brain’s “novelty detector neurons.”īut a novel or useful alert can become a meaningless repetitive noise over time. Familiar and regularly patterned sounds, such as internal-combustion engines and air-conditioners, don’t wake us a new or irregular disturbance stands out, at least at first, amid the sonic clutter. Researchers into the neurobiology of hearing explain this phenomenon in terms of novelty and adaptation. The waking brain performs a similar filtering function in the urban soundscape, ignoring as many of the meaningless noises as possible. The brain must disregard a lot of ordinary metropolitan white noise, while remaining alert to unusual sounds that might be of vital importance. ![]() For people trying to sleep in the city that never does, though, all-night listening is mostly a liability. For early humans, who were trying to rest outdoors with predators around, this trait was presumably a lifesaver. Unlike vision, smell, and taste, all of which dim when consciousness shuts down for the night, hearing is a 24/7 operation.
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