Buy Quiet, Sell Quiet
Plus some acoustic odds and ends for your enjoyment
Welcome to the July edition of CLAMOR! The market is speaking, and it’s saying, “shhhh!” This month, we examine the growing appetite for sonic refuge among noise-weary consumers. Plus, the sounds of a dying glacier, vigilantes versus robo-car noise, and the sonic implications of congestion pricing in New York City.
Can Consumer Demand Defeat Noise?
Consider these numbers from the June 2025 report on environmental noise by the European Environment Agency: 50,000 new cases of heart disease, 22,000 new cases of type2 diabetes, 66,000 premature deaths every year across the continent. To be clear, these findings are based on analyzing medical outcomes across modeled exposures to just one sector of noise—transportation sources. The numbers are big and scary, and they made headlines, just like the equally big and scary numbers did from the previous EEA report in 2022, and the one before that in 2017, and so forth.
I think reports like this and the science behind them are critical to awareness, but I also think there’s a limit to the power of big numbers when it comes to changing behaviors and policies, especially with few signs of progress year after year. There’s a lot to the old adage that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. Clearly, these studies are important evidence that noise pollution is a massive public health threat and not just a nuisance. It’s just as clear, however, that scary statistics aren’t enough to move the noise needle on their own.
Fortunately, the flipside of our growing noise threat is an underappreciated opportunity and the chance to augment the alarm bells with more positive motivation to improve our sound environments. Last month, Forbes published an intriguing three-part series of articles by Bill Schiffmiller, a lifelong hearing-aid user and the founder of Akoio, a consultancy focused on accessibility and auditory matters. Schiffmiller suspects we are at a cultural turning point when it comes to noise. Specifically, he argued that our mounting auditory and attentional fatigue may finally be triggering a shift in social norms and a coalescing of consumer demand for acoustic relief.
“Humans evolved in environments where sound signaled something important,” he wrote. “Now we live in a world of meaningless noise forcing our brains to sort through an endless stream of irrelevant sound.” I would add that noise as unwanted or irrelevant signals should include the deluge the non-audible, digital noise compounding our stress, anxiety, and cognitive overload.
Humans are famously adaptable, but there are some fundamental limits, and we seem to be butting up against them when it comes to the capacity of our (auditory) attention. Plus, more attention is gradually being paid to the sensory sensitivities of people with autism and other developmental conditions. The good news, according to Schiffmiller, is that people are increasingly ready to reward sound-aware products, services, retailers, and employers that help tame the growing noise in our lives. As he noted, “the market is responding.”
Is this just the optimism of someone in the business of helping that market respond, or is there a real shift away from our longstanding sonic neglect? The evidence for the latter is scattered, but ample. For example, in recent years, I’ve seen quiet scores appear in online real estate listings alongside the ratings for schools and crime. Quiet airports have likewise proliferated.
Recently, I was interviewed by Julien van Hoeylandt, an investor who hosts a podcast about noise-reducing products and innovations called Fighting Noise and manages to find new ideas to discuss every week. My March newsletter highlighted a “Travel Report” from Pinterest, which analyzed more than 1 billion travel-related searches on its platform and found that the number of vacation planners hunting for quiet destinations jumped 50 percent from 2023 to 2024, while broader searches related to a “quiet life” quintupled over the same period. Meanwhile, several retailers (like Currys pictured above) have started instituting quiet hours to be more welcoming to people with sensory sensitivities.
In addition, consider the rapid growth of apps such as SoundPrint, a crowd-sourced guide to quiet restaurants (and other venues) that has aggregated hundreds of thousands of user “soundchecks” since it launched in late 2017 and has grown into a global go-to resource for people who enjoy talking to one another while sharing a meal (I recently wrote about the growing demand for reclaiming sonic space for conversation in the Boston Globe). Meanwhile, relaxation and meditation apps such as Calm and Headspace that offer a menu of soothing soundscapes boast millions of paid subscribers.
In his Forbes articles, Schiffmiller notes the growing popularity of product certifications and endorsements from groups such as Quiet Mark. He also details the shifting norms and massive market for new, stylish hearing protection and augmentation devices from brands like Eargasm, Earfab, and the Apple Airpods Pro2 with “conversation boost.”
“Ear protection is no longer something to hide. It is something to choose,” he writes. In addition to these in-ear options, high-decibel alerts have been bundled with sleep, heart rate, and other personal wellness trackers. The demand has grown strong enough to support Nuance Audio’s $1,200 prescription glasses with built-in, invisible hearing aids to help folks focus (in the visual and auditory sense) on people they’re conversing with in a noisy environment.
Last but not least, let’s look at the demand for noise-cancelling devices. Bose sold its first pair of noise-cancelling headphones to normal consumers in 2000, and that market could near $42 billion by 2031, according to KBV Research, a global market research and consulting firm.
The counterargument to market-based acoustic optimism is that we can’t buy our way to a less noisy world any more than we can buy our way out of a changing climate or other pollution binds, and that a more fundamental cultural shift is needed, in which we buy less, use less, and drive less. I’m sympathetic, both with the call for lower-impact lifestyles and with the argument that commodifying quiet risks making a luxury out of something that should be free and plentiful but is increasingly rare and priced accordingly.
But I don’t believe that growing consumer interest in their sound environments and sonic awareness among product developers, architects, and urban planners is necessarily opposed to making more substantive changes in how we live, work, commute, and consume. I remain enthusiastic about the potential for noise (and sound more broadly) to keep gaining currency among the professionals who design and build our world. I think that’s real. Even if none of these innovations are the solution to noise, I think they can be meaningful steps toward improving our sonic environments and, by extension, our health and wellbeing.
For example, I recently learned about a startup called CalmWave, which uses AI to analyze historical and current patient data to help hospitals optimize their alarm settings (via suggestions to clinicians, with multiple safety checks). The goal is to stem the flood of “non-actionable” alarms (not requiring immediate clinical response) that disguise real emergencies, cause clinician “alarm fatigue,” and keep patients from getting their rest. I have more reporting to do, hopefully for a bigger story on this, but for now I’ll note that they cut non-actionable alarms by 58 percent during a six-week pilot of the system in a hospital intensive care unit.
As I’ve noted before, one of the biggest refrains among audiologist, public health researchers, and activists is that it’s hard to get people to care about noise and to understand the importance of our sonic environments. Fighting that apathy is job one in achieving a less noisy world, and that’s a multi-front effort.
Wait…What?!
Acoustic Odds and Ends
Earlier this month, the New York Times opinion section featured an 11-minute video about Ludwig Berger, a sound artist who has spent the past decade recording the melting and slow disappearance of the Morteratsch Glacier in the Swiss Alps. The film is all about the sound, an ASMR mix of audio that Berger has collected as he drops his mic deep into the slowly vanishing ice. There are the expected sounds, the plink plunk of droplets trickling into rivulets and combining into ever-louder cascades. But from the depths of the ice, we also hear a stranger mix of creeks, gurgles, groans, and moans, as if the glacier is alive…but dying. Berger himself seems to frame the sound art to be less a documentary of nature’s mysteries or a call to arms for saving the ice and more of a recording for the sake of posterity. “It’s almost like the last cry of the glacier in this valley,” he said.
People living near the recharging hubs for Waymo self-driving taxis have been up in arms about the noises the cars make at all hours, a mix of beeps and tonal warning sounds when reversing and honking at one another in automated confusion when maneuvering in a crowded parking lot. A few months ago, noise-harried neighbors of a Waymo hub in Santa Monica posted an online petition seeking relief from the “noise pollution” on Change.org, which has gathered more than 300 signatures as of this writing. Others have resorted to vigilante activity, known as “Waymo stacking”—using traffic cones and other means to block the driverless taxis from entering the recharging lots (see video below).
I called up the petition’s creator, a film score producer named Chris Potter. He said it’s not the loudness so much as the low-frequency sounds and persistent beeps of the Waymos that disturbs him and his neighbors, especially at night. “The city keeps saying that the noise isn’t going over the decibel limit, and I keep saying that I never said it did,” he told me. Waymo had yet to respond to the online petition and Potter told me they had not reached out to him personally,
I emailed Waymo and got a response from company spokesperson, Ethan Teicher, who said the company had already changed the Waymo software, so that cars stopped honking at each other in the depot lots. The backup alerts were more complicated, he wrote, because federal law requires the reversing vehicles to emit some kind of warning, but “our engineers have identified a potential solution, and we are discussing its implementation with regulators.” He declined to provide details on that solution.
“Feedback from the community is incredibly important to us,” Teicher noted. “In Santa Monica, we made adjustments to our operations as soon as we were made aware of noise complaints, including instructing personnel to limit cleaning noise…limiting working hours, purchasing quieter equipment, and planting fast-growing foliage to increase privacy and absorb noise.”
At least on the noise front, New York City’s congestion pricing is a quiet success. The system charges drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 60th Street (the southern edge of Central Park) during certain hours. In March, The City, an independent digital news site about New York City, analyzed noise complaints for horn honking originating from zip codes in the congestion-pricing zone, using the publicly available 311 data. When they compared the days between the start of congestion pricing on January 5, 2025 and March 6, 2025, with the same period in 2024, they found that honking complaints plummeted 69 percent (from 219 to 67).
I did my own analysis using the same zip codes and dataset but expanding the period to July 1 and calculated a much smaller, but still noteworthy, drop in honking complaints of about 32 percent (from 841 to 573).
There’s a Clamor event tomorrow evening (July 16)! If you are in the Boston area, please join me and acoustics guru Ben Markham, president of Acentech, to talk about noise and soundscape solutions at the Parkside Bookshop in the South End.
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