The loud cloud and the shifting soundscape of a "frictionless" future; How noise harms hearts and minds.
Plus some acoustic odds and ends for your enjoyment
Welcome to the February edition of CLAMOR! This month’s post explores the shifting soundscape of our digital migration, as well as new findings about chronic noise impacts on heart health. Finally, the Korean noise war flares up (again), Finland announces a new “national soundscape,” and a bit of book news.
The Future of Noise in a Digital-First World
The opening vignette of Derek Thompson’s cover story in this month’s Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century” is the deserted bar area in his local Mexican restaurant, a once-lively gathering spot that’s become a hushed staging area for delivery orders, with a bartop ceded entirely to the bags of food ordered by app.
Thompson goes on to detail America’s worsening “isolationist dynamic” in which we increasingly avoid interacting with people in real life anytime our devices offer an alternative. It made me wonder about the sonic implications of this trend.
Consider all the “social” settings where people are now physically together but mentally separate, their attention devoted to personal devices, neither listening nor speaking to the people who are actually in their midst—creating the sort of oddly quiet scenes that former surgeon general Vivek Murthy described during his anti-loneliness “We Are Made To Connect” tour of college campuses in 2023.
Obviously, there remains plenty of people noise in the world. But on the margins, there’s a sonic shift underway in which the myriad sounds of people interacting face-to-face is supplanted by the constant, droning noise of data centers spreading around the globe to enable our digital migration.
The (Not So) Frictionless Future
A core promise of computer technology’s rapid advance has been an escape from the messiness of our analog world—all that paper, the traffic and other logistical snarls, and the awkward, frustrating, or even frightening encounters with other people. It’s an ideal epitomized by “the cloud” of networked servers, software, and databases powering an expanding universe of friction-free information transfer, connection, and commerce, which we can access anywhere and anytime, in our pajamas if we want, with a few silent finger taps.
While there are undeniable benefits of this computing revolution, there’s also a growing realization that neither the cloud nor the digital ideal it supports are nearly as ethereal as we imagined. For instance, my former colleague, Vince Beiser, recently wrote about the scourge of e-waste on his Power Metal newsletter. There’s also lots of new research and reporting on the real-world impacts of data centers. These squat, concrete server farms devour energy and guzzle water. They also emit an incredible amount of noise. Heat is both a wasteproduct and a lethal enemy of data processing hardware, and so the servers must be blasted by noisy cooling systems 24/7. As a case study out of MIT’s Schwartzman College of Computing put it, “the cloud of the digital is also relentlessly material.”
And these material appetites and impacts are growing explosively, thanks to the computational needs of AI, digital currency mining, and old-fashioned internet. Data centers are far and away the fastests growing sector of commercial construction in the United States, with nearly $30 billion spent building new ones in 2024. A recent report by Compass Data Centers forecasting market demand through 2030 was titled “We are Going to Need a Bigger Boat.”
The Emerging Backlash
In early 2025, the journal Frontiers In Public Health put out a call for research papers focused on the health impacts of noise from “emerging technological sources” such as “cryptomining operations, massive data centers for cloud storage, and the proliferation of other digital infrastructures.”
But how noisy are data centers really? That depends. Inside a server room, the roar can reach well above 90 decibels (power-tool loud), which can cause permanent hearing damage unless workers protect their ears. Outside a data center’s walls, the decibels aren’t nearly as extreme, but there’s a lot more to noise than loudness and more to noise harm than hearing loss.
Mounting evidence links long-term exposure to moderate-decibel environmental noise, such as road traffic and jet overflights, to heart disease, stroke, and a range of other serious physical and mental maladies, via chronic stress and disrupted sleep. And studies find that disease risks start to ramp up at just 40 decibels on average, which is at the lower end of noise levels measured in many neighborhoods near data centers. (More details below under “Circadian Chaos”)
In the building frenzy, data centers are popping up everywhere, but they’re concentrated in places with cheaper land and power—including the resurrection of decommissioned power plants—and in places luring investment with generous tax incentives. A growing number of people in these hotspots are discovering—and protesting—the resulting noise (among other concerns such as rising electricity rates and environmental pollution).
Responding to complaints, data center owners usually point out, correctly, that the sounds from their facilities aren’t loud enough to violate existing regulations. However, most local noise ordinances are designed to combat high-decibel, episodic noise. They’re weighted to frequencies in the sweet spot of human hearing, which discounts the lower-frequency tones that dominate data center noise, travel farther than higher-frequency sounds, and more easily penetrate windows and walls (the sort of noise you feel as well as hear). Plus, unlike late-night parties or road construction, the noise from data centers never shuts up. It can’t. If server rooms paused their cooling, the cloud would quickly overheat into a smoldering ruin.
From Texas to Arizona to Virginia especially (the state with the highest concentration of data centers) noise is triggering a growing number of protests and lawsuits against new server farms and higher hurdles for new facilities from state and local officials.
Besides driving neighbors batty, noise is a symptom of data center inefficiency, driving up costs and cutting into profits. So, bottom-line concerns of data center developers should help mitigate the din with investments in energy efficiency and technologies like liquid immersion cooling that can lessen the need for all that air conditioning. Smarter noise regulations will also help, such as those proposed in Virginia at the end of 2024 by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) report on data center growth, which recommended giving localities the authority to enforce lower-decibel thresholds for data centers that take into account the constant, low-frequency nature of their noise and to require sound-modeling and impact studies before the construction of any new facilities.
The Clamor for Convenience
Real-world noise from the digital realm doesn’t stop at data centers. Whenever I click my way through an order on Amazon or another ecommerce platform, for example, I add a bit more impetus to an expanding web of warehouses and distribution hubs that are disproportionately located in neighborhoods of least resistance pumping out air and noise pollution.
I recently visited the neighborhood of Southwest Detroit sandwiched between freight distribution centers and the busiest trade crossing between the U.S. and Canada. Bigrigs cut through these residential streets to avoid the congestion of surrounding highways, averaging a truck a minute according to counts by neighbors and public-health researchers at the University of Michigan. A video snippet below shows what goes on all day there, and into the night:
In the very near future, our online purchases will generate a whole new noise—the buzz of delivery drones coming to a neighborhood near you. Globally, about 5 million drone deliveries were made in 2024, a number that could explode to more than 800 million by 2034 according to some estimates.
Drone delivery has definite advantages, such as speeding medicine and other critical supplies to remote places such as mountain villages and offshore oil platforms. But, as the market takes off, so will the swarms of drones summoned simply for an extra smidgen of convenience for customers who want that late-night snack or other impulse buy airlifted to them minutes after clicking “purchase.”
NASA studies find that people are more annoyed by the keening whine of drone rotors than they are by truck or van noise at the same decibel level—a finding that fits with some early real-world encounters:
For now, drone deliveries are rare enough that their potential ubiquity is often discussed with a sort of abstract fascination, similar to musings on a future of flying cars and robot butlers. Only a handful of municipalities have done much serious planning for commonplace drone deliveries—to proactively study things like routing, licensing operators, flight restrictions, and potential sites for the depots that will be the hives of drone flights and noise. It’s unfortunate, but not surprising. Reactive thinking has long been the Achilles heel of noise control movements—battling the sources of unwanted sound only after they’ve become deeply rooted in our daily lives and livelihoods while ignoring the next noise threat droning our way on the horizon.
Circadian Chaos and Floods of Free Radicals
Connecting the Biological Dots Between Noise and Disease
Simply put, more noise means more heart disease, hypertension, strokes, and heart attacks. The links have been found over and over. Still, when it comes to noise and disease, the path from correlation to causation is long and appropriately difficult, given the many confounding factors, including the fact that people exposed to more noise from transportation sources or heavy industry also breathe in more particulate matter and other noxious air pollution, as well as the need to trace the pathology between decibels and biological changes such as arterial inflammation.
Late last year, however, a group of scientists from Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S. weighed the collected research on noise and health and and wrote an article titled, “Noise Causes Cardiovascular Disease: It’s Time to Act” published in the journal Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology.
The research they reviewed included sleep studies showing how nighttime noise leads to more fragmented and lower quality sleep, even when the sleepers aren’t aware of the disruptions. The resulting circadian chaos contributes to higher blood pressure and an amplified stress responses and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
They researchers also reviewed PET scan studies showing that people exposed to more noise had more active amygdalas (part of the brain on guard for threats) as well as more downstream inflammation and oxidative stress—a flood of free radicals damaging cells and tissues—that can stiffen and clog artieries. In addition, mouse research published in January by the journal Antioxidants found that administering drugs known to block the stress-inflammation response lessened the harmful impacts of chronic noise.
While calling for more “comprehensive stratgies to mitigate noise pollution,” the researchers also recommended that noise be included “as a significant cardiovascular risk factor along with other environmental hazards such as ambient air pollution” in the guidelines on heart disease prevention used by cardiologists and other clinicians.
Meanwhile, the European Environment Agency (EEA), which has blamed noise for about 12,000 premature deaths annually across the continent, published their latest batch of noise findings. Among the topline items: 20 to 30 percent of Europeans live in areas with enough transportation noise to be considered harmful to health, and this noise also impaired the reading ability of more than half a million children.
If plowing through journal articles isn’t your thing (or even if it is), check out The Quietest Year a 2024 documentary by filmmaker Karen Atkins covering the physical and mental toll of noise and the spread of noise pollution in Vermont—a state long synonymous with bucolic peace and tranquility.
Wait…What?!
Acoustic Odds and Ends
North Korea has launched its latest salvo in an ongoing noise war with South Korea across the DMZ. Since 1963, both sides have had loudspeakers to blast into enemy territory. According to a Radio Free Asia story, North Korea recently started harrassing South Korean border villages with late-night spooky sounds of ghost-like wailing and howling wolves after South Korea broke a period of truce by bombarding the North with news broadcasts and K-Pop hits.
On December 6, 2024, Finland celebrated its 107th day of independence by sharing 15 musical compositions commissioned by the goverment to be its “national soundscape.” The pieces, collectively titled “Ääniä,” meaning “sounds” or “voices” in Finnish, were composed by Lauri Porra, an acclaimed contemporary composer from Finland.
“This understated, minimalist music is meant to create a certain atmosphere,” Porra said in the press release announcing the works. “What’s being depicted is space. There’s space to think, feel and live in Finland – not only in nature, but also in the Finnish way of life.”
The podcast “Politicology” recently aired a great, two-part interview with the coauthors of Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise (2022), Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz. The book does a great job of connecting all the audible and nonaudible noise in our lives, going deep into the meaning of quiet and the value of unbroken attention.
Book News! Clamor is now featured on the book page of the Society of Environmental Journalists. It will also be available as an audiobook via RB Media Global and available wherever audiobooks are sold as of May 20, 2025.
I am looking forward to the book! I preordered it a while ago.
I live in Montana, a place like Vermont where you would expect quiet, but it's noisy as hell. Vehicles are the main culprit here, where heavy-duty pickups are mainstream transportation. In the warmer months, motorcycles are common forms of transportation. They are wildly noisy. There also seems to be zero enforcement of modifying exhaust systems, and it is popular for people (even grown adults) to modify their exhaust systems to intentionally make them louder.
I know this isn't just in Montana.
I hope your book delves into noise pollution from vehicles. It doesn't seem to be getting better, but worse in many parts of the country.
It's also interesting to see how noise pollution impacts neighborhoods. Neighborhoods near busier roads are less desirable because of noise pollution. People know that noise pollution equals less desirable living conditions, and the value of properties near busy roads goes down. Imagine if there was less noise from vehicles? These neighborhoods near busy roads would be much more livable. What's the solution as of now? Building noise-blocking walls or getting triple-pane windows installed, which puts the onus on the victims of noise pollution. But most people living near noisy roads likely don't have the resources to do that. We shouldn't be putting the onus on the victims of noise pollution to protect themselves, we should be targeting the source.
I like how Noise Pollution Clearinghouse puts it as protecting the "commons." Air is a shared space that should be protected and pure, including with intrusive sound.
Thanks for what you are doing! A quieter world is a healthier world.