The Sound of Convenience

The Sound at 23:50 ~ Buying a Ticket ~ Why Is the Plane Awake? ~ 

The Sound Ledger ~ It's the Freight, Stupid ~ What Does Convenience Cost?

An apologetic flight taking off
over Bergamo at night

The Sound at 23:50

Bergamo, 23:50, a low roaring rumble. Then silence. Another one follows. Eventually, things quiet down. At 05:30, it starts again.

What we first thought was an aberration of a late or early flight here and there has become something we recognize as part of the acoustic day in Bergamo. We live near Milan–Bergamo Airport, the third busiest airport in Italy. As the crow flies, we are about 3.5 kilometers from the runway. Most of the time we hardly think about it. At other times, especially late at night or early in the morning, it sounds as if the airport is next door.

The sound isn't necessarily enormous. During the day it would probably disappear into everything else: cars, motorcycles, construction, voices from the street, bells. But at 11:50 at night the city has mostly gone quiet, and the sound of an airplane climbing out of Bergamo has the sky largely to itself. The same is true around 05:30 in the morning, when the first departures begin before much of the city has properly started its day.

After a while, we began to notice the pattern. Why so many planes at precisely these edges of the day? Who wants to leave Bergamo at six in the morning? Who wants to arrive somewhere close to midnight?

At first these were idle questions prompted by lying in bed listening to airplanes. Then we started looking for flights ourselves.

Buying a Ticket

One evening recently, we were looking at tickets on Ryanair. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the dashed hope of truly low-cost flying unless you travel with a backpack and are prepared to wear five layers of clothes onto the plane.

We were looking at tickets to Pescara: departure at 05:50. Later looking at tickets to Helsinki: departure at 06:30. Arrivals back in Bergamo from these destinations were late evening, close to midnight. Slide forward or back a day or two, and the choices often seemed to stay at the edges of the day: very early in the morning or very late at night. 

These are just two examples. We’ve seen the same pattern with other destinations from Bergamo: departures and arrivals clustered around hours when most reasonable people are either still asleep or thinking about going to sleep.

There was probably a time when we would have shrugged and booked the flight anyway. A cheap ticket was a cheap ticket. Get up at 03:30, stumble into a taxi, arrive at the airport before sunrise, and recover later. These days, we are much less willing to organize an entire trip around an unpleasant flight time. We have changed days, changed destinations, chosen another airline, chose another mode of arriving, or simply abandoned an idea because the available flights were too early or too late.

And then came a realization.

The airplanes disturbing our sleep and the flights we routinely refuse to book might be part of the same phenomenon, viewed from opposite sides of the booking window.

At home, we hear the 11:50 departure climbing into the night and think, ah noisy. On the Ryanair website, we see the 05:50 departure and think, ah absolutely not.

The question became: Why are flights scheduled at the edges of the day?

Why Is the Plane Awake?

Our first theory was obvious enough: perhaps the early-morning and late-night slots were cheaper. Ryanair is famously focused on keeping costs down, and its own annual reports say that it favors airports with competitive charges and negotiates aggressively over airport and handling costs. Secondary and regional airports can also offer fewer slot restrictions than larger primary airports.

So maybe 05:50 was simply the bargain hour.

Except, at least at Bergamo, we couldn't find evidence for that. The airport published charges and fee schedules don’t indicate any special discount for taking off at 05:50 in the morning or 23:50 at night. Ryanair certainly cares about airport costs, but cheap airport and cheap time of day are not the same thing.

Slot availability is another possible factor. A flight leaving Bergamo early may need to arrive at another airport at a particular time, and the same aircraft has to fit into a whole day's sequence of flights. There are crews, airport restrictions, passenger demand, and the schedule at the other end to consider. It isn't as simple as Ryanair sitting in Bergamo and deciding that 05:50 is a particularly amusing time to send us to Pescara.

But the explanation that we kept coming back to was aircraft utilization.

An airplane is an expensive piece of machinery, and it only earns money when it is being used. In its 2025 fiscal year, Ryanair reported an average of 9.57 flight hours per aircraft per day (see Ryanair Holdings plc, Annual Report FY2025, Key Performance Indicators section, available at https://investor.ryanair.com). The figure isn't uniquely high. Some airlines, including other low-cost carriers, report even greater utilization. But Ryanair reports it as a key operating statistic, which tells you something about how important it is to the business.

A long working day for an airplane has consequences. If you want to squeeze several flights out of the same aircraft, somebody has to be on the first flight of the day and somebody has to be on the last.

The 05:50 departure begins to make more sense when you stop thinking of it as our flight to Pescara and start thinking of it as the first movement in an aircraft's entire working day. That plane may return to Bergamo and head somewhere else, return and leave again. The unattractive hour for us may be what makes another flight possible later in the day.

In other words, the plane is awake because it has work to do. And suddenly the roar at 23:50 starts to make a little more sense.

The Sound Ledger

It turns out that in the bureaucracy of Italian aviation, our annoyance at the 23:50 flight has already been anticipated, has a formula, and is extensively measured.

Italy measures airport noise using an indicator called LVA (Livello di Valutazione del rumore Aeroportuale) (see SACBO / Milan Bergamo Airport environmental noise page), roughly the Airport Noise Assessment Level. LVA isn't the decibel reading of one airplane flying overhead. It is an overall measure designed specifically for airport noise. The annual LVA is calculated from 21 observation days: three weeks selected during different parts of the year, with the highest-traffic week used in each period. During those weeks, noise is measured continuously. See following Italy’s DM 31.10.1997 (article 1) for methodology for measuring airport noise.

From the May 2026 data (from the linked noise page above), Bagnatica and Seriate show some of the highest noise levels (mid-to-high 60s dB(A)). Bagnatica and Seriate are noisier because they sit directly under the runway 28 (heading toward 280 degrees) arrival path, and arrivals consistently come from the east. Given Bagnatica's position beneath the Runway 28 approach, much of that exposure comes from low-altitude arrivals from the east. Arrivals can come from the west (Runway 10, landing toward 100°) and land eastward at Bergamo, but it is rare.

 

Monitoring stations around the Bergamo airport

Bagnatica’s numbers give a hint of what it feels like to live under the runway 28 arrival path. In May, the station recorded a minimum LVAj of 58.3 dB(A) and a maximum of 70.1 dB(A)—an 11.8 dB spread that is not just a technical fluctuation but a substantial difference. Sound is logarithmic, and a 10 dB increase is often perceived, for comparable sounds, as roughly twice as loud. But LVAj is not a continuous background-noise reading: it summarizes the accumulated effect of aircraft events during the day. In other words, Bagnatica is not sitting under a steady 70 dB roar. What changes is the frequency, intensity, and cumulative impact of aircraft passing overhead.

We are glad we are not in bed in Bagnatica. But someone is.

And the LVA formula makes an important distinction between day and night.

For LVA calculations, daytime runs from 06:00 to 23:00 and nighttime from 23:00 to 06:00. Noise events occurring at night receive an additional penalty, meaning that—within the LVA index—a single nighttime aircraft event can influence the result roughly as much as ten comparable daytime events. Note: the Bagnatica numbers cited above are daily averages. The day/night numbers are not published. A nighttime LVAn could theoretically exceed 70 dB(A) at Bagnatica, but the bulletin’s published numbers would not show it — they only show the combined daily LVAj.

The airplane at 23:50 isn't literally ten times louder than the airplane at 11:50. The multiplier is there because context matters. At noon, an aircraft competes with traffic, voices, construction, motorcycles and the general noise of a city going about its business. Near midnight, the same aircraft has the stage largely to itself. More importantly, people are trying to sleep.

Bergamo has quite an elaborate system for keeping track of all this. SACBO, the company that operates Milan Bergamo Airport, runs eight permanent noise-monitoring stations, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, supplemented by two mobile stations. The system combines microphone readings with radar tracks, weather information, and flight logs so that individual noise events can be associated with aircraft movements. The results are analyzed monthly, published publicly, and periodically checked by ARPA Lombardia.

Three of the fixed stations are actually within the Comune di Bergamo: Via Linneo, Via Quasimodo and Via Colognola ai Colli. The other five are in surrounding communities: Orio al Serio, Bagnatica, Seriate, Grassobbio and Azzano San Paolo.

In other words, it’s not just me hearing the noise, there are microphones scattered around listening to it too. But the microphones don't need a good night's sleep.

Bergamo also has Noise Abatement Procedures intended to reduce the impact of aircraft on surrounding communities. Of particular importance for the city are restrictions on nighttime departures using Runway 28, the westward departure direction, during the 23:00 to 06:00 period. Exceptions can be made for weather, unusual traffic conditions, or operational safety, and ENAC can sanction airlines for violations of the procedures.

So, it would be unfair to say that Bergamo does nothing about aircraft noise. In fact, when it comes to monitoring and mitigation, the airport appears to take the issue quite seriously.

But monitoring noise and preventing noise are two different things. This is where a few comparisons with other European airports heavily associated with low-cost flying make that distinction clearer.

• At Brussels South Charleroi Airport (curfew info), there is a curfew between 23:00 and 06:30, together with a quota system for late operations, restrictions on the noisiest aircraft, noise thresholds and fines when airlines exceed them. The surrounding region has also carried out a large soundproofing program for affected buildings.
• At Eindhoven Airport, scheduled flights have not been allowed after 23:00 since October 2020, apart from limited provisions for delayed arrivals. The airport also caps the total number of flights and charges lower airport fees for quieter aircraft.
• London Stansted, one of Ryanair's largest bases, takes yet another approach. It continues to allow nighttime flying, but the British government imposes both a limit on the number of aircraft movements and a separate noise quota during the core nighttime period. The current regime, running from October 2025 through October 2028, retains those controls. In other words, even if quieter aircraft makes more flights possible, there is still a ledger keeping track of both the number of flights and the amount of noise they collectively produce.

Bergamo has chosen a somewhat different balance. It measures extensively, publishes the measurements, uses special flight procedures and restricts certain nighttime runway operations. But it does not have the broad nighttime curfew found at Charleroi or the prohibition on scheduled flights after 23:00 used at Eindhoven. Compared with those airports, Bergamo seems stronger on mitigation than on prevention.

And that seems important. The 05:50 departure isn't simply an unavoidable fact of low-cost aviation. Similar airports have drawn the line in different places.

How much of the airline's long working day a community is willing to hear is, at least partly, a choice.

It's the Freight, Stupid

At this point, we thought we had the story more or less figured out. We live near a major low-cost airline hub. For example, Ryanair sells tickets at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight. Its airplanes work long days. We hear airplanes at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight.

Case closed.

Except it wasn't.

While looking through SACBO's noise information, we came across reports of nighttime departures from Runway 28. Runway 28 sends aircraft westward (280 degrees), in the general direction of Bergamo, and its use for departures between 23:00 and 06:00 is restricted. SACBO publishes lists of the flights authorized to use this runway during those hours because of weather, air-traffic conditions, safety or other permitted circumstances.

We opened one of the reports, from 2020, expecting to see Ryanair flight numbers everywhere. Instead, a surprising number of flights were cargo and courier operations.

This required a recalibration of our theory.

The report doesn't tell us that all, or even most, nighttime flights at Bergamo are cargo flights. It covers a specific subset of nighttime departures from a specific runway, and 2020 was hardly a normal year for aviation. But it was enough to remind us that the roar we hear in bed cannot automatically be blamed on the person flying to Pescara for €29.99.

There is another wrinkle in using 2020 as our window into freight traffic. DHL, once a major courier presence at Bergamo, was in the process of moving its air hub operations to Malpensa, where its new international hub began operating in 2020 and was formally inaugurated the following year. Cargo traffic at Bergamo subsequently fell substantially. Today, UPS is the airport's principal established courier operator, flying from Bergamo to its European hub in Cologne and other destinations. There are also smaller logistics operators handling, among other things, e-commerce traffic between China and Italy.

2020 also appears to be the last year for which SACBO published these Runway 28 nighttime lists. Another small mystery for a layperson to wonder about.

SACBO has stated that Bergamo’s future in cargo lies in becoming a specialized e‑commerce logistics hub — focusing on fast, efficient courier operations rather than competing with Malpensa’s large‑scale freight volumes. (L’Eco di Bergamo, Bergamo News). I hope efficient means less noise.

Freight has its own reasons for liking the night, because express cargo works particularly well while the rest of us are sleeping. Packages collected during the day can be flown to sorting hubs overnight, moved again, and arrive somewhere else in time for another day's deliveries. For passenger airlines, the edges of the day help extend the productive life of an aircraft. For express freight, the night itself is part of the product. Yesterday's package is supposed to become today's delivery.

Cargo operations can also have different "acoustic characteristics". Freighter fleets tend to include older aircraft than passenger fleets, in part because passenger aircraft often spend a second career carrying freight. Older generations of aircraft generally have larger noise footprints than their newer counterparts. At Bergamo, meanwhile, a growing share of passenger traffic is flown by newer aircraft such as Ryanair's Boeing 737 MAX, which SACBO's own measurements show to be several decibels quieter than the older 737-800.

It would be tempting to turn this into another overly simple explanation: cargo airplanes are old, heavy and loud; passenger airplanes are new, light and quiet. A cargo aircraft isn't necessarily heavier than a passenger aircraft, and carrying freight doesn't inherently require more thrust or make an airplane noisier. Aircraft type, age, engine technology, actual takeoff weight, weather and operating procedure all matter.

What is different is the timing. Cargo and express-delivery networks have a strong economic reason to use hours that passenger airlines and passengers might prefer to avoid.

And so, our neat story about the sound of low-cost flying became messier.

Some of the early-morning sound really may be the Ryanair flight we saw on the booking screen. Some of the nighttime roar may be freight moving through the European logistics system. Both use Bergamo Airport. Both have reasons to stretch activity toward hours when much of the surrounding community is asleep.

The common denominator isn't Ryanair and other low-cost passenger airlines after all. It's an airport working around the clock.

What Does Convenience Cost?

By now, our original theory had become considerably less tidy. Maybe what we are hearing isn't simply the sound of low-cost flying. Maybe it's the sound of convenience.

We want inexpensive flights to Helsinki. We also want the thing we ordered online to appear at our door tomorrow. Neither expectation seems particularly remarkable anymore. Behind both, however, are complicated systems trying to squeeze time out of the day.

Online shopping in Italy has changed enormously. The Osservatorio eCommerce B2C at Politecnico di Milano/Netcomm reports that Italian online purchases were €16.6 billion in 2015. In 2016, product purchases alone were €9 billion. For 2025, the same research group put total e-commerce above €62.3 billion, with products above €40 billion.

Not all those packages fly, of course. Many don't. And we can't draw a straight line from Italian e-commerce growth to freight traffic at Bergamo. In fact, cargo flights at the airport are much less numerous today than they were before DHL moved its courier operation away from Bergamo in 2020. But overnight freight remains part of the airport's activity, and the larger logistics system exists because we use it.

It's easy to complain about a Ryanair departure at 05:50 when we don't want to take it. It's also easy to complain about an airplane passing overhead at midnight. It's harder when we recognize ourselves somewhere in the demand that keeps the entire system running.

Bergamo Airport works hard. In 2025, SACBO handled nearly 17 million passengers, more than 104,000 aircraft movements, and about 24,500 tonnes of freight. The airport officially operates on a 24‑hour basis, and its development planning — as reflected in ENAC’s approved masterplan — is built around distributing annual traffic across the full H24 operating day. (See SACBO).

But there is another piece of infrastructure immediately beside it: Bergamo, where people live.

That brings us back to the question we stumbled into while listening to airplanes in bed: where should the productive day of an airport end and the sleeping day of a city begin?

One obvious answer would be a curfew. But Bergamo doesn't have one.

We wondered whether that was simply because Bergamo has only one runway and needs to squeeze as much traffic as possible through it. A single runway does certainly create pressure to use the available hours efficiently. Yet it doesn't make nighttime operations inevitable.

Eindhoven has one runway and closes to scheduled flights at night. Charleroi also operates a single runway and normally closes between 23:00 and 06:30. Stansted, another huge Ryanair base with one runway, remains open through the night but operates under government limits on both the number and cumulative noise of nighttime flights.

So, Bergamo's 24-hour operation isn't simply an engineering necessity imposed by having one strip of asphalt. It is also a choice about how that infrastructure is used.

We couldn't find an official SACBO or ENAC statement saying, in so many words, Bergamo has no curfew because... And perhaps there isn't one simple answer. A curfew would reduce operating flexibility. It would constrain passenger schedules and overnight freight. It could push flights into already busy periods immediately before and after the closure, move some activity to other airports, and ultimately make some services more expensive or less attractive.

Those are real costs.

But allowing flights through the nighttime has costs too. They simply appear somewhere else on the ledger.

There are ways of drawing the line short of closing the airport. Night flights can be capped, as at Stansted. Airlines can pay more to operate at noise-sensitive hours or with noisier aircraft. Airports can give preference to newer, quieter planes. Certain runway directions can be restricted, as Bergamo already does. Homes can be insulated and noise continuously monitored, also things Bergamo already does.

In other words, there isn't a choice between having an airport and not having an airport. There are many choices in between those extremes. And that's perhaps where this investigation finally landed.

Low-cost airlines aren't the villain. Freight isn't the villain. Nor are those of us who like inexpensive flights and packages arriving at the door. The interesting question is how we divide the benefits and costs of all that convenience.

Commerce would happily use all 24 hours of the day. Human beings tend to reserve a few of them for sleeping.

At 23:50 in Bergamo, we can sometimes hear where that line has been drawn and not be happy with it.

Noise, According to the Italian Driving Manual

Noise On ~ Book Noise ~ Clacson Dialects ~ Clacson Meets Lden ~ 

European Driver, Quiet in Theory ~ California Dreaming Horn ~ 

Exhaust as a Personal Statement ~  Studying for the Exam, Clutching My Pearls ~ 

Maximum Moderation, Minimum Compliance

A variation of the image used in the SID Manuale, in the chapter on noise

Noise On

I've always had an interest in noise, and an issue with noise. I'm interested in noise's impact on people, why some people don't seem bothered by it, and why I am, and why is there is so much of it—NOISE—in the world. Past posts include: Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage, A Field Guide to Italian Hotel Noises, and You Know It When You Hear It.)

So, it was with surprise and delight that I found a chapter in the Italian driving-license book on noise. In the SIDA Manuale della patente A e B (the Italian study book), noise is not treated as a vague annoyance, the thing you complain about while closing the window. It is classified properly, soberly, and a little optimistically as inquinamento acustico: acoustic pollution. Be still my beating heart!

This treatment of noise immediately elevates it. Now my crazy rantings on noise have backing. The truck with the loose load passing below the apartment at 6 am is no longer merely “that truck again.” It is part of Chapter 22.

The book places noise beside air pollution, fuel consumption, exhaust fumes, vehicle maintenance, and the broader civic duty of not degrading our shared environment. It is a high-minded little chapter and I like that. It imagines the driver as a careful, rational, socially aware person who maintains the vehicle, limits unnecessary acceleration, avoids useless honking, and remembers that the road is shared.

Book Noise

The Italian driving manual does not treat noise as a mere irritation. It calls it what it is: inquinamento acustico, acoustic pollution. Section 22.1.5 begins plainly and lists a few behaviors you see commonly when driving around Italy.

Here's the section of the book:

---

Il rumore prodotto dai veicoli a motore è causa di inquinamento acustico e di una serie di problemi di salute. I rimorchi vuoti, che sobbalzano eccessivamente, possono essere causa di rumore. Per questo motivo, ogni conducente ha il dovere di osservare le seguenti cautele:

• far verificare che la marmitta (dispositivo silenziatore) funzioni bene e sia di tipo approvato, sostituire la marmitta rovinata con una approvata per il veicolo, senza manometterla o modificarla
• evitare inutili e ripetute accelerazioni a vuoto, da fermi
• far controllare i freni se stridono (sostituendoli se necessario) e cercare di non frenare bruscamente
• non precorrere le curve ad alta velocità e no provocare lo strisciamento degli pneumatici
• sistemare il carico ed eventuali coperture in modo idoneo
• curare la manutenzione della carrozzeria e delle sospensioni
• chiudere delicatamente la portiera (anche per non danneggiare l'autovettura)
• per avvisare in caso di emergenza, usare il lampeggio al posto del clacson

Bisogna usare il clacson con la massima moderazione e nei centri abitati solo in caso di effettivo e immediato pericolo. Quando è necessario, suonare il clacson il più brevemente possibile.

Causano inquinamento acustico:

• marmitta non omologata
• uso improprio del clacson
• brusche partenze
• brusche frenate
• freni che stridono
• brusche frenate in curva
• carico svolazzante

---

Some useful translations:

• inquinamento = pollution
• rimorchi = trailers
• sobbalzare = jump around
• marmitta = muffler
• clacson = horn
• freni = brakes
• carrozzeria = car body
• carico = load
• svolazzante = fluttering about

What I like about this list of causes of noise is how ordinary it is. The enemy is not only the roaring engine or the modified scooter exhaust. It is also the rattling trailer, the squealing brakes, the door slammed too hard, the horn used as punctuation, the fluttering tarp behind a truck. Noise is treated as a hundred small failures of attention. I guess you could say the entropy of noise in that everyone sort of says "Not my problem, I'm just driving down the road". This is similar to what we observed in the post Notes on Entropy from a Courtyard in Italy, which concluded that the concept of everyday entropy is the slow unraveling of order in one's surroundings because many say "not my job".

The manual is not saying: never make noise. Rather it says: do not make pointless noise. It is a tiny civic ethic disguised as test prep. Of course, I ace all the test questions in this section! They seem so obvious to me.

This careful driver exists. Somewhere maybe? Or, possibly only in the illustrations in the book.

Joking aside, studying for the Italian patente has changed how I hear the street. Before, vehicle noise fell mostly into emotional categories: irritating, very irritating, and mostly “is that thing legally allowed to exist?” Now I have a point of reference, a chapter in the official driver's manual. The bad muffler, the squealing brakes, the horn used as punctuation, the rattling load in the back of a truck: these are not just sounds. They are categories of noncompliance and sections that at least I can console myself with and point to even if it doesn't really help.

Clacson Dialects

The word clacson looks odd to English eyes. It is the Italianized form of Klaxon, originally a trademarked name for an electric warning horn. Treccani defines clacson as a graphic variant of English klaxon, now used in everyday Italian for the acoustic warning device in a vehicle. In official language you may also see avvisatore acustico, which is more literal: acoustic warning device. But clacson is the word more commonly used. The word sounds noisy.

The manual says the clacson should be used with la massima moderazione, and in towns only in cases of immediate and real danger. Good advice in theory, but in practice it's another story. (Also, "maximum moderation" sounds less like driving advice and more like a rule for surviving modern life.)

Moderate your horn, your speed, your acceleration, your impatience, and we'd add perhaps also your expectation that anyone else has read the same page. Why? Because, in practice, the horn has many unofficial meanings in Italy. It can mean:

“I am here.”
“You are slow.”
“The light turned green 0.4 seconds ago, step on it!”
“I know you, hi!”
“I am entering this blind corner faster than I should and please be aware.”
“I am annoyed, and everyone within hearing range should be informed.”

So yes, officially, the horn is a safety device. Practically, the horn is a language. It has grammar, dialect, local idioms, and emotional range. It may be brief, extended, musical, accusatory, celebratory, or existential.

Clacson Meets Lden

While the Italian driving manual treats noise with admirable seriousness, as inquinamento acustico or acoustic pollution, there are no hard limits. The guidance seems squishy, basically "try not to make noise".

The European vocabulary around noise is more precise: Lden, Lnight, dB(A), exposure thresholds.

• Lden is the average noise over the whole day, evening, and night, with evening and night weighted more heavily because noise then is more disruptive.
• Lnight is the average night-time noise, especially relevant for sleep.
• dB(A) means decibels adjusted to approximate human hearing.

The European Union’s Environmental Noise Directive is not exactly a “keep everyone below this number”, but more a framework for measuring, mapping, reporting, and managing environmental noise. The commonly used reporting thresholds are around 55 dB Lden for day-evening-night exposure and 50 dB Lnight for night exposure. (Official legal text.)

WHO Europe is more direct in its health-based recommendations. Its 2018 environmental noise guidelines recommend keeping road-traffic noise below 53 dB Lden and below 45 dB Lnight. Earlier WHO night-noise guidance gives 40 dB Lnight outside bedrooms as a target to protect the public, especially vulnerable groups. (Guidelines table.)

This is all somewhat useful to know, though perhaps less useful at the exact moment a 50cc (cubic centimeters) moto is ripping down Via Pignolo making the left turn onto Via San Tomaso. (Ironically, a 50cc moto can make upward of 80 dB(A) of noise.)

So figuring out whether Italy has “done something” under the Environmental Noise Directive turns out to be its own small research project. The EU directive requires maps and action plans, but the results do not live in one tidy place. Some are reported to the EEA (European Environment Agency), some appear through ISPRA (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambiente) indicators, and many live with regions, cities, airports, railways, and road operators. Italy has implemented the directive through D.Lgs. 194/2005 and has reported population exposure using Lden and Lnight. So yes, the maps and plans exist. Whether the street below your window has become quieter is, as usual, a different and more personal question. Maybe in a future post, we'll dig into these reports but for now, we'll have to accept that it's being thought about, seems to be measured, and maybe work is in progress to mitigate exposure. (Glancing quickly at the reports shows road noise as by far the largest contributor to noise exposure.)

In daily life terms, 50 to 55 dB(A) is not the apocalypse. It is roughly equivalent to a quiet street, a refrigerator hum, moderate rainfall, or the lower edge of conversation. These numbers are not about one spectacular noise event, or whether your ears are immediately damaged. They are about cumulative exposure: the acoustic climate you live in hour after hour, night after night. A loud burst, say a 50cc moto, a truck, or a horn, may pass quickly and add energy to the average. But, more importantly, it interrupts the body. It makes you pause, tense, wake slightly, or lose the thread of what you were doing. Environmental noise is often the background soup: tires, scooters, brakes, engines, deliveries, a horn here, a horn there, all simmering below the level of catastrophe but above the level of peace.

So where are we with noise? The manual gives noise a better name: acoustic pollution. The EU and WHO go further and give it numbers for measuring, even if the averages wash it all out.

European Driver, Quiet in Theory

The Italian book’s treatment of noise is not unique. Germany has an explicit Umweltschutz category in its theory-test material, where unnecessary acceleration is not just wasteful but noisy. France folds le bruit et la pollution into the theme of using the vehicle with respect for the environment.

The vocabulary changes, but the fantasy is shared: the driver as a calm, technically competent, socially aware participant in public space.

Naturally, we started to wonder if Italians are better, about the same, or worse in terms of noise pollution. How would you even measure this?

It turns out that comparisons are not that easily had. A 2022 study in Environment International looked at road-traffic noise exposure across 724 European cities and 25 larger urban areas, using Lden starting at 55 dB. It found that almost 60 million adults were exposed to road-traffic noise levels considered harmful to health. But the study also noted a very practical problem: the underlying noise maps varied in method, format, and quality. So the question 'Are Italians noisier?' quickly becomes 'What did France measure, what did Germany measure, and did Italy count that street with the delivery scooters?' Still, the broad picture is clear enough: road-traffic noise is a Europe-wide problem, and in many cities a large share of adults live above the 55 dB Lden threshold. (ScienceDirect)

The health connection in the ScienceDirect article is not that a honking car directly causes heart disease, satisfying though that explanation might be. Rather, traffic noise disturbs sleep, raises annoyance, and keeps the body making tiny stress adjustments: heart rate, blood pressure, hormones, vascular strain. Over years, those small insults can become less small. In that sense, inquinamento acustico is not only a poetic phrase from the driving manual. It is a public-health phrase hiding in plain sight.

The Italian and more generally the European driver, at least on paper, are custodians of the shared atmosphere: air, fuel, fumes, tires, brakes, and sound. It is a great idea in the manuals, but as we have noted, its application is where it kind of falls apart.

This is not to say that manuals are useless. Quite the opposite. They reveal the ideal. They show the shape of the civic person we are all supposed to become once we close the book, pass the exam, and enter a traffic circle with six exits, two motorcycles, a delivery van, and someone behind us expressing an opinion about our driving through the horn.

California Dreaming

After thinking about Italian drivers in relation to European drivers, we started to wonder about the United States. But the United States is not one driving system. Requirements and handbooks vary by state, even if the broad ideas are often similar. So, for a concrete example, we looked at California: not the largest state by area, since that honor goes decisively to Alaska, but the most populous state in the country, with more than 39 million people. Here's the California Driver Handbook.

California, being California, does have a section on “Green Driving,” with advice on smooth acceleration, steady speeds, tire pressure, vehicle maintenance, extra weight, and zero-emission vehicles. The environment is there, but mostly through the American vocabulary of efficiency, emissions, and technology.

The horn appears elsewhere, under safety. Use it to avoid collisions or warn others of hazards. Do not honk because someone is slow, because someone made a mistake, or because you are angry. The handbook even reminds drivers that the horn sounds much louder outside the vehicle, which is both obvious and apparently necessary to say.

What's interesting and laudable is that the Italian manual gathers these behaviors under a wider moral weather system: consumption, exhaust, maintenance, noise. The poorly maintained muffler, the unnecessary acceleration, the horn used as punctuation, the rattling load in the back: all are small failures of shared space.

The California handbook says: be safe, be efficient, don’t be a jerk. Gratuitous musical reference: "All the leaves are brown. And the horns are quiet..." sort of thing.

The Italian book says: you are part of an acoustic environment. Please behave accordingly. Gratuitous musical reference: "Prisencolinensinainciusol" sort of thing.

Exhaust as Personal Statement

The Italian driver's license manual also warns against modifying the vehicle, especially the muffler. This is where the theory becomes disconnected from reality, because some vehicles seem to treat the muffler not as a device for reducing noise, but as an instrument of self-expression.

The manual, being a manual, does not say any of this. It simply says the muffler should be approved, functioning, and not tampered with. It does not dwell on some drivers' desire to be heard before being seen.

After going through hundreds of quiz questions, I'm surprised how many questions come down to "is it okay to modify your muffler?". These muffler questions along with the noise questions are easy for me. Too bad the exam wasn't all of these types of questions.

There is something real hiding inside of rules, and that is that noise is rarely only mechanical. It is social, be it a horn or muffler. Noise says: I am here, I am impatient, I am powerful, I am careless, I am festive, I am young, I am late, I am delivering something, I am above maintenance schedules. But who could write rules and create exam questions for these meanings?

We could not find a neat statistic for how many Italians actually modify their mufflers. Perhaps this is just as well, because the phenomenon is easier to hear than to count. What we can say is that the issue is real enough to be written into the Codice della Strada. Article 155 says that drivers must avoid troublesome noise caused by how they drive, how the load is arranged, or other acts connected with circulation. It also says the silencing device, when required, must be kept efficient and must not be altered. So, the manual is not just being fussy. It is turning a legal principle into quiz form: the muffler is not a lifestyle accessory, even if some drivers seem to disagree.

Of course, aftermarket exhaust replacement is not automatically illegal. If it is approved for that vehicle and used as approved, it may be fine. The trouble begins when the exhaust becomes less “replacement part” and more “announcement system.” Somewhere between homologation and self-expression, the manual raises its hand and says: no.

Studying for the Exam, Clutching My Pearls

One of the strange pleasures of studying for the patente as an adult is that the material says more to you than to a teenager. You have years of observing driver behavior, and you are quicker to say, "wait a minute—that's not what I have observed!"

The book says:

• Not to accelerate unnecessarily. The, a car accelerates unnecessarily.
• The horn is for immediate danger. Someone honks because a pedestrian has the audacity to use a crosswalk.
• Avoid rattling loads. A truck passes with something loose and metallic performing percussion in the back. At 6am.

So the city becomes a listening exam, and I try not to turn it into a moral judgement on what I'm hearing. Studying the rules creates a new sensitivity where I hear the street not only as background and blatant violation, but as a series of tiny decisions being made long before we landed in Italy or set up shop on Via Pignolo.

Maximum Moderation, Minimum Compliance

The driver's manual describes a quieter, more considerate world. A world where drivers maintain their vehicles, use the horn only when needed, avoid pointless acceleration, secure their loads, and remember that other people also have ears.

We are not always living in that world.

But there is something charming about the attempt. The manual names the problem. It gives us the polite version of civic life. It says: here is how not to add unnecessary noise to the world.

And that may be enough for a chapter in a driving book. Not enough to silence a modified scooter. Not enough to stop the celebratory honk, the impatient honk, the “I am behind you and therefore must communicate” honk. But enough to make you hear them differently and maybe even appreciate them.

I'll take that as a start. That's lesson one.

Once noise gets labeled as inquinamento acustico, we need to consider it as part of the shared air, like exhaust, dust, heat, and all the other things we contribute without quite meaning to.

The road is not only visual. It is not only signs, lanes, lights, and right-of-way. It is also sound. A public space has a soundtrack, and every driver is adding something to it. This is lesson two.

The Italian manual asks, with charming optimism, that we add less. Con la massima moderazione, of course.

A Field Guide to Italian Hotel Noises

Notes from a Noise‑Sensitive Traveler in the Dolomites


 

Left: The Gasthaus Sonzalaut (fictional) has lots of sounds in store for you! Right: Two hollow bricks (laterizi forati) broadcasting noise.

There is a particular kind of promise you hear at hotel check‑in across Italy, a promise delivered with the serene confidence of someone who has never once been woken by a midnight flush. "Tranquillità assoluta," they say, sliding the keycard across the counter. "Very quiet. No parties. No traffic. You'll sleep wonderfully."

And you want to believe them. You really do. Especially after a long day of alpine switchbacks, legs humming, lungs full of pine‑scented air, and the kind of wholesome exhaustion that should lead directly to deep, restorative sleep.

But then you enter the room, admire the carved wood trim, the tasteful textiles, the view of the Dolomites glowing pink in the evening light and you forget, briefly, that Italian buildings have a secret. A structural paradox. A national acoustic personality.

These buildings look like fortresses, but they sound like megaphones.

This guide is for those of us who hear everything — the noise‑adverse, the sensitive, the ones who can identify a toilet flush by floor and approximate pipe diameter. It is a taxonomy of the creatures that inhabit the interior soundscape of even the nicest Italian hotels, especially those built with the ubiquitous laterizi forati — hollow clay bricks prized for thermal efficiency and seismic friendliness, but acoustically about as private as a confession shouted into a rain gutter.

A recent stay in Arabba, Italy for a ski vacation confirmed our field notes and pushed us to publish to other noise naturalists. We stayed in room 202.

Let's begin.

1. The Alpine Flush (Toiletus alpinis)

Signature call: A sudden, cascading roar that begins faintly and ends intimately.

The Alpine Flush is the first species you will encounter, often within minutes of settling into your room. It travels vertically through the building's plumbing shafts, which are typically lined with hollow bricks that behave like resonant chambers. The result is a sound that begins three floors above you and ends as if someone has emptied a bucket directly into your pillow.

For the noise‑sensitive listener, the Alpine Flush is a reminder that your sleep is not your own. It belongs to the collective. It belongs to the group hours.

2. The Stairwell Stomper (Homo escalante)

Signature call: A rhythmic thudding, punctuated by boot squeaks and occasional sighs of exertion.

Concrete stairwells in Italian hotels are built with admirable structural integrity and absolutely no acoustic dampening. They function as vertical amphitheaters, broadcasting every footstep with the clarity of a percussion solo.

The Stomper is most active in the early morning, often around 6:45, when the first wave of hikers or skiers descends for breakfast. Sensitive listeners will note the Doppler effect as the sound approaches, peaks, and recedes — a sonic topography as predictable as sunrise.

3. The Cupboard Slammer (Armadius impetuosi)

Signature call: A sharp, resonant WHAM that reverberates through shared walls.

Cupboards in Italian hotels are often built into the wall — a charming design choice that unfortunately turns them into acoustic transmitters. When your neighbor closes their wardrobe, the sound travels through the laterizi forati with the enthusiasm of a cymbal crash.

For the noise‑adverse, the Cupboard Slammer is a test of the nervous system. You may find yourself bracing for the next impact, like a seismologist anticipating aftershocks. So relaxing, right?

4. The Corridor Conversationalist (Vocalis corridori)

Signature call: Whispered dialogue that somehow registers at full volume.

Corridors in Alpine hotels are often echo‑friendly. The Conversationalist moves slowly, narrating their life in what they believe is a whisper. Sensitive listeners know better. These whispers bounce, multiply, and slip under your door like curious spirits.

This species is particularly dangerous because it often appears during the sacred window between 10 PM and 11 PM — the hour when the building's internal noise is supposed to be winding down. Their presence signals that group hours have not yet begun.

5. The Chair Drag (Scrapius mobilis)

Signature call: A prolonged scraping howl, reminiscent of a distressed sea creature.

Tile floors and other hard surfaces (easy to clean!) are a staple of Italian hospitality, especially in the mountains. Felt pads are not. The result is a sound that begins next to, above you, or below you and travels through the concrete structure with surprising fidelity.

For the noise‑sensitive traveler, the Chair Drag is a reminder that every moment of your stay is a sonic event about to happen. You will hear every repositioned chair, every enthusiastic scoot, every child who decides to push their seat back with the full force of their body weight.

6. The Group Hours Phenomenon (Circadian communalis)

Signature call: Blessed silence, but only when everyone else has surrendered to sleep.

This is the most mysterious and powerful force in the Italian hotel ecosystem. It is not a creature but a collective behavior. When the last cupboard slams, the final flush echoes, and the final corridor whisper fades, the building enters a state of temporary peace. Maybe, just maybe between 11 pm and 6 am if you are lucky.

Sensitive listeners experience this as a kind of truce — a fragile, communal agreement that lasts until the first early riser breaks it with a decisive stomp.

7. The Rifugio Chorus (Snorus communalis)

Signature call: A polyphonic blend of snoring, zippering, rustling, and headlamp clicks.

In a rifugio (very high in the mountains as in you had to walk there), noise is expected. It is part of the social contract. You sleep in a room with twenty strangers, and you accept that you will hear every breath, every rustle, every midnight bathroom trip.

For the noise‑sensitive traveler, the irony is sharp: the rifugio, with all its communal chaos, feels more honest than the luxury hotel. At least it doesn't pretend.

8. The Heavy‑Footed Wanderer (Pedestris plumbeus)

Signature call: A slow, ponderous thudding that suggests the presence of ankle weights, lead‑lined slippers, or a personal gravitational field.

Certainly the most anger, scorn and lost hours are dedicated to this: a creature with particular kind of footstep that defies physics. You hear it from your room — a rhythmic, seismic thump that seems impossible for a human body to produce. You imagine a linebacker. A mountaineer wearing crampons indoors. A person who has replaced their tibias with rebar.

But no. It is always a perfectly ordinary guest, walking with the density of a neutron star.

The Heavy‑Footed Wanderer is most active during the liminal hours: the moment you lie down, the moment you begin to drift, the moment you think, finally, the building is quiet. That is when the thudding begins. Back and forth. Back and forth. A migration pattern known only to them.

Sensitive listeners experience this as a kind of existential riddle. How many times must one cross a hotel room in a single evening? Is it good for their bones? Are they pacing? Practicing? Searching for something? Or is this simply their natural gait? A personal geology expressed through movement?

The tragedy is that the building amplifies every step. Concrete slabs transmit impact noise with the enthusiasm of a drumhead. Each footfall becomes a small tectonic event, a reminder that you are living inside someone else's choreography.

For the noise‑adverse traveler, the Heavy‑Footed Wanderer could be be perceived as oblivious but certainly not as malicious. They are simply unaware that their footsteps are being broadcast live into your consciousness. But awareness does not soften the impact. You lie there, counting the steps, mapping the room, imagining the path they are tracing. You create a private cartography of someone else's restlessness.

9. The Architectural Paradox (Structura paradossa)

Signature call: Silence outside, cacophony inside.

Italian hotels, especially in the Alps, are built with materials that prioritize warmth, speed of construction, and seismic safety. Chief among them are (likely) laterizi forati, hollow clay bricks prized for their thermal insulation and structural flexibility. But acoustically, they behave like perforated drums. Concrete frames amplify impact noise, and the brick cavities carry sound with startling clarity.

The word laterizi comes from Latin latericius, meaning "made of bricks," and forati means "perforated." These bricks are everywhere in Italy, from Milanese apartment blocks to alpine lodgings. They're warm, practical, and structurally sound. But for the noise-sensitive traveler, they're a paradox: a wall that keeps out the cold but lets in the neighbor's midnight pacing.

We've noticed that Italians are sensitive to cold, so perhaps warmth matters more than silence in construction? Or a whole generation of Italians have grown up with these as "normal" sounds of a hotel?

For the noise‑adverse traveler, this paradox becomes a kind of existential riddle: How can a building look so solid and sound so porous?

A laterizio forato - happily passing along sound.

Closing Notes for the Sensitive Listener

If you are noise‑adverse, traveling in Italy requires a certain philosophical flexibility. You learn to accept that silence is not a given but a communal achievement. You learn that "quiet" means "no external noise," not "no internal noise." You learn that the architecture is warm, charming, and deeply human but that humanity is loud.

But you also learn to laugh about it. To observe the acoustic fauna with the curiosity of a naturalist and the resignation of someone who knows they will be awake at 6:45 when the first boots hit the stairs. And in the end, perhaps that is the true Travelmarx lesson: Noise is part of the story, and the sensitive listener hears the whole thing.

And yes, don't forget your best noise-cancelling headphones.

We've written about noise on and off in the years – I guess you can say we are noise cranks – and this won't be the last time we are writing on noise. Some past posts:

• The Noise on the Walls: Urban Static
• You Know It When You Hear It
• Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage
• Schopenhauer, On Noise

The Noise on the Walls: Urban Static

64 images of graffiti and murals captured by 

Travelmarx over the years.

Walking around Bergamo, we often pass the same walls over and over: stone, stucco, concrete, each carrying the palimpsest of tags, scrawls, throw-ups, and the occasional ambitious mural. Most of it we don’t like. Some of it is clever. Much of it feels like a form of urban abrasion. But whether we admire it, tolerate it, or quietly curse it, we can’t not see it.

Graffiti is visual noise. It fills the eye the way unwanted sound fills the ear—insistent, uninvited, and undeniably present. And like noise, graffiti has a way of revealing a city’s and a culture's restlessness.

Noise is a theme we’ve returned to before, in posts as different as our musing on Schopenhauer’s irritation with clatter (Schopenhauer, On Noise), our exploration of disruption across centuries (Noise and Nuisance; Bronzino to Babbage), and a more personal reflection on how sound becomes a kind of knowing (You Know It When You Hear It). Graffiti simply completes the metaphor. If noise is the soundtrack of a city that refuses to be orderly, graffiti is the handwriting of that refusal.

The Clean Surface Myth

Cities like the idea of cleanliness—clean streets, clean façades, clean narratives about who belongs and who gets to speak. You see this in the small brigade of city workers who occasionally repaint a tagged wall. The smooth, monochrome patch lasts days, maybe hours, until someone adds their mark. The next repaint will come when it comes. Meanwhile, the cycle—paint, tag, paint, tag—becomes its own quiet commentary.

Public space isn’t neutral, no matter how clean it looks. Corporate logos, government messages, shop signage, and advertising already occupy most of what we see. Graffiti just breaks the illusion that these sanctioned voices are the natural state of things. It interrupts, inserts, and insists.

The Easy Explanation We Don’t Fully Buy

There’s a standard explanation for graffiti: it’s the voice of the marginalized, the unsanctioned speech of those without access to the official channels. And yes, sometimes that is true. But walking around Bergamo, this neat narrative never quite matches what’s on the walls.

Most of what we see doesn’t feel like political expression or a plea to be acknowledged. It feels more like a motorbike revving under your window at midnight—an assertion of presence, not a manifesto.

And anyway, if feeling unheard automatically produced graffiti, wouldn’t we all be out tagging? We’re not. When we feel frustrated or overlooked—or simply full of opinions—we take the official routes: voting, emailing the comune, participating in neighborhood committees, or writing blog posts that attempt (sometimes unsuccessfully) to make sense of it all. These are our sanctioned modes of expression. Slow, structured, polite.

No one is spray-painting È vietato ignorare questo blog post on a retaining wall.

So maybe the graffiti–oppression narrative is too tidy. Perhaps graffiti isn’t always a voice from the margins, but a voice that simply refuses to wait. Graffiti collapses time: it speaks now. Civic channels take their time: they speak eventually, after stamps and signatures and agenda items.

The discomfort we feel may not be moral at all—it may be temporal. Graffiti is impatient; we are happy to be patient.

Disorder as Ritual

Graffiti fits neatly into the anthropological idea of ritual inversion—those moments when rules are gleefully broken to reveal how fragile the rules really are. Carnival does this with masks and parody; graffiti does it with paint.

The mess is not a side effect. It is the gesture.

A tagged wall today may be a neat monochrome surface tomorrow, and then a clean canvas again by the end of the week. The city is always smoothing things over; writers are always filling them back up. Impermanence becomes the rhythm.

Texture Over Cleanliness

One idea we keep circling back to is how differently we respond to images of people on walls. We realize we’re more susceptible to graffiti that depicts human forms, especially faces—whether part of a formal mural or something more spontaneous, a piece of graffiti that has drifted into mural territory. The line between the two is often blurry anyway.

So before we get too far, it’s worth admitting that not all wall markings land the same way. Murals—commissioned or not—tend to feel intentional, composed, legible. Faces, in particular, can stop us in our tracks: eyes gazing down, features rendered with surprising tenderness or defiance. These images show up in our photos far more often than scribbles or territorial tagging. They evoke something: recognition, curiosity, maybe even connection.

But are they really different? Or are we just more comfortable with certain forms of visual interruption than others?

Even the most beautiful mural is still an intervention on a wall that wasn’t blank by accident. It claims space just as tagging does. The difference may lie less in the act than in our willingness to decode the result. A portrait offers us an entry point—a face is a language we understand instinctively—while a tag demands fluency in a code we don’t speak.

Perhaps murals and graffiti are not opposing categories but points on the same continuum of urban expression, one simply easier for us to welcome. Beauty can be a softening agent. It can make us forget that the gesture underneath—the insistence on being seen—belongs to the same family as the scribbles we tend to dismiss.

One of the quiet surprises of travel is realizing how much a city’s character comes from the things you didn’t go there to see. London’s layers, Lisbon’s flourishes, and Reykjavík’s bursts of color and whimsy all become part of a place’s mental map.

When we visited Reykjavík years ago, the street art was impossible to ignore—clever, bold, often beautiful, and woven into the city’s fabric. It didn’t feel like vandalism or rebellion; it felt like the city making itself visible in its own energetic way. Not unlike noise, which you never plan for but remember anyway.

Clean walls can make a place feel eerily blank, as if life had been pressed flat. Graffiti—even when messy—adds texture. Yes, some texture is good, right?

What Graffiti May Actually Be Saying

Walking past tagged walls the other day on our way to the hospital, we wondered: what exactly is the message here? Are we meant to decode it? Is there anything to decode? Maybe the message is simply the mark itself—a claim, a moment of visibility, a quick refusal to be quiet.

Or maybe the message is aimed at other writers, not at us at all. The city becomes, in effect, someone else’s chat thread—one we’re reading without fully understanding the references.

Closing Reflection

Graffiti isn’t easy to like, and it’s probably not meant to be. It unsettles the visual field the way noise unsettles silence. But both remind us that cities are not curated exhibits; they are lived-in, contested, slightly unruly things.

Some people speak through walls; we speak through notes, photos, and posts. All of it is a kind of noise—some sprayed, some typed—each insisting on being noticed in its own way.

Maybe what troubles us most is not that graffiti is there, but that we’re not always sure what it’s asking us to notice. And maybe that uncertainty is part of what makes a city feel alive.

An Open Letter to ASMR Creators

Dear ASMR Creators,

You are creeping me out. What started as pure joy just two weeks ago has now turned to uncertainty and self-doubt. Let me explain.

Ever since I was a kid, I knew that certain sounds relaxed me. In elementary school, I finished my work early just to hear the scratching of other students' pencils as they worked. Sure, I thought I it was kind of weird, but it relaxed me. I kept it to myself. Another example: I'm the kind of person who gets a haircut and says nothing. It's confounding to stylists who feel compelled to talk to make clients happy. I'm much happier not talking, just listening to the sound of the scissors and razors. The attention of having my hair cut relaxes me.

In my career I watch many technology videos and I discovered that certain ones relax me. Specifically, I like videos presented with a soft, even voice. The voice combined with the tapping of keys and the clicking of a mouse relaxes me. Then one day a light bulb went off: I could use these videos to relax before falling asleep. It worked and soon I was watching videos to nod off. Furthermore, the videos I liked the most I saved offline, worried they might be removed from the Internet and I'd never find them again. I felt a little weird about it all, but hey, I wasn't breaking the law.

It became very clear I really liked certain sounds to relax when one year we commissioned a bricklayer to rebuild our chimney. During the several months the bricklayer worked outside, I lay down on the floor inside, out of view, relishing the sounds. First, a gentle tap, tap, tap as he used the trowel handle to adjust the brick level. Then, a soft scrape of the trowel blade as it picked up extra mortar squeezed out as the brick settled into place. Very strange, but even stranger was that I found bricklaying videos on the Internet and used them to relax before going to bed long after the chimney was finished.

My partner says I’m cheating on him with a bricklayer.

But here's the thing: these actions, in real life or video, weren't created specifically to relax me, that was just an happy accident.

Now imagine my surprise, when just a few weeks ago I discovered ASMR: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Those tingles on my scalp and down my spine that come about when listening to certain sound have a name! I discovered I wasn't alone. I wasn't that odd after all. I found all sorts of information about ASMR and videos created to trigger ASMR "spine tingles".

But, as I started looking closer, I realized that many of these videos actually made me feel uncomfortable, and in some cases creeped me out. To name just a few: ASMR Makeup Roleplay, ASMR tapping (including 10 hours of tapping, crinkle & trigger sounds where the host is wearing a rubber glove crinkling packaging at one point in the video), ASMR eating, ASMR barber, ASMR towel folding, Tony Bomboni (hi poopsies!), and a full body massage labeled as ASMR that unfortunately I can never erase from my mind.

I admit that part of the problem with the videos labeled ASMR could be my reluctance to be identified as someone who wants to use these videos to relax. Before, when I didn't know what my relaxation mojo was called, I felt slightly weird in my private pleasures but at least it was my thing. Now, I'm faced with the choice of belonging to a community of people who relax when someone applies make-believe makeup on a camera lens, folds towels for hours on end, or obsessively touches book covers and taps things.  Case in point for tapping: ASMR Elder Scrolls Maps, what are they and why does an off-camera, self-titled ASMR nerd fondle and tap the maps in such unnatural ways?

That brings me to another part of my apprehension with much of the ASMR content that I find. It is overly self-conscious in its attempt to evoke ASMR. For me, the best ASMR is evoked unintentionally. Great you say, look up unintentional ASMR. But that too seems to have been abused with labels such as "unintentional ASMR" or "inadvertent ASMR" while clearly going for an ASMR effect. People in fact label existing content like old Rob Ross videos (man can he paint!) or Dr. Willie Ong (drink your water!) videos as ASMR. Who knows if the subject of the video would even want that label?

Please forgive me if I sound strident. I went from 0 to 60 mph with ASMR, just too darn quickly and it's all a bit of a rush. I need to slow down, cool off, maybe watch some ASMR jewelry show and tell. That might calm me down. Honestly, perhaps my real problem is with the Internet. I just don't feel special anymore, at any level. Everything is revealed. My private little pleasures seem like been-there-done-that. But what is one to do, stick their head in the (ASMR) sand?

Sincerely,

M

P.S. I admit that I do have a special affection for yanghaiying's museum tours, tea blah blah blah videos, and the Math Whisperer.

You Know It When You Hear It

"Caw, Caw, Caw!"
"Shit." I rub my eyes and throw back the covers.

6:00 am. A Seattle Spring morning and the crows wake me up again. My partner, oblivious to the caw-cophony continues sleeping. The crows might even figure into a pleasant dream for him. Not for me. I get out of bed wondering how will I cope today in a world of noise?

What noise?

I'm talking about noise in the pejorative sense: unwanted, disruptive, ugly, loud for loud's sake, and sometimes against the law. Noise the spoiler of my concentration. Noise not produced by me. Noise that irritates.

Garret Keizer, in The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want, captures the subjective nature of noise this way: "we know it when we hear it."

Crows are my unwanted noise. So are booming car stereos, deafening after-market mufflers, thumping bass through a floor, babbling televisions in airports, drumming of fingers, popping of gum, slamming of doors, and wind chimes. If none of those sounds annoy you, my earplugs are off to you.
I wrestle with my response to unwanted noise because noise precipitates awkward behavior. I'm worried about becoming a noise crank. Several years ago, I began to, at first serendipitously, and then more directed, read about noise. I found solace in the anecdotes of how historical personalities confronted unwanted noise.

Two Signposts

Street music rankled the English mathematician and "father of the computer" Charles Babbage (1797 - 1871). His 1864 autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher contains a chapter, Street Nuisances, which lays out his contempt of street musicians, in particular Italian organ grinders. Babbage made his unwanted noise issue into one of class and education. Intellectual workers - like himself - were harassed by noise while those with "frivolous pursuits or with any other pursuits requiring but little attention from the reasoning or the reflective powers" welcomed noise.

Babbage lashed out at the noisemakers. He yelled at them, urged the police to pursue them, and prosecuted them in court. They returned the favor. Babbage wrote, "[T]he crowd of young children, urged on by their parents, and backed at a judicious distance by a set of vagabonds, forms quite a noisy mob, following me as I pass along, and shouting out rather uncomplimentary epithets. When I turn around and survey my illustrious tail, it stops; if I move toward it, it recedes; the elder branches are then quiet - sometimes they even retire, wishing perhaps to avoid my future recognition. The instance I turn, the shouting and the abuse are resumed, and the mob again follow at a respectful distance."

It is reported that on his deathbed, Babbage endured an organ grinder outside his window.
Babbage's life spanned the Georgian and Victorian periods in London, at the time one of the largest and noisiest cities in the world. It is true that London street musicians, typically immigrants, did play until you paid them to leave. Their noise disturbed Babbage, but was his method for dealing with it something I see myself adopting for my unwanted noises?

A half of century later in 1906 America, tug boat whistles on the Hudson River kept Julia Barnett Rice (1860 - 1929), a New York physician and philanthropist, awake at night. On any given night there could be a thousand or more whistles penetrating her Riverside Drive bedroom of Villa Julia. Sick of sleepless nights, Rice fought back. She took noise measurements, collected statements from people impacted, and waged a campaign for the suppression of unnecessary noise all the way to Washington D.C., and she won.

Rice's New York City took over the mantle of the largest and noisiest city in the world from Babbage's London. The whistles Rice silenced were from tugs carrying material and debris from the expanding city. Rice took a pro-business approach, knowing that much noise was unavoidable, but that excess noise could be framed as inefficient as well as "hurtful to humanity".

Beyond tugboat whistles, Rice shined a line on the issue of noise outside of hospitals and the general noise levels of the city. She educated by not just telling people about noise, but showing them. She recorded and played the noise back to audiences. A 1908 New York Times article, Canned Din by Phonograph, gives a taste of one of her 'concert events', a "record that will give outsiders some idea of New York's din furnished a duet between an elevated train at Fifty-ninth Street and Columbus Avenue and a flat-wheel surface car."

I calculate that Rice made a difference in dealing with her unwanted noise as well as benefiting society. Babbage comes off as cranky. A man targeted because of his response to noise. Is my response to noise more Rice or Babbage?

Chamber of Quiet

Crow 1: "Look who's here."
Crow 2: "The guy who flaps his arms at us."
Crow 1: "What's he doing now? What's he holding up?"
Crow 2: "I hear the sound of an eagle, or is it a falcon? But I don't see one."
Crow 1: "What a strange and noisy creature he is."
Crow 2: "Let's get his attention."
Together: "Caw, caw, caw!"

My partner watches and shakes his head. A bit of a Babbage moment except instead of organ grinders it’s crows. My attempt to scare the crows away with the "Crow Be Gone" soundtrack - a product reputed to repel crows by repeating the sounds of their predators - doesn't work. I put the soundtrack on my phone - portable crow-repellency I thought. I feel silly trying to scare crows away by making them think they are under attack, all because I feel under attack by the noise they make.

11:00 pm. Summer. The noise of a Saturday night party penetrates into our basement bedroom, which is half submerged underground, protected by thick walls and double-paned windows. It's usually relief from outside noise but not tonight.

I pass the time before sleep wondering what it would be like to create a quiet place to sleep without white noise generators or silicone earplugs. I could design my own anechoic ('echo-free') chamber, like the one at Orfield Labs in South Minneapolis. The 12 by 12 chamber is the quietest place on earth according to Guinness World Records. The chamber's walls sprout brown fiberglass wedges, which alternate horizontally and vertically in orientation. The floor is cable-mesh suspended over more of the same brown wedges. The fractal-like surfaces look nightmarish but provide ample surface area to absorb noise.

The chamber was built for product testing and registers negative decibels, -9.4 dBA. Zero decibels is the point at which you begin to hear. A quiet bedroom or library is about 30 decibels. At negative decibels your body becomes the sound.

The longest that anyone has remained in the chamber is reported to be 45 minutes. The challenge is one of orientation; we use sound to orient ourselves and that room robs soaks it all up.
An idea begins to take form in my mind: perhaps you can never escape noise.

Cranky Behavior

Noise impacts me beyond an occasional crow gathering or a joyrider with a new fat-boy muffler. When I plan a trip and look for hotel rooms, fear-of-noise is my travel agent. I construct mental blueprints of hotels, calculate distances to elevators, stairwells, and ice machines. Can I get a top floor so no one is above me? Good. Do TVs in adjacent rooms share a common wall with a bed? Bad. Do the pictures of the room look like they are insulating from sound? Good.

My partner puts up with my ruminations which turn to machinations once we arrive at a hotel and I get the true lay of the land. The diagram on the back of your hotel room door is there to help you find a fire exit. I study it for possible room swapping opportunities and get angry when it's a hand drawn approximation of the true layout. If you were staying in the hotel, you might hear me babbling as I wander the halls: "Room 204 must be a quiet room. Look at it, isolated at the end of the hallway. And, there's no room above it."

My in-laws are happy we come to visit. They said nothing when during our first visits I incapacitated their wind chimes with white tube socks. When visiting us, they accept my Napoleonic declarations: no door slamming or dryer usage after 10 pm.

At work, I sit cheek to jowl with my colleagues, and noises grate on my nerves. I can't be a noise tyrant as at home, so I escape. I book conference rooms for meetings with myself.

Record Breaking Noise

"Go Hawks!" A touchdown for the Seattle Seahawks.

We are at a Super Bowl 49 party, in a basement rec room. A big screen TV dominates one end of the room. Twenty-five friends gather to cheer on Seattle. The windows are steamed up. Seattle green and blue are everywhere: in clothes, face paint, wigs, pom-poms, party streamers and donuts. Some friends sit on a large couch sprawled in front of the TV, others are too nervous to sit. Three friends are in the "prayer corner" clutching each other.

I measure the noise in the room at an average of 100-110 decibels. My decibel meter offers that it's the same as listening to power tools. For the duration of the game, we are in a wood shop.

A prayer-corner friend controls the volume of the TV. She cranks it up when an important play is coming up or we need to focus or the prayers aren't working. We hit 125 decibels – jackhammer – we moved from wood shop to construction crew. The volume of the sound keeps everyone in a heightened sense. My ears ring for hours after the game has finished.

I imagine channeling Julia Barnet Rice and educating my friends (during a commercial break naturally). "Did you know that quite possibly some of the fine hairs of your inner ears - making hearing possible - have just died, never to grow back?" Or "Sounds above 85 decibels for extended periods of time can permanently damage your ears." But I don't and instead reach for a blue and green donut.

Noise Wake Up Call

7:00 am. Winter. The world is still asleep; I'm half asleep. I sit at my desk in socks, underwear, and an oversized sweatshirt staring at the gray outside. The radiator hisses and the house creaks as water flows through pipes. I imagine our house - with it creaks and groans - as a ship afloat on a sea of noise.

The sound of a distant plane edges into my consciousness for a few seconds and then fades. This morning, there are no crows. No fire engines or ambulances. No blaring stereos. No wind chimes. Just comforting sounds and the absence of unwanted sounds.

Yet, it's a temporary respite. The world will wake up and the sound level will increase. Sounds will become my unwanted noise. The best case scenario is that I won't notice it because I'll be busy and the total sound level will rise to drown out what bothers me. The worst case scenario is that I'll get irritated, then cope, and maybe even create my own noise.

I think of how Julia Barnett Rice and Charles Babbage responded to noise, proactively and reactively, respectively. I'm somewhere in the middle. My mind wanders to Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65), a Roman Stoic. He lived above a spa and describes the noises that irritated him in the essay On Noise including the hair-plucker's voice, "continually giving it vent and never holding his tongue except when he is plucking the armpits and making his victim yell instead." He gives this advice on dealing with noise: suck it up and calm the turmoil inside. I think of the Stoic's response to the old saw "shit happens," which is, "This shit is good for me." Maybe some noise is.

7:05 am. I yawn and stretch. Suddenly, "Varoom!" Out of nowhere a motorcycle roars up the street. It sets of a car alarm. My first test of the day.