The effects of noise on society at large

After physician Louis Hagler retired, he set himself a single goal: to learn to play the piano. He bought himself a wooden upright and vowed to crank out scales and chord progressions every day at his home in Richmond, California.

But as Doctor Hagler embarked on his self-teaching regimen, he encountered an unexpected obstacle. “I lived close to a railway crossing, and slow-moving freight trains would constantly be coming through,” he says. The blast of train horns was so deafening that he could scarcely concentrate or hear the notes his fingers were striking. “And it wasn’t just train horns,” he says. “There were boom cars on the streets that were noisy beyond belief.”

Doctor Hagler’s frustration set him thinking about the impact of excessive noise on the world around him. If train noise stopped him from learning to play piano, a relative luxury, what about children trying to learn in schools next to fire stations, or singles trying to converse with future spouses in bars blaring heavy metal music?

From Science & Spirit