Transcripts

Bart Kosko, Professor at USC and author of the book Noise…

People are talking increasingly into their cell phones as if they were in the privacy of their own room. People honk their horns more. There's something like ninety million leaf blowers in this country. There's more helicopters flying over you than before. And noise in that physical sense cannot only damage your hearing but is a cause of stress - and it's getting worse.

And the worse it gets, the more we all pay the price.

Just the lack of sleep - that we're not sleeping enough - we're largely a sleep-deprived society and the quality of sleep is affected by the background noise. There was one finding out of Europe that a single motorscooter at night in Paris could wake up two hundred thousand people. You think about the costs and benefits of that - the benefit to the scooter rider and the huge social cost.

And this increase in noise is having other consequences you've probably never imagined.

Studies have shown that birds in Europe and presumably everywhere else that live near cities, have to start singing to each other in higher frequencies and with greater energy just to be heard. Somewhere a set of studies showed that in the oceans, the humpback whales have to increase substantially the length of their mating song to be heard over navy sonar, for example.

Tomorrow what can we do about all this noise - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.