{"id":9674,"date":"2017-02-08T12:22:50","date_gmt":"2017-02-08T16:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=9674"},"modified":"2017-02-08T12:27:36","modified_gmt":"2017-02-08T16:27:36","slug":"silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=9674","title":{"rendered":"Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What are you hearing right now?<\/p>\n

I hear a very faint noise inside the computer. I just heard Lily’s cat feet hit the floor downstairs as she jumped off her table by the window. Now I hear her downstairs lapping water from her bowl. I hear keys clicking as I type. I don’t hear any sounds from outside at the moment. If I opened a window, I would hear crows. The ambient sound in the room is about 35 decibels — typical of a quiet room. The computer keyclicks peak at about 60 decibels.<\/p>\n

A story in today’s Washington Post says that a quarter of Americans age 29 to 69 have hearing loss caused by noise<\/a>. I’m surprised that it’s not a great deal worse than that.<\/p>\n

When I left San Francisco, one of the things I was looking for was silence. Cities are extremely noisy. Just walking down Market Street at lunchtime exposes you to a steady noise over 100 decibels. A passing bus, or — cover your ears — a siren could reach 120 decibels. The threshold of discomfort is given as 120 decibels. City streets are uncomfortable places. In San Francisco, the noise never stops. The sirens went on all night, as did loud buses or trucks and loud motorcycles.<\/p>\n

Hearing is an exception to the “use it or lose it” rule that usually applies to the human body — to our brains and our muscles. With our hearing, the less you use it, the better off you are, and the sharper you’ll be when you’re old. <\/p>\n

It’s a noisy world. Silence is a refuge. I hope you’re having a quiet day.<\/p>\n

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Screen shot from an iPhone app that measures sound levels<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n
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What are you hearing right now? I hear a very faint noise inside the computer. I just heard Lily’s cat feet hit the floor downstairs as she jumped off her table by the window. Now I hear her downstairs lapping water from her bowl. I hear keys clicking as I type. I don’t hear any … Continue reading “Silence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9674"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9685,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9674\/revisions\/9685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}