Quiet big bang, dinosaurs chirping, noisy people

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Every time an airplane rumbled over my head, I pulled a woolen hat over my face – then still in a carriage. This is what my mother told me later. Back then, when I was a teenager in a children’s room, the music from the stereo couldn’t be loud enough for me. To emphasize this, I played the drums and banged the rulers on the pillows until my dad burst in and told me to turn off the noise.

“Noise is subjective,” writes Kai-Uwe Kessler (60) in his recently published book The World is Loud. “What seems unbearable for one person is not a problem for another.” Sometimes the noise is even a refreshment, relief, joy and pure pleasure. Ironically, one Kessler, the drummer for the hard rock band Bad Sister, is now avoiding loud noises and posting a “history of noise.”

The Hamburg historian, musician and journalist from the NDR has been researching noise for nearly 20 years, from the Big Bang to the sound of telephones. “Many people are especially annoyed by the ringing of a cell phone if they don’t call themselves,” says Kessler. The call is definitely louder than the beginning of the universe: “The explosion was not an explosion at all, because there were no physical prerequisites for cosmic noise yet.”

It only became really loud with the formation of the Earth 4.58 billion years ago: “The primordial atmosphere was created by the release of gas.” Scientists do not know how dinosaurs could later sound in it – maybe like birds, because they are the closest living relatives of predatory lizards. “However, the researchers are sure that the tyrannosaurus rex sounded different than in the movies,” writes the German author.

Noise research is a tricky field because sounds are fleeting. “They are not amenable to either archaeological discovery or historical fixation or reproduction,” Kessler writes. Sound recordings have only existed since the 19th century. As for the previous time, it depends on descriptions or reconstructions: using the QR code in the book, you can listen to the sounds of prehistoric flutes or the turmoil of medieval battles on your mobile phone.

Even if the loudest noise to date was a natural occurrence — the 1883 eruption of the Krakatau volcano in Indonesia reached about 310 decibels and could still be heard 4,800 kilometers away — the biggest noise polluter on earth is man: with his invention of steel factories, steam engines, cars and planes, many he put to sleep or even brought to consciousness.

“Help! Noise! ​​My nerves!” – read the headline in the Münchner Abendzeitung back in 1928. But things got worse: “There are many indications that the years after 1945 and especially the 1960s and 1970s were the loudest years in world history,” writes Kessler The most important change from that time is today’s assessment of noise pollution: it is taken seriously and is no longer ridiculed as oversensitivity.

Source: Blick