Lunch + Noise

Last Sunday I had lunch in a Tesco food market: massaman curry and 92 decibels of noise. The effect was brain numbing and I hurried away as quickly as possible. Today I returned to investigate the sources of last Sunday’s noise. In a more moderate environment of only 82 decibels I could bear to look about for a short time. First there were the television screens which nobody watches. However, there were only two of them about fifty metres apart and their sound was submerged in the general cacophony. Next there was a stall selling tapes and CDs of traditional Thai music. A sound system provided a base of the overall noise. Then there were obscure announcements being made over a PA system. But the mass of sound emanated from a section for young children called “Small World”. Parents carried their small children into this bath of sound. The effect seemed to be akin to that of the largely discredited electric shock therapy on psychotic patients. The emerging children had on their faces the look associated with that of Jack Nicholson after shock treatment in the film “One flew over the cuckoos nest”. From a parent’s point of view this may be the attraction of Small World, their children may well be more docile until the effect wears off. However, as their hearing has probably suffered during their exposure they must be addressed, and they themselves respond, in louder tones.

As I had lunch, the sudden sound of a siren warned that Tesco was on fire or under terrorist attack. But then I saw that the sound came from a rocking plastic pink motor car which was rewarding its tiny driver with this exquisite siren wail. I found that “Small World” and the nearby area had a multitude of infernal machines where children could fight vicariously and batter harmless hamsters or frogs on screens to the accompaniment of sounds imagined by Dante in the circles of hell. All of these noises blended together to produce the meaningless tangle of sound we call noise, damaging to the ears of an adult, destructive to the hearing of a child. A question remained, noise on a Sunday was 92 decibels, horrendously serious sound, while that on a weekday was 82 decibels, only very serious sound; why the difference? Next to “Small World” was a music shop, school. I remembered that on the Sunday they had moved a piano like instrument outside which contributed an extra ten decibels. To put it another way, the music shop, school increased by a factor of ten the total amount of weekday noise, and hence contibuted to the greater exposure of the greater number of children who came at weekends!