Jan Doering, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto explores the complex relationship between sound, behavior, and social conflict, unpacking the social, cultural, and neurological dimensions of sound, and discussing how we can move toward a more considerate coexistence in our shared environments.

Sound that delights one person can deeply distress another. Clare and Jan explore how our appreciation of sound is deeply subjective and why this gap often turns into tension in urban life. Through examples from everyday environments, they discuss how noise reflects culture, how it can become a form of power and resistance, and why some people respond to it with frustration or even aggression.

The conversation challenges policymakers, urban planners, and designers to take sound seriously as an issue of well-being issue and accessibility, highlighting how neurological safety and collective responsibility can help create more peaceful and inclusive soundscapes.

Clare and Jan also reflect on the deeper psychological and emotional layers behind how we relate to sound, revealing that finding peace in a noisy world might start with changing how we listen.

Jan Doering is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research explores social control and conflict in urban neighborhoods, as well as how individuals experience and respond to discrimination. He has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Councils.

His first book, “Us Versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods” (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the dynamics of community conflict and identity during the era of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

Key Takeaways

• Hearing is a sense we cannot turn off, making sound a constant, shared experience.
• Noise is not just about volume - there are more elements to consider 
• Urban “vibrancy” often comes at the expense of rest and recovery, highlighting a policy blind spot.
• Municipalities, designers, and leaders can promote neurological safety by designing environments that support well-being and reduce sensory stress.

CHAPTERS

03:00 Introduction

06:05 Tension Around Noise

09:10 Defining Noise and Perception

12:16 Reframing Noise Experiences

18:05 Joy in Noise: Machines and Gender

22:18 Noise and Cultural Responsibility

29:08 Government and Policy Failures

36:50 Consequences of Noise Stress

45:50 Allergic to Peace?

51:31 Sadism, Pleasure, and Noise-Making Behavior

58:45 Emotional vs. Intellectual Arguments for Quiet

01:04:40 Density, Well-being, and Cultural Vision

01:08:00 Creative Solutions and Happy Spaces

Sources

• Clamor by Chris Berdik — https://www.chrisberdik.com
• Golden: The Power of Silence in a World Full of Noise by Justin Zorn & Leigh Marz — https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Power-Silence-World-Noise/dp/0063027607
• Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind – Wilson, T.D. et al., Science (2014) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4330241
• Epstein, M. J. (2020). Sound and noise: A listener's guide to everyday life. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51941863-sound-and-noise
• “The Traffic Mimes of Colombia” — Atlas Obscura, by Eric Grundhauser, published March 23, 2016 — https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/traffic-mimes-of-colombia

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Images

Barcelona’s City Campaign: Clare Kumar

Connect with Guest

Website: Jan Doering - University of Toronto - https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/sociology/people/jan-doering

LinkedIn -  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-doering-33a836/

Connect with Clare

Website - https://www.clarekumar.com

Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarekumar/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/clarekumar/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/clarekumar

Museletter - https://clarekumar.kartra.com/page/MuseletterOptin

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About Clare

Clare Kumar explores the intersection of performance and inclusion in her mission to help stop the unintentional squandering of human potential. She collaborates with design, management, and user experience professionals to incorporate neuroinclusive design into spaces, cultures, and experiences ensuring that everyone has the chance to make their richest contribution. 

Clare encourages the creation of “neurological safety”, the conditions that invite us to “keep calm and carry on”. Every organization wants their customers and employees to be able to move forward with ease but without this level of safety, too often people are unintentionally designed out.

Clare continues to experience this. She brings not only her keen noticing but also her sense of social justice to advocate for greater inclusion.

Clare also serves as the Canadian Regional Director of the 🌻Hidden Disabilities Sunflower program, bettering daily life for those with non-visible challenges.

Tune into the 🙂Happy Space® podcast for conversations with leading voices working towards a more hospitable world and subscribe to the museletter podcast for the latest in related news, media & events.

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If you prefer to watch video, check out the episode on YouTube. And look for the Shorts playlist for clips. If you prefer to read, please see the transcript below.

Ready to learn more, or want to find out more about coaching with Clare or hiring her for your next engaging event? Contact Clare here.

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PRODUCTION  

• Production Assistant: Ana Quintero
• Song Credit: Cali by Wataboi  / wataboi  
• Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by FDL Music  • Cali - Wataboi · [Copyright-free Music]

Clare

Welcome Jan. Happy to have you on the Happy Space podcast.

Jan

Thanks so much, Clare. It's great to be here.

Clare

I've been excited for this conversation for a long time. We first met through talking about noise and sound and some of your research into noise. I am particularly interested in your line of inquiry around sound and social conflict. And from my vantage point, they there is a lot of that going on where I live. My first question for you is why you think we have such tension around noise. Here's an example. I play tennis at a local tennis club and it's situated right beside a park and in this park is a baseball diamond.

Well, when I took my kids to baseball practice many years ago, it was a very chill experience. You would hear applause, you would hear cheering, but you didn't hear a big loudspeaker with walk on music for number nine. Let's hear. And so I'm sensing that there's a cultural shift in the entitlement to make noise is maybe one of these things. We have a cultural impact on how we view noise and how we feel entitled to express ourselves. We also have a tug of war between commerce and well being. In Toronto, where we live, I notice we talk a lot about having a vibrant city and vibe. Vibrant. My interpretation of their use of vibrant is pass for making tons of noise without considering the neighbors and the residents.

It's really around supporting commerce. So with these, these two as a starting point, I would love to hear your thoughts on why we have tension around noise.

Jan

Great question. Wow, thanks. That's a big question. I think very fundamentally, hearing is a sense that is difficult for us to control. So I can close my eyes if I don't want to see what's going on around me. I can avoid touch with other people in most situations. Even with smell.

I can move away if it's a subway cart and I'm bothered by someone's smell, although it's. That can be difficult as well. But it's in the sound studies world and in research on sound, there's a sentence that people often say which is that ears have no lids, right? There is no direct way of filtering out sound. And so really the only thing that I can do if I am bothered is to leave, which is sometimes not possible. And also it may sting morally.

Clare

Right.

Jan

If you abandon your tennis court because you're not comfortable there, because someone else is imposing on your sound space, you may not feel very good about that. So then the only thing you could do is to drown it out, try to drown it out with Noise canceling headphones by making more noise yourself. It's something that people are fundamentally uncomfortable with. Right? It's, it's a tension this, this fact that, that we almost inevitably invade each other's space by making sound. Where the, where the line is between noise and sound is something that' very difficult to tell and I'm sure we'll talk about it, but that is making it in a densely populated space, almost impossible to not have conflicts over noise.

Clare

And to your point, this definition or a line between sound and noise. Noise is unwanted. Sound is my light definition. Maybe you have a better one. How do you define noise?

Jan

That's the one that's very often used and it's an interesting definition because it's a subjective definition. And I think it's important, important to emphasize two things about this. One is that noise does have subjective components. And at the same time, if you put people on an aircraft carrier and had them see planes take off, they would agree that it's noisy. So there's a limit to the subjectivity of noise, but there is a subjective component to what noise is and does.

Clare

It relate to the value of that noise? I remember reading the book Sound and Noise and the quality of sound, the duration of sound, the frequency of sound. There's so many different characteristics to sound, but it's. Whether a sound is perceived to be useful or not also translates into its perception of sound versus noise. So a fire engine siren, for example, or oh, I have a bone to pick with Amber alerts, right? So 5am Amber alert when I'm sleeping. And it's a very emotional debate, that one where people are very much like, wake me up anytime, I'll help the child who's missing.

I'm like, yeah, you could do that to me too, but you could whisper. You don't need to scare me to my core with this alert.

That is very visceral. So I love your point. It's subjective, but also our processing of sound, it's very quick in the brain and it's very connected to memory. So does it also have something to do with how visceral our response to prior sound is? Our own sound history, for example?

Jan

Yes, there's a built up memory, I think memory is a good word for it, of experiences with sound and what those sounds mean and how we evaluate them and that shapes our perception of noise. And you've pointed to value. So I think we can point to utilitarian thinking. Right. Is this something that enhances the greater good for the greater majority of people? Right. And in the case of an ambulance, in many cases we would probably say yes, or in the case of a fire truck, and in other cases we might not.

So that would be an important criterion. There's often moral evaluations of the people who are making the sound. And I'm finding in my field work that if people feel that the noise is indefensible, it becomes noisier. Right. It's something that over time will probably generate a stronger emotional response because it's more. It's more upsetting. It's literally more upsetting in any way.

The way that people think about and talk about the phenomenon, but also how they feel in their body when they hear the sound.

Clare

I've definitely lived that and am living it now with totally trying to have a counter strategy. Here's my strategy is to try and think of the person on the motorbike so happy that I'm at least tapping into that bit of joy that somebody else is experiencing, even if it's my hell. And it even extends to my love. Drinks coffee multiple times a day. And his coffee machine, of course, grinds the beans.

Jan

Oh, yes.

Clare

And it's about 80 decibels of, for me, purely useless noise. But for him, it's. His whole body is getting primed for this great coffee experience.

Jan

Right.

Clare

And so the absolute extreme. It's so sweet. He now comes and closes my office door. Or if I'm close to him, he says, plug your ears.

I'm going to. I'm going to run the machine. But this machine also does cleaning on its own with no warning. And that's about 72 decibels. Because I'm nerdy. I've tested this as I walk around with my. My phone app and my noise meter.

Like I'm never without it. So it's really interesting because he will not even notice those sounds, whereas I look at them as, and I call them audio assaults. Coming back to this counter strategy that I have of trying to associate with somebody else's joy to lessen my adverse reaction to the noise, I have a feel it's helping. Do you have any thoughts or experience with what people can do to improve their relationship to the soundscape?

Jan

I am so impressed that you're doing that. So I have thought about this and the pattern that it may not be helpful to you as an individual. If you envision the people who are making noise in particularly dark ways and morally problematic ways, that that's not helpful. I think I'm fairly certain about that. But there has been overall, and I'VE never suggested this to anyone because this is not just not my place to tell people how they should engage this. But I have thought about how that could be helpful, how reframing one's thinking about this could work. And really what I've heard from people is just a very fundamental resistance to wanting to do that because there's a moral sense that you've been wronged in the situation.

And it takes a great deal of emancipation from. From that to be able to say yes. But I might still be happier if I meditate on this, if I try to reframe this and think about the people differently. So I have never met anyone who has done that. So I congratulate you for doing that. I've personally had these kinds of thoughts though, and I've tried to work on it as well. Back when I lived in Montreal, I was living close to a park.

Actually I was living next to the park. It was very small.

Clare

Which park?

Jan

You would not know it. It's. It's a playground. So it's. And that was part of it. So it.

Playground with benches. And it's a gentrifying neighborhood. And people come out there at night to. To drink, to smoke, to have fun. And the fact that it's a playground was related to this because in the morning you would sometimes have beer cans, you would have some cigarette butts. And it made me very angry and it made the noise more unbearable. And I tried.

I'm not sure if I succeeded, but I tried to rethink the experience, to say, these are people who don't have balconies. They are trying to socialize with their friends. Some of this was during COVID They cannot meet in other ways. But I'm not sure I made it as far as you did. So you say you think it was helping. I tried and I don't think I necessarily succeeded.

Clare

I think so. And I mean, full disclosure. Disclosure I've gone from. And I'm still very triggered by certain noise. It happened most recently while I was away in Luxembourg after having considerable noise stress here went to my family's place and unfortunate timing. They had ordered the removal of six stories of windows.

Jan

Okay.

Clare

The morning after arriving in an international flight and significant noise stress. And I really. I really had a bad reaction to that. But I've. I've thought it doesn't. So this is how bad my reactions have been. I've been visualizing because predominantly, and.

And I hope inner listeners don't hate me for saying this, but I've. I see this as A predominantly male problem, although I see women bikers and I love it. And I've been talking and I've been talking more and more to motorcycle riders to understand and get closer to their joy and to try and understand it. But I was sort of envisaging castration, if I'm going to be honest. I was really like, we need to stop the source of this problem, which I think is testosterone based. But I'm curious actually, because. So, for example, I live on the lake and I saw there are jet ski tours here and I was looking and individuals with jet skis and I was sort of observing who came to the parking lot with their jet skis.

Well, it was a gentleman in a Ram or a Ford F150 with a modified exhaust. Unpacking jet skis with modified exhausts. And so what I see predominantly in the people who seek joy from making noise and expressing themselves in this way, feeling the vibration because sound is to our ears, but also the vibration to our bodies. What do you know socially now about the people who prefer this kind of audio expression?

Jan

So I think when you said that you're trying to feel people's joy, I think, I think that is, you're very descriptive there of many people's experience. That's how people describe their feeling when they're on motorcycles, when they're in powerful cars, and also when they're on jet skis. So these, you know, there's resemblance between these devices, right? They're machines and you get to enjoy the functioning of the machine at high, at a high operating capacity, right? You push the motor, you push the engine to its limits. And there is a, there's a, I think a joy in feeling that I've been riding along only a few times. I, I actually don't personally love it so much because I have a bit of, I get, I'm not going roller coasters and so on.

Clare

Speak to me. I feel you.

Jan

But you feel it, right? Like you feel the, you know, you're pushed back in your seat or, or something like that. And there is a, an almost primordial excitement in that. And I think, you know, I'm not sure how deeply this is in, in gender, but there is of course the tendency that men are raised more to appreciate machines, technology. It's just a social, socialization phenomenon that boys get cars and whatnot as toys. And so there's this excitement that, that is definitely gendered and, and women enter this world and more than, than I think many people think and their experience there is very interesting but yeah, it is a very gendered experience. And, and it is often related to this desire to, to feel a machine, you know, and the noise is related to that.

When you hear the noise that, that an engine at high operations makes, it gives you visceral feedback. Right. About, about, about how high the engine is running. And, and, and it's an important component. You'll see people having the windows down to hear it. I think you've also observed yourself that people like to, they like to rev when they enter tunnels where.

Clare

Oh yes, amplified resonant chamber.

Jan

Right, exactly, exactly. And people love that, right? They, the driver, semi. Right. They love it because it gives them, it lets them hear like, oh, wow, this is how it sounds. Right. This is.

Clare

Well, it's like me singing.

Jan

Yes.

Clare

In a swimming pool where the sound is. And the sound is spinning. And I was in the steam room this morning singing. And the moisture and the small hard surfaces. I'm like, oh, it was amazing. To me, it was amazing. And luckily there was nobody else there to be worried about the sound.

But so yes, this is why sound. And I don't think any levels of our government deal with very effectively the vibration of sound, the fact that it's affecting every cell in the body because we're water and water is vibrating. So we feel, we feel all of it more than we just talk about sound and decibels related to volume and hearing. We don't talk about the vibration that low base that's carrying. We're in camp through Caribana weekend. Right. And this year I didn't hear. But it all is a matter of wind direction, which is, you know, the vehicle to carry those sound waves.

It's really interesting to me just following this thread a little bit further, thinking of Stellantis and some of their cars that they've actually put speakers in electric vehicles generating incredible sound to give that visceral feeling. Right. There's a whole appreciation electric cars are going to be quieter. Well, unless they're at high speed, then the tire noise is going to be still significant. But they're actually recreating the sound of the engine because that's what their buyer wants. I guess this is the question, what's the social conversation around collective understanding of well being and the stress that some of these inventions is now placing on the general public because one person backfiring disturbs tens of thousands of people. And what are you noticing in that conversation in any kind of ethical, moral, collective responsibility?

And how does it vary by culture?

Jan

That's a big topic. And it also depends on the particular sound that we're talking about. But maybe we'll just talk about.

Clare

Let's talk about cars.

Jan

About cars.

Clare

Let's talk about cars.

Jan

Let's talk about cars right now.

Clare

Let's talk about cars, baby. Yeah.

Jan

Yeah. There's no one answer for this community. I think that's something that I should point out. So I've been studying the car enthusiast community, and this is a broader term that includes motorcycle riders, usually, and it includes people who are into various kinds of cars and motorcycles. Classic cars and their preservation, American muscle cars, tuning cars.

Clare

My distinguished gentleman riders that I talk to who ride their motorcycles in suits.

Jan

Ah, yes. Okay.

Clare

They're a classy group. There were 300 bikers across the street from me one morning gathering for a trip together. Only two to three bikes, I think I counted, made noise, like revved the way I would expect if I had 300 motorcycles across the street. But this distinguished gentleman riders group was. They had a consciousness. And this is what I'm. This is so to your point. Yeah. There's a diverse experience even within.

So I'm not. I don't want to tar and feather people that are riding motorcycles. I love that people are finding joy. Some of my favorite people are bike fans.

But it's this question of how do we. How do we raise the consciousness? And where is the consciousness today amongst this community? And how does it vary by individualistic culture, North America, collectivist cultures, Asian? To point two extremes, how are we thinking? I mean, when I was in Singapore, I didn't hear people revving their cars to get attention and make noise. The motorcycle was an A to B experience.

It was a means of transportation. So that's kind of the question.

What are you noticing?

Jan

Well, I've been doing my research, really, in individualistic cultures, although I do. There are. It's not as cohesive as you might think. In Japan, for example, there are also car cultures that are, you know, quite noisy and that will be more of a collectivist culture. But I think, generally speaking, one can make this comparison, that this is a phenomenon that you will find more in Europe and in North America than in. Than in other places. So I think generally speaking, that's true, although it's not always true.

And in terms of consciousness. So I think there's two things. One is the consciousness about noise and how we impinge on others is a big element of this. But another one is also aesthetic experience. So people grow up, you know, and if you talk to older motorcycle riders and drivers, they're not necessarily going to be so excited about loud engines anymore, just like we are no longer excited about roller coasters. Right. Like it's.

It's not exclusively, but primarily the domain of younger people, people who from the age of having just gotten their license to, I would say, late 20s, early 30s. And there. There's both the aesthetic appeal, right, of this, of this experience, and also the, The. The interest in risk taking that it entails, because you have to also accept some risk there.

Clare

Yes.

Jan

And perhaps then a certain, you know, question of how moral is this behavior? And there, too, you have divisions. Yeah, there's a lot of things to say about this, but one thing that I found very interesting is how do you think about riding in the city? Particularly because you could also ride in the countryside. I mean, it's not always accessible, depending on where you live. But a lot of people who are in this community don't live downtown, and so they would have the option. And you can think about downtown as a place that's loud, which would suggest that you should be quiet so that it doesn't become even louder.

Or you could say it's a place that's already loud. So this is the place to make noise. After all, it's already loud.

Clare

If you live here, you've already subscribed to being assaulted.

Jan

I get that answer a lot that people say. If you choose to live along the gardener in downtown Toronto, that's exactly what people say.

Clare

What percentage of people do you think. Do you have a sense of what percentage of the population thinks, yeah, you chose noisy. Suck it up.

Jan

I don't know. My personal research is. My method is always to probe very deeply into particular people rather than to have large numbers, which you would need to say something about percentages. There are surveys that would give this kind of answer.

Clare

I think I love scientists because they know where they're operating. It's perfect what you can say and what you can't claim yet. Yeah. So cultural differences. One other thing I noticed recently, I was in Barcelona and the city had a real campaign inviting, because there's been a bit of backlash to tourism there. There was a campaign all through the city inviting more gracious behavior. And some of it had to do with noise making.

And almost, you know, every few lampposts, there was a banner, and it was either a message about, you know, at the beach, there were messages about being kind to the environment. But near Sagrada Familia, the big gaudy church, for example, big banner saying, shh. Respect the. Respect the residents of Barcelona and a €600 fine. So the city was making an effort to influence the container in a vibrant place. When I was in the Barcelona beach, there was not one Jet Ski in the water, not one. In Toronto, we have jet ski tours, we have motorized watercraft exclusion zones.

Now because of the bad behavior we have, I've witnessed Jet skis terrorizing wildlife, spraying people. We have egregious behavior. And I see cities responding very differently. What do you think as a researcher, you might be able to offer up to municipalities, provincial governments, federal governments as insight as to how to invite respecting the, the guidelines that we already have in place, but thinking more collectively, do you have any golden thoughts on what we can do to encourage leadership, to be caring more about our environments, our soundscapes?

Jan

So enforcement is one thing that you do, but you have to have cultural buy in, right, from the population. People have to. You heard probably about the backlash against the speed cameras in the city and in surrounding municipalities where people say, oh, it isn't fair, I was just speeding. 20, I was just speeding, I was just going home.

You know, it's not. And there, you know, people are flabbergasted that the rules that are in principle on the books are being enforced. Right. And I'm making fun of it a little bit, but, but, but really the, the point is serious that people, they have, there's the law and then there is the standard that people have in their heads for what's, what's appropriate here. How do we live together here?

Clare

And I think that Covid and our restricted ability to move, I think it's amplified the resistance to being policed, to being controlled. Especially in Toronto, we were the most locked down city. So I think here there's a pushing back to being told what to do. It's like a child saying, you ain't gonna be the boss of me.

Jan

That may well be. And I think it's also that, and this is something that I wouldn't necessarily want to change. You know, Toronto is a, is a, you know this very well. It's a hyper diverse culture. And I think in order to facilitate this, generally, the city has veered towards being extremely laissez faire. Right. Not in all cases, but generally the way in which our life together here seems to work is to be very permissive.

And I can compare this to other places like Montreal, where people have more of a sense that there is a legitimate dominant culture that is okay to enforce. Like if there's nothing necessary, that's what people feel, right? That there is no Necessarily exclusionary character about saying but this is how we live.

Clare

I'm getting you what I hear when I say you're here. Laissez faire is abdication of responsibility. Yes, that's how I view it. It's like what are you guys doing?

Do you not? Because even talking to our former Toronto medical officer, the science is there about noise and well being and chronic noise and the stress on the body. The science is there but the willingness of our silos in government at any level. Transport doesn't talk to health doesn't talk to accessibility doesn't talk to event and commerce. Like we don't have a nuanced understanding because noise is pervasive. But our way of addressing noise is not filtering into every aspect of how we navigate and manage and enforce and guide and invite our lives to be led. And I think every level of government is guilty of not giving this due attention.

If I look at the UN Convention for Rights of Persons with Disabilities sensory issues are there but we focused on and not got yet right to be very clear as mobility. If we can get ramps steps into every restaurant, we can tick our, we can take our accessibility. Well no, I'm being feel like I'm being designed out of the city because no one's protecting the sensory experience. I call it neurological safety in, in my model and sensory support is really, really critical. And so we have an abdication of and potential ignorance, potentially lack of will, potentially lack of funding. Whole complex set of reasons why we're not addressing it. Think no one said you actually need to put a noise sort of a knowledgeable group about noise.

Because also noise is complex, it's moving, it's fleeting, it's temporary, you can't see it. It's very difficult to enforce, very difficult and expensive to try and influence. But I think we're missing sort of getting that we actually have to do something about this. Like this, this core belief that oh this is going to show up in, it's going to show up in violence. I mean my, my visualization of castration would never happen clearly. Right, clearly. But I have seen in groups saying I feel like going and keying a car, I feel like slashing tires. Violence. We're on the cusp of violence for to your point people who are their sense of injustice and their sense of nobody else is looking after me.

The sense is I have to do something about this until I think noise hits the news because like, like let's take the freedom convoy trucking in Ottawa, right? An egregious abuse an egregious audio assault. And I spoke to the lawyer who won that argument and brought that case last week. And. And it's interesting to look at what the arguments can be and are we actually protecting our citizens? And I say where we haven't figured out, A, that it's important and then B, how to do it. So I think there's a big climb.

When I talked to Eileen De Villa, who was our medical officer in Toronto, she was likening it to smoking. We took a 60 year journey to go from 65% of the population smoking to under 7% today. Like Amy Winehouse, I ain't got 70 days, no, I ain't got 60 years to wait for action on this. I'm looking at the science of persuasion, like how intellectually and emotionally we can make these arguments.

And when we talk about noise, we often hear people just talk about the decibels and hearing loss, but there's a lot more to the consequences. And I wonder, with your experience looking at the consequence of noise, if you can share a little bit more about what you've seen.

Jan

Right. So I've been interviewing Torontonians about their experience of noise, and I've heard many very dire experiences. But two come to mind when I think about it. One is the case of a man with a brain injury who will temporarily lose consciousness when he hears a very loud noise and can actually just fall over. And this happens to him, for example, when he hears a very loud motorcycle or loud car that drives by. So he told me that he just fell into the road one day, which of course, is an acute danger to his life. And that's something that most people will not think about.

It's not something that's on people's radars. And then something that may be more common, but that's also, I think, very chilling, is I talked to a family where a daughter would just constantly wake up at night and had a very, very hard time at school for several years because she would just be woken up at night as a result of motorcycles and loud cars riding by. And it became a very severe issue for that family. So there are many cases like this, but these two, they come to mind when I think about, about this question.

Clare

Yeah. And I'm thinking back to our conversation too, where I was talking about my own challenge with quantity.

Jan

And yours. And yours. That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Clare

So for listeners, just quickly, that was noise stress related to living in a condo with single pane glass, and on one side, a temple was being reconstructed. So there was Construction noise on one side. On the other side was a school ground which used to be enclosed. And I never heard it until they rebuilt the school and then built the playing, the playgrounds essentially with eight tennis courts on them in between my condo and the school building. And in Japan, one of the, you know, kind of beautiful things is the support that they can show each other when competing. So while there might be four people on the court, there were eight people on either baseline screaming at the top of their lungs. Times multiple courts, multiple times through the day.

And that sound traveled through that single pane glass. And then in the evening when those sports were over, the taiko drumming studio began. And taiko drumming is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

You know, amazing music. But when you can't escape noise stress. I had my own, my own medical emergency after breaking through the single playing Paneglass. And so we can have, we can have. And I think my concern is that we get to such a level of stress that people don't have a way out of that. We start to see more of these situations that can be, like you said, acutely dangerous. So in your unpacking of this social tension and conflict, what's the best invitation you can make for someone who is determined to make noise at the expense of others to consider not just the joy but the well being of the general population?

Jan

Good question. And I should say I agree that it seems like the political will isn't necessarily there, right? To set clearer guidelines, to lead by example, to diffuse across institutions. It's not a general planning principle that seems to be considered. And right now there's even this willingness to bracket, right? There's the housing crisis, and so there are exemptions left and right for construction. Because it seems most people in leadership consider this to be a zero sum game, right?

Either we build fast or we build quiet, but we can't have both.

Clare

And let's build dense. Let's create some more noise problems down the road. Hello.

Jan

Right, right. How do you do that? Intelligently. Right. So those are really important issues for the people who I've been talking to most. They vary a lot in their behavior. But everyone subscribes to the notion that there's a time and a place for noise.

It's just that the answer for what time, what place are different, Right, I've already mentioned, right, well, the gardener is the place, right?

Clare

So for listeners, the gardener is a big highway running east to west across the south southern border of Toronto. And so it's a commuting route. It's it's just how you get across the city if you're lucky. It's also chronically under construction, which it needs to be. But right.

Jan

Right now you don't. But yeah, and it's. And it's a place that leads right through an entire forest of skyscrapers. Right where?

Clare

Jan

It is, it was shocking to me when I saw it for the first time. And there's all kinds of architectural things that we could think about there.

Clare

Well, yeah, because our standards are not, they're not, we're not building to a code. Like I stayed at an airport in Hong Kong. Airport, hotel. I didn't hear a plane.

Jan

Oh, wow. Okay.

Clare

You can build, you can build to insulate from sound, but our, in our double pane glass, the way it's built, the quality of the construction is. And I interviewed an architecture firm at Open Doors Toronto and they said, oh, we will design to have a sound insulation, but whether it's built to preserve that container is another question. So I'm digressing. But as we build quickly, I'm sensing a lot of there will be shortcuts.

Jan

It falls to the wayside. We can only hope that right now that there are actually condos in Toronto that remain unsold when the construction picks up again, which it must, hopefully people will build better, better units.

Clare

I don't see it like in Covid. We know people needed access to outdoor space. We know we have an aging population. Are we building condos with required balconies, with required cross ventilation, with required width of turning a wheelchair in a bathroom?

No, we're not. We are so far behind any kind of accessibility guideline and well being for humans. Disabled or not everybody can be disabled. Tomorrow you fall down the stairs, you go and live with the new problem. So we are not acting with all the information we have.

Jan

For sure the standard is very low right now. I agree there should really be the moral commitment and the political commitment to implement these standards. But if it's more difficult to sell units, then hopefully there's a change in mindset there that people say people don't want to live in these units. That sound as if you were outside or worse. So that could be part of it.

Clare

Okay, more questions because this. I'm loving this conversation. Thank you so much. I don't think this is a bigger question. Number one, are we allergic to peace culturally? And I'll unpack that question in a minute. I'm curious what percentage of buyers, whether it be a hotel room for a weekend or a place to live, actually look very closely at the soundscape.

So we look at a project that has not got off the ground near train tracks, and it was deemed that you could not open your window living in that unit. Yet those units are allowed to be built and sold and marketed. And depending on the economic drivers, what percentage of the population is even aware of the impact of sound on their cells? I mean, one example as a productivity coach for 20 years, people think, I get enough sleep. I'm fine with less than six hours sleep. Well, actually, you're operating impaired. So people.

People don't have the information and then continue to design a life around information that says, I'm doing fine. This noise is fine.

Jan

I was not aware of this study.

Clare

I will put a link in the show notes. I will send you this study. But yeah, people were invited to be just not given anything to do. Be alone with your thoughts or here's something you can give yourself shocks. The majority wanted to shock themselves. And in the. In the US I talked about this on an earlier episode.

Probably Silence is golden with the authors of the book golden the Power of Silence in a World Full of Noise. How I went down to a hotel and it was. If you've been to Great Wolf Lodge, the water park in Niagara Falls.

Jan

I don't know it. No.

Clare

Okay. It's an atrium with. With a water slide and kids playing. Well, this hotel was an atrium with waterfalls and amplified music. And you imagine the soundscape in there. You had to shout to check in. We stayed one night and then made plans to do something else.

I canceled going to the conference, everything. In the morning, I saw a pool and I thought, oh, this is great. I'll have a moment of respite and I'll be able to regulate my nervous system calm and enjoy a swim. Sorry, we gonna pump some music in that pool. So you won't be able to think there either. The war on Our ability to self reflect the attack on peace. I don't know if it's as calculated as saying keep people stupid, keep people malleable.

Let's feed the messages we want. But we're not gonna invite self reflection. But I think that's at play. And we need to fight for sanctuary. We need to fight for our parks as sanctuaries of sound. We need to fight for these pockets of peace in our culture. So we actually have the ability to be regularly with our thoughts.

Jan

Yeah. Wow, that's an ambitious argument. There may be a case to be made like that. What you just said reminded me of arguments that I've heard in critical theory about how the industrial age shapes the human being and their preferences and ideals. For example, there's this famous statement by Theodore Adorno that jazz is the pumping machine extended into the human, where the desire to want to listen to that kind of music could only be explained by people slaving away at the machines all day.

It's a similar argument. It's difficult to make, but you may have a point. I guess one thing I would say is there is also the counter movement, right?

There is the desire for. I was recently talking to a friend who I discovered goes to silent retreats. There's the mindfulness movement. You're very aware of these things. So these things also exist. So is there a general trend that we have a general desire towards wanting to drown out our thinking?

Clare

Well, Gabor mate will say it's a form of numbing so we can escape dealing with hard things because just give me sensory input of some kind, some kind of addiction, some kind of. Whether it's alcohol, whether it's sex, whether it's going fast, like stimulate me so I don't actually have to face what I'm facing.

Jan

Yeah, yeah, you may have a point there. And I too sort of drown out the subway when I'm on the subway. Well, rather than not doing it. So I think, think, you know, a case like this could be made. But how does it compare there. There is this trend also towards, you know, wanting more silence, seeking it out, seeing it as a goal in and of itself rather than a means to an end. So I'm not sure that, you know, one would say that our culture is generally heading in this direction of.

Clare

I think the challenge though is as I talk about neurological safety and when we have a shared space, designing for the more sensitive.

Jan

Yeah, yeah.

Clare

We can't with noise because we can't protect from those few people that want to Disturb the peace for tens of thousands at one instant. And so that's where, in my opinion, we need our governing bodies to help invite the culture. So I want to come back to that question of what would you say to someone? What would you say to a noisemaker, a noise lover? What would you say?

Jan

I can't say for sure, but something that. That could be considered. There is no. You. You're aware of the. Of the paper that suggests that sadism is at play, right?

Clare

Yeah. So this is out of London, Ontario, the professor that was researching young. Young men making noise and looking at whether it was narcissism or sadism, and.

Jan

Right. Found sadism to be the. The. The stronger correlate of. Of people saying, I want a loud car. I don't think that's right. I. There are some problems with this study that we could or could not get into.

But I think the bigger issue is simply what you were pointing out earlier, that the pleasure is the key to understanding the behavior. And then there's the willful or not so willful ignorance of other people's suffering that might be caused.

Clare

I want to unpack it in percentages. I mean, I want to get there because if we look at psychopaths, that's a small percentage of the population. Right. And sadists, and that's. Do you know what the number is?

Jan

Oh, no, I don't know. But there are some. Especially, I mean, even among drivers, we can find cases. Did you hear about the Belltown Hellcats case? The man in Seattle who had one of these extremely loud cars and was, you know, he became a social media star. And I think he's actually in jail now. He was ordered to retrofit his car, refused, and then was sent to jail.

He seemed to take pleasure from.

Clare

I've witnessed it. I've witnessed it where I live with a car following pedestrians slowly and inflicting an audio assault. And I think the language is not too strong to stay audio assault because if we look at sound waves actually hitting the eardrum and it is. You just can't see it.

Jan

It.

Clare

The odd Jet Ski. No issue with modified exhausts here as a collective, it's an issue. It's now become a destination for motorcycles, for hot cars as we've had more development. But it's also become a place to visit. And I worry about any beautiful road on the water. And water is water is why I moved here, for healing, for light and water and which are for the nervous system, very calming. And it's these few individuals but growing over the past years who have totally disturbed this what used to be tranquil area.

And as I see as a marketing advantage, come and live by Humber Bay and enjoy our parks. No, enjoy the fumes of jet skis, enjoy cars backfiring. They're not protecting the asset they have. So while you say there's quiet and this, the noise is overtaking the possibility to have this quiet. So I think it's a pressing issue.

Jan

Yeah, yeah. And as you said earlier, this is something I recently looked into. Downtowns, cities overall, in their core areas, they're retaining more older people. And I think it's an important thing to nurture because people can be less isolated, they can maintain their networks that they may have had from living downtown. They have access to services and transportation. And so there are important equity issues at stake. Going back to the issue of sadism.

Clare

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jan

And the others. Right. So I do think it is a very small group because humans are for the most part moral creatures. They don't embrace, for the most part, villainous characteristics. That's something that very few people are contented with. Unless there's something that is at stake in terms of group conflict. If this was an ethnic conflict, if this was a class conflict.

And I thought about that and looked into that. I could not find anything where someone said, I'm going down to the lakefront to disturb all these white collar people who are telling me what to do every day. I haven't found the sentiment, which is not to say that it never occurs, but in Toronto, I don't think it is. There are cases like that in other places. And in Seattle, that element exists because the man who was arrested was black. So it adds another dimension to the issue. Right. But in any case, I think the sadism, it's a relatively rare phenomenon.

So I think for the others who are more just oblivious or ignorant of the problems they're causing, one could try to provide a different opportunity to live out their hobby. Right. So we could try to make road space available where it really is okay to make noise. This is not sure how practical this is. But yeah, people talk about how expensive the racetrack is, how difficult it is to get out of the city, given how congested it is. Some people will even say, I drive at night because I can't drive during the day.

Clare

Yeah, the way I want.

Jan

Yes, exactly. The way I want. You could drive very slowly on the gardener instead, but you don't get the.

Clare

Sense of freedom and exhilaration.

Jan

Exactly. You don't.

Clare

At 5pm in Toronto on the garden.

Jan

No, just.

Clare

No. It's not what you're looking for.

Jan

And the jet skis never run into this. Right. So this would be a great explanation for why the jet skis are so popular now in a city that's kind of drowning in traffic and where people love enjoying engines. The waterway is not so congested at any point of the day that you cannot speed through it with a jet ski. So we could try to see it as a youthful form of deviance, as so many generations have had their. Their unique form of deviance and in some way channel it in ways that we can live with better. But I don't have a perfect suggestion for this. It's just.

One would have to think about urban planning, how to make it possible for people to drive this kind of way without bothering such a large amount of people. You know?

Clare

Yeah, it's raising the. It's raising compassion. It's inviting compassionate thinking. And that's difficult because we might not even have compassion for ourselves. I'm going to bring an example from. You probably heard of the book Clamor by Chris Burdick. It's a new book. Right. And I'm looking forward to speaking to Chris about some of these things as well.

And one example that he relates in the book, which I thought was gorgeous, was looking at a hearing specialist trying to understand why people are not wearing hearing protection to protect their own hearing. Hearing when they know they're losing their hearing. Until the. The hearing specialist invited a connection to a reason for that individual to care about their quality of sound. So this fundamental not thinking about, caring about the soundscape, I think is the point. So this person was a fly fisherman, I think it was. And so she said in that envisage a sound that you love.

And he described a sound. And she said, well, or he. You would lose that sound.

Jan

Oh, okay.

Clare

So we can't make intellectual arguments for something so innate to who we are. I think we have to find an emotional argument. That person wore their hearing protection. So if we translate, transfer that to a young person who knows that motorcycle is right Risky. Who inherently would know that the noise is offensive but not be connected to the impact in any kind of meaningful or personal way. My thinking is that's the nut to crack, is to figure out how there's a personal connection to something that with the feeling of invincibility of a young 20 year old male, it's like really hard to connect to this potential that. Oh, actually I should care about this thing.

Jan

Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, that sounds right. And I mean you and I, we both watch the, the city engagement efforts, right? That's. That have been made in Toronto and I looked all over the city. There was a promise I think last year to do a large scale public education campaign and I came across one of those signs finally that they put up to discourage revving.

Clare

Did you, do you have a picture of it? Send me a picture if you have it. Yeah, I can send it.

Jan

You're going to be furious. But it's also hilarious. So it shows a motorcycle and the line is to rev or not to rev. That is what they came up with. Wow.

Clare

Pulling a little Shakespeare into that.

Jan

So how are we reaching these people?

Clare

How are you reaching that dude?

Jan

We're going to engage their love of Shakespeare and then not to even suggest an answer, but. So that was what the city came up with. Right. So it's very, very, It's a very disappointing.

Clare

It's not Barcelona in your face. A sign with the fingers over the lips and then. And shh.

And a €600 fine.

Jan

Right.

Clare

And on top of that, in Europe the license plate for a motorcycle is about the size of my notebook here, which is, you know, an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper kind of size here. What are the size. It's less than a five by seven postcard. And they're allowed to be. I don't know if they're allowed to be, but a large percentage of bikers put them on a hinge, tuck the plates underneath. They are allowed to fly under the radar and nobody's doing a damn thing.

Jan

Yeah, it's true. And the police have a, have a no chase policy for good reason that if there isn't, if there isn't a compelling reason to pursue this person, they're not going to.

Clare

And the bikers know it. I've watched. I joined the police on our bylaw for the blitz that was happening right outside my window actually. So I joined them for a couple of hours just watching, observing what was going on. And one biker for sure, the police went to stop him and the biker Just went. Just like, leave and just left. But another biker, this was on the corner of Park Lawn in Lakeshore, was turning right and at the light, and he revved, and the officer was gonna let him go.

And he was like, you, buddy, over you go. It was like, okay. Like, there are laws against unnecessary noise.

Jan

Yeah. Yeah.

Clare

There is a reluctance from police to actually act on it, except for some. I've interviewed some officers who are, oh, I love giving out these tickets. This is what I do. I live for these. This is. This is. This is like, I'd give out multiple a night. So there's.

It's a very personal issue for the enforcer and the person making the noise and for the person, the people at the receiving end.

Jan

That's a really interesting point, and I think it returns to something that we talked about earlier, the difference between the law and the standards of life that we have together in a community. And the officers. I think many officers know this is something you see around many issues. Public drug use, noise, any sort of deviant behavior. Where the police know, yes, there's the law, but you do need to accommodate the general standard in this community to retain essentially the legitimacy of policing. Right. If you enforce the law as written down, and people feel like, but that's not how we live. Right. Then it become a problem.

And a lot of officers are very aware of that difference. So they'll use discretion sometimes in ways that you don't appreciate. But. Yeah. So how do we get people. How do we create messages that make it clear to people what their impact is? I think there are so many good examples that people would find convincing.

Many of the drivers that I spoke to said, you know, you never want to drive in such a way that you, you know, you wake up babies and you create hazard in families, but it happens, right? So that's. That's.

Clare

I think this is what I was getting at. I was thinking of a young man and their grandmother, right. And making the connection to elders who they care about. But I wonder, you know, in our fractured society, where we've got families living apart, we don't have the same cultural constructs that we have maybe in countries we came from. And so we don't have that sense of respecting elders. We don't have the sense of taking care of each other to the same degree. And so I think as we're diverse, we're fractured, and we need some invitation to say, who do we want to be as a city, I feel like we have no vision for world class when it comes to well, being.

Jan

I think one thing that we should try to do, and this is something that we should try to do in cities overall. It comes back to this issue of density. We, environmentally speaking, and also in terms of what state services we offer, density is a very good and important thing. And we should reframe it from seeing it as an expression of bohemian life, which it was for a while. Right. The families lived in the suburbs and the people who wanted to, who chose to live in core areas were bohemians, gentrifiers.

But this is no longer the case at all. And so.

Clare

Well, especially with return to office mandates. Hello, banks. You're expecting people to manage crazy commutes or relocate closer to.

And we, we. I think we've had tremendously livable cities for a long time in Canada compared to our southern friends.

Jan

Yes.

Clare

And that's kept our cities safer because they've been livable. And so if we lose that now, we're at risk of keeping the city livable and prioritizing well being and making invitations. See? So having lived in Japan and looking the way that dense culture evolved, and then traveling to Hong Kong or to China, where that dense culture evolved, in Japan, you survive by not making eye contact and navigating around each other and not causing friction.

Jan

Okay.

Clare

In Hong Kong and Shanghai, when I was there to get out of an elevator or to get onto a bus involved elbows, you had to physically claim your space. So we can deal with densification in wildly different ways, but we have to think about who we want to be, and we have to invite behavior. I think that's more respectful of each other. And I would lead more to Japan and less away from the elbows.

Jan

Yes.

Clare

If we want to bring the nervousness system down. And I think my big argument in the world is to invite neurological safety, which is it's essentially the conditions that invite us to keep calm and carry on. And these audio assaults are a threat to the ability for the collective to be able to keep calm and carry on. So just looking at creative things we can do to invite the behavior we. We hope our culture can have. Do you have any other ideas?

Jan

It's a very famous campaign. It had quite a big impact on how people in Bogota live together. And it's a very creative idea.

Clare

Of course, I love it. I mean, I'm first thinking nobody kills a clown, so we're starting, but antanas mocas. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. I love that example, I think, and I don't know how many non urban planners know it. And imagine now with video as a way of sharing how viral this would actually travel today if you get filming of the mime. And then it would be really interesting.

You don't need to film the person they're shaming, just film the mime. It would be.

Jan

That's right. Actually it will be. It's. It very much sounds like the perfect campaign for the social media age. That's. That's right.

Clare

It really does. It really does. All right. I love that idea.

Thanks so much. My last question for you, Jan, is if you think of happy space, can you describe for us a happy space of yours?

Jan

That's easy for me. I even have a meditation that revolves around this. So it's one of my go tos. When I need some calm, I think of my parents garden and it's very specific. There is this reclining chair that I can feel when I think about it. And I can hear the sounds of that garden. I can smell the birch tree there.

My mom used to make this fantastic marble cake that I can smell from there. So it's a very sensorially. It's a very rich environment that when I think about it, it instantly is very present to me. And it's something that I can call up in moments when I need some calm. So this is a place where I'm very happy. So it's very much a happy space.

Clare

Thank you so much for sharing that. I can imagine it now and that sensory experience is rich. I want some of that marble cake.

Jan

Yes.

Clare

Jan, it's been a real pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much for all your wisdom and keep asking those questions. I'll be checking in with you.