Hear the sound, enhance your wellbeing
Enhance your brain June #3 what are you listening to?
Take 24 hours in your life. What have you heard? What was in your environment? How did that make you feel?
Sound is a huge contributor to how well we feel and how well we are.
Here are some interesting facts around noise -
The estimated cost of noise pollution is $30.8 billion a year — and that’s just in Europe. The World Health Organization Europe’s 2011 report, “Burden of disease from environmental noise,” analyzes the relationship between environmental noise and health. In this study, they calculate the financial cost of lost work days, healthcare treatment, impaired learning and decreased productivity due to noise. The total they came up with is staggering, considering they’re looking at just one continent.
Each year, noise pollution takes a day off the life of every adult and child in Europe. This same study also looked at the cost of noise pollution in terms of lost life expectancy. Shockingly, they determined that every 365 days, one million years are taken off European’s collective life expectancy — averaging to a day per person.
If you can hear someone talking while you’re reading or writing, your productivity dips by up to 66%. Open floor-plan offices distract workers without them even noticing it. In a classic study published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1998, researchers found that employers were highly distracted when they could hear conversation around them, and less able to perform their duties. Another classic study found that noise in the office also correlated to increased stress hormone levels and a lower willingness to engage with others. According to Sound Agency case study, when sound masking technology was used in an office, there was a 46% improvement in employees’ ability to concentrate and their short term memory accuracy increased 10 percent.
The average noise level in many classrooms is not just associated with impaired learning — but with permanent hearing loss. Noise can deeply affect learning too. The WHO recommends a noise level in classrooms akin to that you’d find in a library — 35 decibels. However, a study in Germany found that the actual average noise volume in classrooms is 65 decibels — a level associated with permanent hearing loss.
A 20 decibel increase in aircraft noise is enough to delay a student’s reading level by up to 8 months. A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2006 looked at 2000 students between the ages of 9 and 10 in schools in The Netherlands, Spain and the U.K. — many in schools near airports. They found that aircraft noise was associated with impaired reading comprehension.
50% of teachers have experienced damage to their voice from talking over classroom noise. A study of teachers published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research in 2004, noted another side-effect of noise pollution in classrooms — 50% of teachers have suffered irreversible damage to their voices. Why? Because as the environment gets noisier, we speak more loudly.
The average noise level in some hospital wards not only impedes healing — but could legally require hearing protection. The WHO recommends noise levels in hospital wards to stay around 35 decibels. But a study in the US found the average noise level in hospital wards is actually closer to 95 decibels — just 10 decibels beyond the noise level at which U.S. federal law requires ear protection for prolonged exposure. Sleep is crucial for patient recovery, and yet with the constant beeps, tones and shuffling, the body feels that it is under threat. Not to mention that staff errors increase the greater the level of distracting noise.
3% of cardiac arrest cases in Germany have been explicitly linked to traffic noise. Treasure found this alarming fact in a 2009 press release from the Environmental Protection UK.
Noise pollution may possibly even contribute to crime. When the city of Lancaster, California, installed a sound system featuring birdsong along a half-mile stretch of a main road, there was a 15 percent reduction in reported crime, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Similarly, when the London Underground started playing classical music at a crime-heavy station, robberies fell by 33% while assaults on staff dropped 25%, says The Independent.
So you can see that there is a case to be made for you being mindful of what you hear, how you hear it and the volume of that hearing.
Do you know your colour noises and how they help?
What Is White Noise?
True white noise is a mixture of all the frequencies humans can hear, from about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, all going at equal strength at the same time. The result is a sound like the static from an old television or radio when nothing is broadcasting. Because it covers all frequencies, white noise tends to make any other sounds in its path disappear. If your goal is simply to drown out an annoying sound, white noise will do the trick.
What Is Pink Noise?
Colors besides white noise are like white noise but with more energy at one end of the sound spectrum or the other. If you use a “white noise” machine, you’re probably really listening to pink noise, as this type of noise serves the same purpose of drowning out all other sounds, but is less harsh than white noise. It sounds more like a heavy rainstorm, or that static with an extra bass-like rumble. At least one study has found pink noise to be effective in helping people achieve deeper sleep.
What Is Brown Noise?
Brown noise is similar to pink noise, and technically not a noise “colour” at all. Brown noise is short for Brownian noise, because its signal resembles the pattern of random movement of particles in a liquid known as Brownian motion. It’s a deeper sound — more reminiscent of ocean waves. Many people find Brown noise useful in helping them focus.
What Is Blue Noise?
Blue noise is essentially the opposite of Brown noise — its energy is concentrated at the high end of the spectrum, meaning it’s all treble and no bass. An example might be a hissing water spray. You’d most commonly use blue noise to minimize distortions during sound engineering.
What Is Grey Noise?
Grey noise is like pink noise, but sounds a little different to every listener. Ear doctors use it to treat conditions like tinnitus and hyperacusis.
What is green Noise?
Green noise lies in the center of the frequency spectrum and has a limited frequency range that centers around 500 Hz . Ironically enough, green noise supposedly represents ambiance that stems from nature.
What is orange Noise?
Orange noise is kind of strange in that many people describe it as the sound of an out-of-tune ensemble. To most ears, this noise is clashing and cacophonous.
What Is Black Noise?
Just like the colour black is the absence of light, black noise is the absence of sound, with zero power at all frequencies. Black noise is known for being the colour of silence.
While the pink noise spectrum is the most popular in the health realm, scientists around the world use various frequencies to help with insomnia, anxiety, and memory loss.
People will often administer the pink noise pattern at night to evoke deeper sleep, which can, in turn, put our brains into a state of restoration that optimises our focus and concentration during our waking hours.
Deep sleep is crucial for creating and consolidating memories. It is proposed that our lack of restorative sleep as we age is a major contributor to memory loss.
Overall, the use of noise for health, whether it is to enhance focus, sleep, mood, or motivation, is a promising field that seems to be gaining popularity more and more each day.
You can find all of these noises easily on both streaming music applications as well as on various video sites!
Another sound to consider is that of the voices around you.
How do they talk to you?
Are they critical, are they nurturing, are they supportive, are they harsh?
Do you enjoy the sound if not the words, do you hear what the words are saying?
What kind of language is used, how does that make you feel?
Do you need to have inspiring sounds as you have too many detracting sounds?
Make a choice on what you want to hear and how that then makes you feel.
There are lots of ideas here to enhance your sound wellbeing - which will you choose?
And of course silence is golden… we need more of it, not less.
“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a grey vegetation.”