Other Voices, Other Rooms

The Joneses wake up every morning at 7 to the sound of a helicopter pilot telling his friends in Radioland about the newborn traffic snarls on the turnpikes leading into town. The Joneses would much prefer waking up at 8, but they cannot turn off the radio: it is in the Smiths' apartment next door. Down the hall in 17-F live the Browns, who loathe Handel. Yet their living room is knee-deep in Water Music every night --high-decibel seepage from the Greens' stereo set in 17-G.

Why does the electronic voice penetrate plaster when human voices don't? Sound engineers offer several reasons. The ordinary give-and-take of human conversation varies greatly in its volume level, but the announcer touting jet travel and the interview lady spouting praise at an author are merciless in their demand for attention. They sound as loud as someone addressing a meeting, which, after all, is what they are doing. Furthermore, for obscure sociological reasons, the cheaper the radio, the louder it is played. And a radio's ability to make the tables and walls it touches vibrate along with the speaker cone often turns a small room into one enormous speaker enclosure.

Low Boom. When music is the offender, the boom-lay, boom-lay boom of the low frequencies is usually all the captive audience next door can hear, because it rumbles much more readily through apartment walls. Says Acoustical Engineer Michael J. Kodaras: "It's like the big waves at the beach--they're much more likely to knock you down than the smaller ones." Low-frequency sounds are also closer to the natural resonance of most wall paneling, hence make walls vibrate more than high frequencies.

The problem of noise annoyance has taken on monstrous proportions during the new wave of apartment building. It is all a question of mass, says Architect N. Dan Larsen of Manhattan's Frederick G. Frost Jr. & Associates: "World War II is a convenient dividing line. During the war, new, lighter materials were developed. The masonry wall eight to ten inches thick gave way to a plastered metal lath partition two or three inches thick." The whole thing resonates like a drumhead.

Trouble Next Door. Some amelioration can be obtained by putting a pad of sound-deadening material under the radio or hi-fi set. "We recommend a waffle padding with a foam rubber back about two inches thick," says Austin Granat, technical consultant for Fisher Radio Corp. But few set owners bother to do anything about it unless the neighbors complain.

Ultimately, the only solution is a good, thick wall. But despite the universality of complaints, no U.S. state has written any specifications on noise control into its building codes--though Canada and at least five European countries have. Now New York City, where the worst offenses take place, has commissioned the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to prepare a new building code, which should give some relief. Says New York City Buildings Commissioner Harold Birns: "The authors of the present code had no concept of the cacophony produced without limit by a disharmonic symphony of radio, television and hi-fi sets, which now thoroughly inundates our apartment houses."

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