What Is Noise?

Inspired by: “What is Noise,” The New Yorker, April 22 & 29, 2024, in conversation with Ed Yong’s An Immense World

Noise is a slippery concept. One person’s treasured symphony can be another’s unbearable racket. A child’s laughter delights parents but might fray the nerves of a neighbor trying to nap. Across biology, culture, and politics, noise exists as both a physical phenomenon and a judgment—a signal that has slipped out of tune with our needs. In their wide-ranging article, What is Noise, and in Ed Yong’s sweeping book An Immense World, we are asked to think beyond human ears. What happens when we take noise seriously, not just as nuisance, but as a force shaping lives, ecosystems, and societies?

Biological Richness of Sound and Noise

In An Immense World, Yong reminds us that every species lives in its own sensory bubble, or Umwelt. What counts as noise depends on whose bubble you inhabit. Frogs croak to attract mates, yet in urban ponds their calls are drowned out by the hum of nearby traffic. Whales, whose low-frequency calls once carried across entire oceans, now compete with the relentless thrum of shipping traffic. A blue whale’s call, meant to reach a mate hundreds of miles away, is now muffled into local chatter.

Insects tell similar stories. Some katydids and crickets evolved to synchronize their chirps into rhythmic choruses. This only works if each insect can hear its neighbors. Human machinery—generators, air conditioners, and street sweepers—fractures those rhythms, scattering the music of the night. Even bees, which use wing vibrations to communicate the location of food, struggle when agricultural machinery or urban construction drowns out those delicate signals.

Elephants, communicating with deep infrasound below our hearing, face disruption as well. Seismic surveys for oil exploration create vibrations in the ground that swamp the elephants’ messages, splitting family groups and disorienting migration. Coral reef fish, which use sound to locate healthy reefs, are thrown off course by the roar of boat engines overhead. Bats, which rely on echolocation to find prey in dark forests, find their sonic maps scrambled by the reverberations of nearby highways. Noise here is not abstract—it’s a collision of signals. One species’ infrastructure is another’s silencing.

Cultural and Political Dimensions of Noise

Humans, too, have never agreed on what counts as noise. Soundscapes are political arenas.

• Silence as protest: During demonstrations in authoritarian states, silence itself can be weaponized—marchers filing past in mute defiance.

• Noise as censorship: Governments and corporations sometimes deploy literal noise to drown out dissent, such as blasting music over protest chants.

• Regulation and class: Noise ordinances reveal who gets to define peace. Airports push flight paths over low-income neighborhoods, externalizing jet roar.

The cultural history of noise is also full of irony. Jazz was once derided as cacophony; today, it plays softly in hotel lobbies. Punk rock, once threatening noise, is now curated nostalgia. What counts as offensive sound evolves with time, taste, and power.

In cities, competing claims over noise can become proxy battles for inclusion and exclusion. The busker’s guitar is music to one passerby, noise to another. Church bells once defined daily rhythms in towns across Europe; now, residents petition for their silence. In workplaces, the clatter of keyboards may feel productive to some but unbearable to others seeking concentration. To study noise is to study whose voices are welcomed and whose are dismissed as disruptive.

Unexpected Consequences of Mismanaging Noise

We often treat noise as an irritant rather than a signal. But history shows that mismanaging sound can have devastating consequences. The Challenger disaster in 1986 offers one example. Engineers had been warning for months that O-ring seals could fail in cold weather. Those warnings were voiced but discounted—perceived as “background noise” against the drumbeat of schedule pressure. When the shuttle launched on a frigid morning, the noise became catastrophe.

Similarly, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a flood of contradictory messaging—masks are unnecessary, masks are vital—produced informational noise that paralyzed public trust. The signal was there, but buried under the static of mixed messages.

Nature, too, provides chilling cases. Songbirds in Europe have shifted to higher pitches to be heard above traffic. But higher pitches are less attractive to mates, leading to declining reproductive success. Coral reef fish use sound to locate healthy reefs; when motorboats pass overhead, the fish scatter, missing their cues. Snow leopards in Central Asia, already elusive, find their hunting grounds disrupted by mining blasts that echo through valleys.

Even technology is not immune. In aviation, cockpit alarms sometimes compete with each other, overwhelming pilots during emergencies. What was designed as a safety net becomes a source of confusion—noise that undermines survival. Noise, in short, can kill—not only patience, but trust, reproduction, navigation, and systems themselves.

Noise, Signal, and Systems Thinking

At its root, noise is a systems concept: signal plus interference. Engineers, biologists, and sociologists all rely on the distinction. But the line between signal and noise is contextual. To an airport, a jet is signal—commerce, connectivity, lifeblood. To the community below, the same jet is noise—sleep lost, health impaired. Systems thinking forces us to see both simultaneously.

Noise is diagnostic: it tells us where systems are rubbing raw against one another. Yong’s An Immense World expands this idea beyond human-centered design. Every organism filters the world, amplifying some signals and suppressing others. For us, the cacophony of a rainforest may feel overwhelming. For a bat, it is perfectly parseable—each squeak returning with meaning. For a moth, the same sound is a death sentence. If we understand noise as relational rather than absolute, we can redesign our choices. Quiet pavements, whale-safe shipping lanes, and dark-sky initiatives all become ways of tuning the world so that multiple signals can coexist.

Sidebar: The Silent Spring of Soundscapes

When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, she warned that pesticides might render spring mornings mute, erasing birdsong. Today, many ecologists warn of a similar crisis with soundscapes. Acoustic ecologists record shrinking diversity in natural soundscapes: fewer bird calls, more engines. The sonic health of ecosystems may be as important an indicator as species counts. Listening—literally—could become central to conservation.

Classroom Prompts

• Think about your daily life: what sounds feel like signal to you, and what feels like noise? Do you think others nearby would agree?

• Research one animal species affected by human noise. What adaptations (if any) has it developed in response?

• Debate in class: should cities have stronger noise ordinances? Who benefits, and who loses, when sound is regulated?

• Imagine designing a “quiet technology.” What would it be, and who would it serve?

Sidebar: When Sound Saves

- Fire alarms for the hard of hearing: These often use vibrations or flashing lights.

- Soundscapes in dementia care: Certain songs trigger memory and calm agitation.

- Acoustic lures in conservation: Some conservationists use recorded calls to lure birds or frogs back to restored habitats.

- Noise as protection: In WWII, white noise was used to mask the sound of troop movements.

- Medical diagnostics: The sounds of breathing, heartbeats, and even gut gurgles can indicate health or illness—interpreted through stethoscopes or more advanced tools.

Sources

• “What is Noise,” The New Yorker, April 22 & 29, 2024.

• Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (2022).

© 2025 Michael A. Pink