Somebody called it ‘a stench in the ears’. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that the amount of noise anyone can tolerate is in inverse proportion to that person’s mental capacity and may, therefore, be taken as its measure.

It may also be taken as a measure of our democracy that more communities are treating noise as a public problem. The Edmonton AB (formerly Alta.) city council is a case in point. In June it adopted a bylaw that will allow police personnel armed with sound meters to issue $250 fines to people who operate motor cycles that generate sound louder than 96 decibels in use or 92 while idling.

A standard decibel (unit of loudness) measurement chart puts the average motorbike that passes your house at 100-110 dB (the usual abbreviation). A power mower generates 107. Hearing loss can result from sustained exposure to 90-95 dB. The word was invented by a combination of the Latin word for ‘ten’ (‘decem’) and the surname of Alexander Graham Bell, pioneer in hearing devices.

A study published last month by the American Medical Association says that hearing loss among teenagers 12 to 19 years old is increasing. The damage is done gradually and so its progress is not easily identified. It has long been noted that older folk who are hearing- deprived are less happy even than those who experience sight loss.

A survey conducted by the Hearing Foundation of Canada found that 30% of the sample group listened regularly to music above the 90 dB level. If while you are listening you cannot hear what someone beside you is saying, the music is too loud and is potentially damaging, said one expert.

The wearing of earbuds by most iPod and iPhone users is a particular problem. Going farther into the ear canal, they increase the sound density by 4 to 5 decibels. It is odd that music which a poet said “hath charms to sooth a savage breast” may now be savaging the hearing ability of a whole generation.

The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy puts it this way concerning noise-induced hearing loss: “Any source of intense noise such as heavy machinery may damage the inner ear. Individuals vary in susceptibility but nearly everyone will lose some hearing if exposed to intense noise for a sufficient time. 90 decibels is damaging”.

If damage to the ears does not concern you, as it seems not to do in the case of those who play in rock bands and among their fans, anti-noise activists also warn that prolonged exposure can be the cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stomach ulcers and sexual impotence. Tell that to the kids. As the “starry, starry night” song says, “perhaps they’ll listen now” .

Normal breathing registers 10 dB and a breeze moving in the treetops scores 20. Machine gun fire at close range counts 130. A decibel is defined as the smallest difference in volume that can be detected by a normally functioning human ear. And, while on the subject of definitions, a “noise” is usually agreed to be “unwanted sound”. That can include both the clacking or hum of windmills and the take-off or landing sound of aeroplanes over residential areas.

The branch of medicine called otology and its practitioners, otologists, are concerned with the ear and its disorders. One who measures hearing is an audiologist.

Sigmund Freud thought excessive noise irritation to be a symptom of anxiety neurosis, explicable by the inborn connexion between sound and fright. What would he have said to Marcel Proust who had his study lined with cork or to the poet Juvenal who complained often about the all-night cacophony in the streets of Imperial Rome?

Inadequate insulation and open windows are problems when one has a neighbour who roars off on a sputtering motorcycle at 110 dB. An insomniac hoping to make up at that hour for earlier sleeplessness should not have to tolerate such an invasion of privacy at 5 a.m. or the embarrassment of complaining.

Noisy bikers are not the only culprits. There should be some way without neighbourly confrontations of dealing with the positioning of air conditioners that are left running all night within sound range of next door bedroom windows. That should be subject to a bylaw and inspection when it is deemed necessary. An infestation of giant buzzing insects would elicit municipal action. Why not, then, the loud reverberation of air conditioners?

The Edmonton bylaw provides for a report to the police commission due this week (13 September) of a ‘mechanism’ to control excessive noise and steps to provide the means to enforce it. “A person shall not cause or permit property they own or occupy to be used so that any sound coming from the property exceeds 65dB”.

The Ontario government has hired Aerocoustics Engineering Ltd. of Toronto, an acoustical consulting firm, to devise a way of measuring the noise and vibrations caused by wind turbines. Their numbers are increasing and their installation is profitable for some people. Roadside signs up in Clearview Township north of Creemore say, “Turbines don’t make good neighbours”. The municipalities of Dufferin County might well investigate their own noise problems and take action, especially against the ‘recreational’ use of sound pollution

There are, admittedly, two sides to any argument. Respondents to the Edmonton council’s decision have pointed out that bikers’ gatherings bring business to the areas in which they gather and raise money for various charitable causes. Some foresee the fights that enforcement efforts will occasion between law enforcement officers and aggressive knights of the road.

Different kinds of noise will always pose problems for different people. King Edward VII was not an opera lover. He dozed through Sir Thomas Beecham’s direction of the first two acts of “The Wreckers” at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London. Its storyline is about scavengers in Cornwall who salvage goods from shipwrecks. Startled during Act 3, the king complained to Fritz Ponsonby, his equerry, “Confound it, that’s the fourth time that infernal music has wakened me”.

As they say, it takes all kinds.