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Vox presents an article about restaurant noise levels and why they've risen over the years.
When the Line Hotel opened in Washington, DC, last December, the cocktail bars, gourmet coffee shops, and restaurants that fill its cavernous lobby drew a lot of buzz. Housed in a century-old church, the space was also reputedly beautiful.
My first visit in February confirmed that the Line was indeed as sleek as my friends and restaurant critics had suggested. There was just one problem: I wanted to leave almost as soon as I walked in. My ears were invaded by a deafening din.
[...] In reckoning with this underappreciated health threat, I’ve been wondering how we got here and why any well-meaning restaurateur would inflict this pain on his or her patrons and staff. I learned that there are a number of reasons — and they mostly have to do with restaurant design trends. In exposing them, I hope restaurateurs will take note: You may be deafening your staff and patrons.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kazzie on Friday April 20 2018, @07:58AM (7 children)
This morning on the way in to work I heard a report on BBC Radio 4. It started on the news that the British Museum's (disused) reading room is to host a performance [thetimes.co.uk] of Ligeti’s Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes. The report then drifted into discussing just how quiet libraries are today,and whether the BL's reading room was actually quiet back when it was in regular use: one interviewee described the sound "of 400 academics breathing and murmuring".
A further interviewee was a person who has recorded the ambient noise of numerous museums and galleries worldwide. His recording from the Sistine Chapel has the sound of security guards shouting(!) at tourists to be quiet, but he described his favourite recording ad being from the Museum of Broken Relationships (iirc) in Europe, where, due to the weather on the day, there's a steady noise of rain falling on the roof: almost in sympathy with the broken relationships therein. He was quite adamant that a quiet museum is the worst sort.
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Friday April 20 2018, @08:43AM
Which made me imagine a scene where a hard-of-hearing couple decides to visit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Friday April 20 2018, @09:00AM (4 children)
One of my favorite movie scenes is from Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire", [imdb.com] where black and white angels (as any astro-photographer knows, angels see in black and white, since they know what the wavelength of the light they are seeing is, but they just don't see it as color, since color is one of Locke's subjective properties, and is not actually real) walk through a library in Berlin. Being angels, and not Saxons, however, they can hear what everyone in the library is thinking, as they read and study and cogitate. One of the noisiest places you could imagine, if you could hear it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 20 2018, @01:58PM
That's an excellent movie. The poetry is rare in film. I can still hear the children's song [youtube.com], "Warum bin ich ich, and warum nicht Du? Warum bin ich hier, und warum nicht dort?" ("Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there?")
But as somebody else in the thread pointed out, the sort of noise matters. There's a big difference between brash cacophony and the burbling of the water mills [vimeo.com] in the final scene of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:15AM (2 children)
You watch some weird movies Aristarchus!
Thanks for the pointer, I just watched the movie and was blown away.
Cheers
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:13AM (1 child)
Have you heard of Aristophanes? His comedy "The Frogs" is really quite pertinent these days. But, Greek drama is best viewed live, preferably in an amphitheatre.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Sunday May 13 2018, @01:16PM
Never had a chance to see a live Greek drama but I have read some of them (including The Frogs) and indeed war and deceit have been with us since the first hominid threw a stone or spear at another.
We have made great advances in science and technology but our minds are the same as those of the ancient.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday April 20 2018, @01:45PM
Or any recording of a performance of John Cage's 4'33". [wikipedia.org] Pretty much the same general effect, and that was the entire point - to emphasise that there really isn't any such thing as total silence; even in a sensory deprivation tank (which provided Cage's inspiration) a person with reasonably functional hearing can still hear the flow of blood in the vessels around their ears and a higher pitched whine of brain activity.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!