Honolulu Weekly

Let’s take a test.

You are living in a nice apartment high up in Honolulu. Which would bother you more?

Scenario One: Your neighbor smokes weed on his lanai at dusk. He’s a nice enough fellow–you think he might be gay. On windy evenings his secondhand smoke wafts into your apartment where you live with your 2-year-old son and your diseased grandmother.

Scenario Two: You live by Robert Frost’s quasi-motto, which asserts that good fences make good neighbors. You get along fine with the folks next door (for this situation you’re not in an apartment anymore), but someone keeps throwing graffiti onto that wooden fence of yours. It happens every weekend, yet no one does anything about it.

Scenario Three: You’re back in the nice apartment with the bad neighbor. This time he doesn’t smoke, but he disturbs you by a) playing My Bloody Valentine records at ear-smashing volume on Sunday mornings, or b) watching Laguna Beach on DVD late into each weeknight at volumes just loud enough to disturb your sleep.

Which would bother you more? Which is the greater intrusion into public space: smoke, graffiti or unwanted sound? Discuss.

For me it’s a tough call, but right now I think I’d have to complain loudest about noise. (Is that ironic?) I’ve recently come into possession of a decibel meter. It belongs to the state of Hawai’i. Who knew the Department of Health has a Noise, Radiation and Indoor Air Quality Branch, and who knew they’d lend out meters to Honolulu Weekly freelancers? I head out into the city with my gadget to see what kind of decibel levels I can conjure up. First stop: My own apartment.

I live amidst a constant roar. Even when I am in relaxation mode, I hear the blurry vibrations of the fan’s whir. I listen to Ani Difranco at low volume, and my three parrots squawk–call and response, call and response–whenever they want to proclaim their dispositions. I hear the sounds of voices and cars from my busy Makiki neighborhood. Even as I chill out on my couch, the decibel levels in my apartment never really drop below 60. I walk outside and the man with the weed-whacker does his job across the street. The decibel meter registers 65 and rises to 70 as I walk closer. I amble down Pi’ikoi Street to Ward Centre, and traffic along the way creates enough noise to hold the decibel levels at 75, sometimes, when a moped buzzes by, leaping all the way up to 90. At the water’s edge at Ala Moana Beach Park, the small waves roll in at 75 decibels. In Borders I find a stool in the poetry section and register the decibel level at 45.

Noise results from variations of pressure in air or water. The number of pressure variations per second is called the ‘frequency’ of sound, and through some formula that I only barely understand, the speed and frequency can be factored together to produce calculations of ‘wavelength.’ At this point we get into logarithms and ratios that eventually lead us to ‘decibel units.’ To understand the effects of noise, we could also talk about the mechanics of the human ear and how, at high decibel levels, the wavelengths of sound cause physical–at times irreparable–damage to the inner ear.

A decibel is not an absolute unit of measurement. A decibel expresses the power of a wavelength of sound by comparing it to some other known level. If my explanation is confusing, it’s because I don’t really comprehend all of this myself. What I do know is that decibel levels mean very little unless you give yourself a frame of reference, so think of these as benchmarks (source: Hawai’i Department of Health):

Silence–0 decibel units (dB)

A whisper–30 dB
Normal conversation–60 dB
Vacuum cleaner–70 dB
A subway train–100 dB
A clap of thunder–120 dB
A blast from a shotgun–130 dB
A jet–150 dB

Steady exposure to decibel levels of 85 or higher can result in damage to the inner ear. A single exposure to a sound measured at 130 dB or higher can result in some permanent hearing loss.

I admit to a long-term infatuation with cacophony. Ever since Sony invented the Walkman back when I was a senior in high school, I have listened to music at volumes that prompted my mother to say, ‘You’re going to lose your hearing when you get older.’ As usual, my mother was right. As usual, I didn’t really care. Loud noises can be pleasant, after all. (As a side note, iPods can go above 100 dB.)

I recently heard Daniel Carvahlo, teenaged slack key master, play a beautiful song on amplified guitar. The music registered in the 90dB range and peaked at the shotgun level of 130 dB. I didn’t mind. It made me feel good to hear those loud, elegant tones. I also like to collect the random sounds spoken on streets between people I do not know. Six months ago I walked down Wilder Avenue. at 11pm on a Saturday night on my way home from a friend’s house. As I passed a bus stop, one woman said to another, ‘Sometimes you’re too honest. What good could ever come from telling me that right now?’ For the rest of my life I’ll wonder what they were talking about. I enjoy sound when I choose to listen. Perhaps the difference between the word ’sound’ and the word ‘noise,’ is that a sound is something we expose ourselves to by choice. Noise is sound gone feral.

I am watching Snakes on a Plane at Ward Theaters. I point my decibel meter at the pilot as he screams, ‘We’ve lost avionics!’ Throughout the movie, the decibel level hovers around 100, occasionally peaking at 130. To see a movie at Ward is akin to sitting in a subway tunnel as trains run constantly by; occasionally, a shotgun would blast.

Because of a sneaking suspicion that Ward plays its movies louder than other theaters, I bring the meter to Dole Cannery. An Inconvenient Truth plays at the relatively quiet level of 70 dBs.

Perhaps it’s not fair to compare a documentary featuring Al Gore to a movie with Sam Jackson about snakes on a plane. I watch the snake movie a second time. Now the levels average around 90 dBs and peak at 120. Ward plays this movie 10 dBs louder than Dole Cannery.

If it weren’t for my quest for data, I probably wouldn’t watch Snakes on a Plane two days in a row. When it comes to killer snake movies, I’m of the opinion that once you’ve had Anaconda with Jon Voight and Jennifer Lopez, you can never really go back. And speaking of going back: Is it possible to return to a time when Honolulu was a quieter city? Is noise pollution yet another unavoidable by-product of the urban transformation of Hawai’i?

Such are the questions raised by Cliff Montgomery, president of an advocacy group called Citizens Against Noise (CAN). The first Hawai’i CAN chapter formed in 1970 as population and development began to increase on O’ahu. At one time the organization, founded by former state representative Joan Hayes, listed on its roster more than 1,000 dues-paying residents. CAN dissolved in the late 1980s, but Montgomery is actively trying to reestablish its influence. ‘I think the problem is steadily getting worse,’ he says when I ask him about noise pollution on O’ahu. ‘We’re just cranking up again.’

Right now CAN is focusing on enforcement of existing noise laws. ‘It’s clear there are laws and state statutes that need to be enforced,’ Montgomery asserts. ‘For instance, there is both a state statute and a city ordinance against modifying a vehicle’s exhaust system so that it makes more noise. This seems clear cut, yet dozens of cars and motorcycles drive around daily with obviously modified illegal mufflers. We expect the law to be enforced and we expect convictions.’

This issue of noise pollution seems connected to issues like graffiti and secondhand smoke in that each involves conflict between individual expression and communal obligation. ‘If some guy wants to ride around with loud mufflers,’ Montgomery explains, ‘that’s a form of individual expression that’s just not acceptable.’

I point my meter through the plywood wall at a construction sight in Kaka’ako. The noise registers 90 dBs until a passing ambulance boosts up the levels past 120. Noise may be an inevitable consequence of growth, but I also wonder if a more avoidable kind of noise increases as lines blur between that which is private and that which is public. I’d imagine it’s obvious to most Americans living in the 21st century that definitions of ‘private’ and ‘public’ are collapsing into one another.

On one hand, privacy, which I’m defining as the right of individuals to designate parts of their lives as personal and restricted, is assaulted by contemporary politics, culture and technology. The government claims authority to investigate who we are calling or which books we check out from the library; our individual histories float around unfettered on the Internet; television cameras broadcast as entertainment the lives of people engaged in what we used to call ‘private life.’ Privacy has become a quaint luxury of a passing age.

On the other hand, anyone who has stood in line at the grocery behind someone involved in personal discussion on a cell phone knows that we are losing a sense of what it means to share public space. Web cams, YouTube and MySpace push open the closed (if virtual) doors, which delineate the difference between the inside and outside worlds. Now there is no such thing as an outside world. Or if there is one, someone is engaged in something private there. Knock down the walls separating the individual from the communal and one thing that remains is someone else’s noise.

Perhaps we need to apply the analogy of sustainability to noise pollution. What would be the definition of a sustainable level of societal noise? Could we imagine a Honolulu where people only made sounds that they–and they only–could hear?

Sounds about town

70 dB– Foodland (Beretania St)
70 dB– Volcano Joe’s Cafe at 10am
100 dB– Atherton YMCA during dance and drum class, from the street at 10:30am
55 dB–University of Hawai’i-Manoa Campus Center, morning
85 dB– Market City Fun Factory, morning
90 dB– Waikiki, Aloha Festival Parade, P.A. announcer along Kalakaua Ave
95 dB– Kalani High School Marching Band, along Kalakaua in Waikiki during parade
80 dB– Honolulu Zoo, Sun Conure exhibit
80 dB– Leaf blower, Honolulu Zoo
75 dB– Roberts Hawaii School Bus, parked on Kalakaua Ave, filled with ‘Iolani Marching Band kids, measured from the street
65 dB– Tennis ball hitting racquet, Kapi’olani Park courts
80 dB– Interior, Mi Casa Mexican Restaurant at noon
90 dB– Barnes and Noble men’s room urinal, flushing
95 dB– Kahala Tower Records listening station, maximum volume, Fat Boy Slim’s Greatest Hits
80 dB– Side Street Inn, 11pm
65 dB– In car at Chinatown, windows down, radio off
85 dB– In a car at Chinatown, windows down, radio on
70 dB– Dillingham Popeye’s Fried Chicken, noon
80 dB– Kalihi Pet Center, Sunday, 1pm
65 dB– Sans Souci, Kaimana Beach, morning
80 dB– Sans Souci, Kaimana Beach, morning, as two
helicopters fly by above
100 dB– Ward Stadium 16 Theater, average level during
Snakes on a Plane
90 dB– Dole Cannery Theater, average level during
Snakes on a Plane

The readings for the chart were taken on Sat-Sun, Sept. 16-17, by the writer of this piece.