Background Briefing

Most people rate noise as a bigger problem than rats, drugs, or dog poo. It's highest on the list of citizen complaints, but it's listed low by councils and politicians. But noise can have cultural value too. Hagar Cohen reports.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Hagar Cohen: New York and New South Wales share at least one thing: more than anything else, residents hate noise. New York research has shown that noise is, on the list of things people hate, higher than drugs, or rats.

In New South Wales noise is ahead of both the misbehaviour of youth, and dog poo.

Even in Europe it is now compulsory for every large city to have its own noise map. The purpose is to have somewhere that tells you what parts of the cities are the noisiest, and where people can find peace and quiet.

In Australia, the authorities are starting to respond to public pressure about noise, but it's slow, and it's a fragmented picture. An example is the long debate between pubs and clubs which host high volume live music gigs, and those residents living nearby who demand a stop to the noise.

But bands like INXS, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel all got their start playing live to small crowds in local pubs. Some people say that Australia will lose an important part of its local culture if live music venues are made to close down. Once a pub rocker, and now an academic, Shane Homan has been part of a group that lobbied the New South Wales government.

Shane Homan: Most definitions of noise that you find in regulation state the noise is simply unwanted sound. And I think this has always been the problem for the live music industry, that music is often seen just as simply a by-product of music-making, and not actually intrinsic to musicians themselves. So of course though, if you're a resident two doors down in your terrace house and the bass is throbbing through into your loungeroom and bedroom, you're not likely to actually worry about those semantics, about definitions. To them it's simply noise, and it's unwanted noise. But for musicians it is sound, not noise.

Hagar Cohen: Whether it's called music or noise, resident complaints have closed down a lot of loud music performances at local pubs.

Lobbyists like Shane Homan have argued that if the pubs were there first, then the residents shouldn't have the right to have them closed. It's called the 'order of occupancy' debate.

Shane Homan: Several famous noise cases in previous decades have evolved around the fact that a resident, he or she, had just moved to the suburb and was complaining about the music emanating from a premises, which in some cases had been playing live music for 20 years. So they'd throw up issues about who has the right there to continue their business; if it'd been long-standing music business for 20 years, does that resident then have the right to purchase a premises fairly recently and complain about the amenity of the area? So that change has actually gone through in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. That is, who was there first, the venue or the complainant?

Hagar Cohen: In those states, whenever a noise conflict blows up the new legislation says that the Director of Liquor can make a decision based on who came to the area first.

Brisbane's Fortitude Valley is a good example. The area is now defined as a popular music cluster. Residents who move into the district have to accept that the noise there is an integral part of the environment. Shane Homan.

Shane Homan: In Fortitude Valley you have the establishment of a music precinct that covers several significant venues and states that that particular section of Brisbane, one of its most significant business concerns is entertainment, and principally live music. So that to me seems a very hopeful and very commonsensical way of dealing with those kinds of issues.

Hagar Cohen: But as inner city suburbs become gentrified and valuable real estate, the pressure from residents for 24 hour tranquillity can mount.

Shane Homan: With gentrification comes certain expectations from certain classes, I think, about how they can control council or change suburban conditions to suit themselves. I'm not advocating here to defend outrageous behaviour by particular venues. What we're simply about over a 10 year period was kind of campaigning for a correction of the balance of power.

Hagar Cohen: This debate is a part of a bigger conflict. Some look for peace and quiet everywhere they go; others say that some noises should be protected because they have cultural significance and are part of the city's heritage.

Luna Park was built in Sydney in 1935. By the early '90s nearby residents and developers began to complain about the noise.

In 1996 architect Harry Seidler successfully argued that the Big Dipper was unreasonably noisy and should close down. Soon after the Big Dipper was closed, the whole park shut down, partly as a result of lost earnings. More residents began moving into the area.

But eight years later after Luna Park's financial problems were overcome, it re-opened. New residents again complained, arguing the noise was just too much.

Newsreader: Residents of Milson's Point in North Sydney are trying to shut down five rides which they say are noisy. This time they're taking their complaints to the Supreme Court.

Hagar Cohen: In 2005 the New South Wales government intervened with legislation. At the time, Arthur Chesterfield-Evans was a Democrat member of parliament. He voted to keep the rides running.

Arthur Chesterfield-Evans: I was worried that if there was another successful noise compliant, that would then set a precedent. The noise complaint succeeded, and the next noise complaint; and the next noise complaint would rack the noise down to the point that Luna Park would close. So in a sense I was voting, as I thought, to keep Luna Park open; provided they stayed with the noise definition that they had had when they had been given the site. So from my point of view it was an emotional thing to try and keep Luna Park open, because I thought if it got mired in noise litigation it would probably close and we'd lose Luna Park.

Hagar Cohen: Arthur Chesterfield-Evans lost his seat in the 2007 election, but he is now helping out groups that want to lobby against noise in neighbourhoods. One of the most common complaints is against barking dogs, but one greets us as we arrive at the Chesterfield-Evans home.

Arthur Chesterfield-Evans: I'm a dog owner, and interestingly enough my dog sees thousands of people going to the ferry pass the door each day and doesn't bark at them, but when the drunks come out of the pub rolling down the hill in the middle of night, she barks at them.

Hagar Cohen: In the early days, Arthur Chesterfield-Evans was heavily involved with the anti-tobacco campaigners, when that movement was made up of small, disparate groups and individuals. There's much of the same feeling about those who want action on noise as there was back then on those who wanted action on tobacco smoke.

Arthur Chesterfield-Evans: First we were seen as crazies and killjoys, and I think that was a perception that came from the industry because they were very savvy at marketing. You don't want to go to a pub because you're too boring, you don't want to drink, you don't want to have girlfriends, you don't want anything, you know, you are a classic killjoy. And that was the line they took.

Hagar Cohen: The way not to be seen as crazy or a spoil-sport or a whinger is to have a strong evidence-based argument, says Arthur Chesterfield-Evans.

Arthur Chesterfield-Evans: Your object in the long term is to redefine what's too noisy. You've got to start thinking in terms of the noise dose of the population. You've got to start looking at how many people are getting deaf, how early, and what's causing that. And then go systematically through what policies will lessen that.

I think you've always got to start with a realistic understanding of what the problems are, in other words, you make a good scientific case. Because until you've got a good scientific case, you're really probably wasting your time.

Hagar Cohen: The national association for noise activists is called Noise Watch Australia. It's not a very big group, but it is growing. Their president is Gary Goland, and he says there are some noises most people just can't stand.

Gary Goland: I can mention the word 'leaf-blowers' and just about everybody resents the intrusion that leaf-blowers provide.

Hagar Cohen: But do you feel anyone's actually going to take up this cause and do something about it?

Gary Goland: The community is prepared to assist with letters to authorities and to politicians. The community is prepared, particularly when they're affected themselves, to take it a step further. Whether we can achieve enough angst if you like, to get the politicians and the administrative staff at local government and state government levels, to take seriously the intrusions in our lives, is really an open question. So far they're not, so far they're really not taking noise seriously.

Hagar Cohen: The villains in the story can be a difficult target, maybe a large developer wanting to put in a big hotel development, or maybe just a neighbour with a dog that barks at anything that moves.

Gary Goland: The villains are more than just a single company. I mean there are companies out there, manufacturing, transport companies, packing sheds, aircraft, there's a range, a much larger range of industries. And even the people in their own backyards with all sorts of equipment, the leaf-blowers again, barking dogs again, so the target is much more diverse, and that really does underline why it really needs to be a cultural shift.

Hagar Cohen: In New York, the City that Never Sleeps, the politicians have been listening, because the people of New York have complained for so long. So the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, knew there were votes in it.

Bloomberg has put noise high on his political agenda. Here's part of his first speech about new noise legislation, back in 2004.

Michael Bloomberg: These proposed noise code revisions would make significant changes in the areas that are among the most challenging, and they include, for example, construction noise, noise produced by large groups of air-conditioning devices, and music emanating from clubs and other commercial establishments. The proposed new code

Hagar Cohen: These new regulations came into effect just last year. It was the first time the Noise Code's been changed in New York in 34 years.

The circumstances that led Michael Bloomberg to act against noise form part of a book being written by American journalist Garret Keiser.

Garrett Keiser: I have in front of me a graph that summarises the findings of a quality of life survey that was done recently in New York, where people were given a number of problems and asked to rate them as either a very big problem, or no problem, on a scale of 1 to 7. Street noise has a higher rating than lack of parking, potholes, drug dealing and rats. In fact it has the highest rating of any criterion on this graph of a 4.5, whereas lack of public transportation doesn't even make it to a 2.

Hagar Cohen: One of the strangest results of the September 11 attacks in New York was that people there noticed something for the first time in years—the sky was silent.

Garrett Keiser: All the airplanes were grounded, and suddenly the sky sounded like it sounded for generations of our ancestors, which is much quieter. I think that probably it's safe to say the world has become noisier if for no other reason than that there are more of us in it, and we have more stuff.

Hagar Cohen: And how quickly has that situation changed?

Garrett Keiser: In a country like the US, for a long time in our history, the solution to noise has been to move. Where we have enough space, we're not a country like Japan or the Netherlands that's a small land mass with a dense population, for a long time we've had this tradition of wide open spaces, and there are places in the US where that's still the case. But those wide open spaces are becoming fewer, harder to find, and more populated, and for that reason I think noise is coming into greater prominence.

Hagar Cohen: The evolution of our sense of hearing, and how we react to it, is a complex science. Needless to say, different sounds can mean different things according to where we are, and what we are used to. Garrett Keiser.

Garrett Keiser: As we become involved more and more in multicultural global civilisation, we are going to encounter people who are different from ourselves, or seemingly different, have some cultural differences. Historically, whenever that's happened, people have tended to notice the noise of people different from themselves. It's interesting that now there are controversies in Europe about the loudspeakers on Islamic minarets, there have been church bells in those cities sounding for centuries but now that's an issue.

Hagar Cohen: In Europe, all big cities must have noise maps showing the level of noise in every area, the average decibels of sound. These digital maps are colour-coded. The world's biggest noise map is for London, and talking to us on the phone is the man who produced it, Roger Tompsett.

Roger Tompsett: Well one of the reasons that the EU wanted to have noise mapping was specifically to raise public awareness. They did feel that sometimes noise was being relegated to low down the environmental pecking order.

Hagar Cohen: To what degree do you think that people in the UK think that noise pollution should be an issue that is a top priority by governments?

Roger Tompsett: There is no doubt that if you ask people about the environment, noise always comes up as one of the first factors that they mention. But the problem for government is that noise is seen as a second-order environmental effect.

Hagar Cohen: Roger Tompsett says noise maps are important because they can be used to prevent noisy developments in quiet areas.

Roger Tompsett: What they are doing is helping us to do some more positive planning to reduce noise levels. And in particular, prevent quiet areas, or tranquil areas, from becoming noisier. We think that that is something which the noise maps can very quickly help us to identify the quiet areas, and we can be aware of them.

Hagar Cohen: Maps like these can also make everyone aware that noise can be a problem, a social problem, and that issues around sounds of all kinds have to be carefully considered.

Roger Tompsett: I would encourage local authorities in Australia particularly, to consider this aspect of protecting areas, quiet areas, and areas of tranquillity. I do think that these are very valuable resource which is easy for us to undervalue them, particularly in urban areas.

Hagar Cohen: We're in Sydney. It's Friday late in the afternoon and the city is bustling with peak hour traffic. Showing us around is Soundscape artist Gabrielle Nicholson.

Gabrielle Nicholson: Well we're in the middle of the city we kind of have the general car noise, which kind of permeates anywhere that's built up. Obviously the sound, the sound of people getting married. How does it sound to you?

Hagar Cohen: Like a fountain... How does it sound to you?

Gabrielle Nicholson: Well just stand here and shut your eyes for a minute, do you think—it could be something else like applause, or white noise, if you take away what we see it could be anything.

Hagar Cohen: So where are we going, Gabrielle?

Gabrielle Nicholson: We're going to the Domain walkway. There's an incredible sound. ... Footway symphony. Because it's a moving footway, that goes from Hyde Park to the Domain, and it's probably long enough to be a symphony.

I live right near a train yard, and so I have 24/7, 365 the sounds of trains idling and testing their horns at 3 o'clock in the morning, and electrical hum, and it's really quite noisy but I just listen to it as vibration, listen to it as part of something bigger, and it becomes OK.

Do you have a train ticket?

I studied music, most of my entire life, but I can't play an instrument, I just listen. I've been trying to just be here in a part of the city, and hear the city as music. It's just waves and waves and waves of vibration that's going through the city. Yes, it's like a really weird picture of a Christmas tree, with decorations. Like you can look at the buses and the cars and stuff as being like the pine branches, like because it's a pine tree obviously, and then the little weird things like the sounds of the pedestrian crossings; it could be like tinsel maybe. The trains could be like the lights, and things like the shops with their little bits of music could be like stars and different snippets of conversations could be like different ornaments from different countries.

Hagar Cohen: Sounds completely nutty.

Gabrielle Nicholson: Really? Interpreting the world through sound and imagination is nutty? No! And I thought television was for nuts... I don't know.

Hagar Cohen: Soundscape artist Gabrielle Nicholson.

Most people would have difficulty hearing the roar, crash and bustle of a big city as a kind of music. In fact recent surveys in Victoria have found that half of the population there finds noise very annoying. It's about the same proportion in the city of Sydney. And in Queensland they also complain. The government there recorded nearly 19,000 complaints about noise in one year.

To measure the level of noise in Sydney, Background Briefing took a tour with Joel Parry Jones, an acoustic engineer, and we made a collage of the journey, starting at a child care centre in a lower North Shore suburb.

Joel Parry Jones: The background is about 45; it's pretty typical during the day. A quiet suburb would be around 35 to 40, this is kind of near a major road, but it is in a back street so 45 is pretty typical. Yes, the café was what I was expecting, around the 65 to 70 mark. So normal conversation speaks around 65db so when you've got a small room with a few people making noises, it's conversation speech, it means that people can talk openly next to each other and not feel like everyone can hear their conversation.

When the performance first started did you notice that loud introduction? It started quite loud, and the sound guy turned it right down so I think maybe they have a limit imposed by Council, I'm not sure, but maybe there is some kind of limit that they're working to, to make sure that it doesn't affect the commercial premises.

That busker was 85db, they were sitting at about the right level for the city and just for noise in general.

Hagar Cohen: So what's the verdict?

Joel Parry Jones: Yes, that one was interesting; it was a medium to heavy machinery. The lowest point was about the same as traffic, about 75 and then it went up to about 85. So obviously clearly audible, obviously louder than anything else around the area.

Hagar Cohen: Some facts about noise: Normal conversation is about 60 decibels.

Traffic can reach 85 decibels, and regulations say that at work no-one should be exposed to 85 decibels any longer than 8 hours, because otherwise it will result with hearing damage.

At 130 decibels, that's something like a shotgun blast, the average person will start to feel pain.

Director of PKA Acoustics Consulting is Peter Knowland. He was an adviser in the acoustic design of the Sydney Opera House.

In the past, noise regulations were the responsibility of the Department of Environment and Climate Change, or DECC. But gradually, that responsibility was handed to each local government. Many authorities think it was a bad move, and so does Peter Knowland.

Peter Knowland: The thing that has to be set first off, noise and noise control is a very specialised discipline, and it requires a fair bit of experience, and it also requires a high level of academic ability.

When you're dealing with the DECC, a common language has been established of background noise levels, exceedence, intrusions, all these things, so we're all communicating in the one language. When you deal with councils, the particular officer may not have that depth of knowledge, and the communication process can sometimes be quite tortured.

Hagar Cohen: For example, semantics come into it. Many councils use the word 'inaudible' to describe some sounds. Technically it usually means 10 decibels below the background noise. But hearing differs, and what some people can hear, others can't, so it's hard to measure exactly what 'inaudible' means. It can be expensive to do, because it's very hard, and may have no benefit to the public.

At the other end of the spectrum, some councils brush noise complaints off as unimportant, says Peter Knowland.

Peter Knowland: Some councils just simply can't afford the expertise that is required. They can't afford the training, and as a result perhaps the constituents of that council have had problems getting their message across.

Hagar Cohen: There are international guidelines about how to manage noise pollution, and they are designed to suit the vast majority of a population. Many councils don't stick to these guides. Others do, but Peter says it's all to do with whether councils are well-resourced.

Peter Knowland: when you use international standards, and Australia is a signatory to ISO, the International Standards Organisation, you are using values that have been determined by world-wide experience, as being reasonable, pragmatic and appropriate design goals. If you arbitrarily come up with standards that are below that, thinking you're doing the right for your constituents, or members of the particular council area, you may be actually stopping development, (perhaps that's what they want to do) or you're imposing enormous cost on people.

Hagar Cohen: Peter Knowland, director of PKA Acoustics Consulting.

The National Acoustic Laboratories are in Sydney. Showing us around the labs is senior research engineer, Warwick Williams.

Warwick Williams: So if we walk into here, you'll notice these things here, you're going into a separate box; it's completely isolated from the rest of the building to make sure there's no vibration comes up through the floor, and it's all isolated, and you'll hear the acoustic conditions change as we walk into the room, so we're going from a very flat response, to a very active response where you get the sound bounces around in the room here.

Hagar Cohen: There are several different rooms with different acoustic properties.

Warwick Williams: The room we're going into now is a free field room, it's called anechoic so there's no acoustic reflections in here at all. It becomes what in sound engineer terms, it's dead. There's no reverberation in here at all.

Hagar Cohen: Warwick Williams suggests we go to the nearby café to talk further.

Warwick Williams: When you initially go along to look at buying a house or an apartment, noise is usually fairly low on your list. It's not something you see. You see the view, you see the amenities, the facilities, you don't see the noise.

Hagar Cohen: You don't see the barking dog in the middle of the night.

Warwick Williams: Yes, exactly, you don't see the garbage truck emptying the recycling bottle bin at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Hagar Cohen: But when we talk about these kinds of things, like the garbage truck and the barking dog, is there a case to argue that they shouldn't be making any noise?

Warwick Williams: Yes, but it's like the old argument of children should be seen and not heard; it has pluses and minuses, so each side has its merit, but to come down squarely on one or the other, say it's black and white, is very difficult.

Hagar Cohen: How hard is it to measure what noise is? When we're talking about the whole of the population?

Warwick Williams: Noise is usually defined as unwanted sound. So there you've got it. I mean who says it's unwanted? And it's usually the person that's hearing it says it's unwanted, so it immediately makes it subjective. You can try to put objective measures on it by looking at its frequency and its loudness and its duration and that sort of annoyance level that way, but it's a subjective—it's very hard to put a finger on it. What annoys some people won't annoy others.

Hagar Cohen: The way we all hear sounds, and music, and how it's been used in military prisons, became an issue when it was discovered that the American military had used certain kinds of music as a means of torture.

Christina Aguilera is great fun at parties, but the way the songs are engineered and their very Western sound can also become excruciating. Professor of Music from New York University is Suzanne Cusick.

Suzanne Cusick: The music is engineered to produce what's sometimes called dynamic compression, or wave compression. So that the softs and louds are erased out, everything turns out to be roughly the same volume. Also the very low frequencies and the very high frequencies are stripped out, so that there's a kind of a blasting effect that actually makes the recordings seem louder than they are, in terms of number of decibels.

Hagar Cohen: It's not only Christina Aguilera's songs. Suzanne Cusick says the harsh settings of prison cells accentuate the impact of any Western music as torture.

Suzanne Cusick: If, for example, you're hearing it while in a stress position that causes another kind of physical pain, and music in combination with some kind of pain, denies you the ability to concentrate, because it eventually completely fills your consciousness. Another sort of situation which simply the loudness and the duration of the music, any music, makes it tortuous, is the situation at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan, where prisoners in 2003, 2004 were prepared for interrogation by being put in plywood boxes that were 3ft x 6ft x 6ft. And then music was blasted into these boxes so they were in effect inside resonating chambers.

Hagar Cohen: In the context of interrogation, the object is to so disorientate the prisoner that he doesn't know where he is or even his own reality. One prisoner said it was suggested to him that he was in a place 'outside the world'.

Suzanne Cusick: Being in a place outside the world means being in a place where you will not be able to use your senses to know where you are, to make judgments. It's clear that captives on the other side in the Iraq War, that is, people who were captured and detained for a while by Iraqi insurgents, were able to use their ears to understand what part of Baghdad they were being held in, and were able to understand what time of day it was by listening to the sounds of children going to and from school, because their sensory input was not tightly controlled. They were able to know they were in the world.

Hagar Cohen: So even in a prison, providing it's open to the air, the sounds around us can help us to know where we are and what's happening. Noise of some kind permeates our daily environment. It can be desirable, or it can be annoying. Suzanne Cusick.

Suzanne Cusick: Mainstream American acoustical culture is saturated with unwanted sound. A lot of it unwanted musical sound that's used to shape the desirable populations in certain public spaces for instance, a certain kind of popular music is played extremely loudly to attract people on some floors of New York's biggest department store, and those people are 14-16 year olds. Their acoustical environment is just unbearable if you don't like the music that 14-16 year old girls like.

Hagar Cohen: Some shopping centres and stores in Australia also use music very deliberately to create an ambience that will encourage spending, or perhaps attract young people, or send them away. And very loud pop music can deeply irritate others.

Suzanne Cusick: I talk conversationally to social acquaintances, or even when I give public lectures about it, a lot of people will say, 'Well how is this different from ...' and then they bring up an experience in which the acoustical environment is on the annoying side of a continuum. And I guess what I sometimes think is that there is actually a continuum here, and that one of the things we might profitably think about is the extent to which the constant violation in some places of our acoustical privacy is also denying us the ability to think our own thoughts in peace.

Hagar Cohen: Professor of music at the New York University, Suzanne Cusick.

There are also psychological responses to certain sounds in ordinary residential settings. People living close to an airport's flight path for example, will be affected in different ways by an aircraft flying overhead. Dr Soames Job.

Soames Job: People whose attitude to the airport is 'This is a good thing for the community; this is a good thing for the economy; I fly regularly, I like the convenience' won't be as affected by the noise as someone whose attitude to the airport is, 'It's a nuisance, the government doesn't care about us, and it should be moved.' So that the attitude to the noise source is a major factor.

Hagar Cohen: Dr Soames Job is the acting director of the RTA's New South Wales Centre for Road Safety. He's also a psychologist, and earlier this year Dr Job attended an international congress on Noise, where he presented a paper about the relationship between personality types and reactions to noise.

Soames Job: Personality may directly affect how much you feel annoyed by, or feel disturbed by the noise, but it also seems it's quite likely to influence the extent to which you go on to suffer various physical and mental health effects, so the first stage might be the extent to which you are disturbed or annoyed by the noise. Then there is the possibility that that will create mental health effects like depression or anxiety. Then there's the possibility with significant evidence, that it will create effects like increased risk of cardiovascular disease, or increased risk of infection.

Hagar Cohen: Dr Soames Job says while such extreme reactions may not be common, they do exist, and he uses a technique of cross matching with various personality types.

Soames Job: So for example, there's an extraordinary personality questionnaire, which will classify people into various categories. There are six personality types in it. The three most relevant here are healthy personality type, and those people are much less likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease or cancer; then there's cancer-prone personality, more likely to get cancer; and then there's cardiovascular disease prone personality more likely to get cardiovascular disease, die of a heart attack.

So if you are those personalities, that will influence the extent to which the noise is likely to produce those subsequent more severe effects in you.

Hagar Cohen: If a person is hard of hearing, that can also contribute to sensitivity to noise, says Soames Job.

Soames Job: People who have very good hearing are not more likely to suffer annoyance and communication disturbance from living under an airport or next to a rail line, or whatever the noise source is. In fact it's the other way around. People with poorer hearing are less able to pick out the signals they want to hear from a background noise. So the people with poorer hearing are often the ones who suffer more with typical kind of environmental noise pollution.

Hagar Cohen: These views are supported by the World Health Organisation. On its website, it lists problems that can be caused by noise. Here's a partial list:
Pain and hearing fatigue;
Hearing impairment;
Interference with social behaviour and speech;
Cardiovascular effects;
Hormonal responses and their possible consequence on the immune system;
Performance at work and school.

There'll be a link to the WHO website on the Background Briefing site. The United Nations, too, has addressed the health impacts of excessive noise. it says it can lead to:
Psychiatric disorders;
Raised blood pressure;
Hypertension;
Diminished working memory span.

In Australia, there is a network of people so severely affected by noise it is making them sick in other ways. One woman, Anitra Thomas, became so distraught at the dogs barking in her neighbourhood, and the lack of action by any authority, that she decided to self-publish a book. It's called 'A Shocking Expose of Human Health Damage due to Noxious Barking and Adversarial Government Policies'. It's the constant barking of dogs around her that has wrecked her health, says Anitra Thomas.

Anitra Thomas: I tend to have a mild immune disorder; it's mild and it's very well managed. Now that started to flare up, so I started to have more inflammatory problems. Then I started to actually develop heart problems; I started to develop palpitations and I'd wake up in the night and my heart would be thumping so hard and it was really quite frightening. Then I started developing stomach cramps, because I was very nervous all the time. I really became quite tired, because I was just in hyper-drive all the time, because you're actually in hyper-arousal. And hyper-arousal is when your adrenal grounds are flying out large amounts of adrenalin and the cortisol levels have also gone up, and so you're really in a quite abnormal fight and flight syndrome all the time.

Hagar Cohen: The group that has formed around Anita Thomas's project is in Queensland, and it's called the Barking Dog Action Group. In Tasmania, a similar grassroots group is called Quiet Tasmania. In South Australia there's one that concentrates on aeroplane noises from a nearby cadet training field at Parafield. These groups all keep in touch with each other, and share concerns and stories.

Anitra Thomas: And we've all had our own personal experiences of suffering, really quite considerable financial and health loss through being exposed to some type of noise. We're a lobby group, and it's like the smoking issue, you must lobby to make change, you must keep at it, you must have a passion, and so we have a passion because we've experienced it, we know what it's like, and we know there's many, many voices out there that are not being heard.

Hagar Cohen: It's 14 years since the flying school was built at Parafield, a suburb in Adelaide, and for all that time, it's been a source of misery for Robert Davies.
Robert Davies: The frequency you can have three to four overflights per minute, as one extreme; often one every minute, or every 40 seconds, at the least it's one every five minutes, so that's when one individual is doing one circuit, it takes about five minutes to go around, but often they have many more on the circuit. The nature of the sound is a very annoying drone, and it—I suppose after about 10 minutes of that I can no longer think straight. It more or less turns my concentration span to jelly.

Hagar Cohen: A neighbour has recorded the noise from his back yard, to prove just how bad it is. But most of the neighbours have given up the fight, and moved to quieter areas. Robert Davies says this has had a devastating effect on the community.

Robert Davies: Those areas become undesirable to live in, and are being displaced by people that need cheaper housing.

Hagar Cohen: Robert Davies' group is called Stop Parafield Air Noise. They write constantly to various authorities.

Robert Davies: The governments generally refer us back to the airport, and the airport says nothing. The airport may say, 'Write to your Minister', or refer you to the Air Services Complaints number. It's just a circular situation. State government blames federal government. Federal government says, 'Oh, it's the state's responsibility for measuring air quality and public health.' It is structured so that nobody is ultimately responsible.

Hagar Cohen: In Australia, there are 673 local government councils, with some noise responsibilities, and each council has its own guidelines. As well, state governments have responsibility for various other noise related projects, usually larger projects, and some traffic.

The federal government takes responsibility for aeroplane noise. Workcover for noise in the industrial context; the liquor licensing authority regulates noise in clubs and pubs; and so the list goes on.

The aviation industry is pushing to change Sydney Airport's flight curfew. This will mean noise will go on longer into the night. There's a lobby group called No Aircraft Noise, formed by residents in the '90s. They push for a complete relocation of Sydney's airport. President of No Aircraft Noise, Allan Rees.

Allan Rees: It's not necessarily such a big ask, because many cities around the world have done it. Quite recently, Athens did that. They had an inner city airport on a restricted site; before the Olympics, they'd built a new airport outside the city, they had buses and a motorway first, they've now got a railway there; it's all working very well, and they closed the existing airport. Munich did that in Germany; quite a few cities around the world have done it.

Hagar Cohen: But since the airport isn't likely to move any time soon, Allan Rees says there have been many attempts to convince residents like him to move out.

Allan Rees: The Commonwealth bureaucrats told the Keating Labor government that the market will solve the noise problem, by which they meant people who don't like, who can afford to, will move away. And that is social engineering of the very nastiest kind.

Hagar Cohen: Throughout history there have always been attempts to control loud noise. One of the earliest recorded dates back to the 1st century BC. Julius Caesar banned night-time chariots in Rome to cut down the clatter of wheels on cobblestone streets. But tranquillity doesn't necessarily mean no sound at all. Roger Tompsett.

Roger Tompsett: We're certainly starting to realise that it would be wrong to say that all sound is bad. In the past it's been the norm to assume that what we want to do is reduce all noise to the absolute minimum level. We're now realising that some noises in fact can be very positive. People cite the fact that they like to hear perhaps a clock bell or something like that, which gives an area a certain character. It might be that we actually think that a bit of liveliness and activity in a town centre is a good thing; it shows that it's a vibrant place to be. So we're starting to think again about exactly how we should assess sound in a place, and the more recent idea is this idea of soundscape. How does this place sound?

Hagar Cohen: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness. Research, Anna Whitfeld. Soundscape production by Russell Stapleton, and technical production this week is by Timothy Nicastri. Our executive producer is Kirsten Garrett, I'm Hagar Cohen and this is ABC Radio National.

Presenter

Hagar Cohen

Producer

Hagar Cohen