05A short history of city noise

The short version: People have complained about city noise for as long as there have been cities: a Roman poet blamed night-time wagons for sleepless nights around 100 CE. Modern noise control grew out of campaigns by individuals - Charles Babbage against London's organ grinders in the 1860s, Julia Barnett Rice against New York's tugboat whistles in 1906 - and New York's 1929-1930 Noise Abatement Commission was among the first to measure street noise in decibels. The US passed a federal Noise Control Act in 1972, then stopped funding the office that ran it in the early 1980s, leaving noise largely to states and cities, while the EU went the other way with a 2002 directive requiring noise maps. Alongside the rules, a Canadian composer's idea of the "soundscape" changed the question from how to remove noise to which sounds are worth keeping.

Did ancient Rome have noise laws?

What you hear: wagon wheels on stone, all night.

Not exactly - but Rome had a traffic law that shaped its night sound. A text known as the Law of Caesar on Municipalities, dated 44 BCE, says that "no one shall drive a wagon along the streets of Rome" after sunrise or before the tenth hour of the day.⁸² It made exceptions for wagons hauling materials to build temples and public works, for carting away rubbish from publicly contracted demolitions, and for sacred processions, triumphs and public games; wagons that had come in at night could leave empty or carry out dung.⁸² The point was congestion in daytime streets, not quiet. Its side effect was to push delivery traffic into the night.

The poet Juvenal, writing around 100 CE, described the result. In his third Satire he asks, "Show me the apartment that lets you sleep!", describes wagons thundering through narrow streets after dark, and says that "insomnia causes most deaths here."⁸³ Sleep in the city, he says, takes great wealth.⁸⁴ Juvenal was a satirist, so the death toll is a joke, but the complaint - that the city's delivery schedule decided when its residents slept - would be familiar to anyone near a loading dock today.

Babbage against the organ grinders (London, 1860s)

What you hear: a barrel organ starting up under your window, again.

The mathematician Charles Babbage spent years at war with London's street musicians. In his 1864 Chapter on Street Nuisances he recorded 165 interruptions to his work over 80 days and estimated that street noise cost him a quarter of his working power.⁸⁵ The campaign made him a target: neighbors hired musicians to play outside his house.⁸⁵

He was not alone. Charles Dickens backed the cause, and Babbage's pamphlet appeared alongside a campaign in Parliament by MP Michael Bass. The law known as Bass's Act passed later in 1864.⁸⁵ These accounts come from Mike Goldsmith's history Discord: The Story of Noise, as summarized by The Marginalian.

The Babbage fight set a pattern that runs through the rest of this history. The people bothered by a sound and the people making it often come from different classes and trades, and the argument over who gets to make noise is also an argument over whose work and whose rest count.

Bass's Act is formally 27 & 28 Vict. c. 55, "An Act for the better Regulation of Street Music within the Metropolitan Police District," passed on July 25, 1864; legislation.gov.uk files it as the Metropolitan Police Act 1864.⁸⁶ It let a householder require a street musician or singer to leave the neighborhood of the house because of illness in the household, interference with ordinary occupations, or another reasonable cause.⁸⁶

Julia Barnett Rice and the tugboat whistles (New York, 1906)

What you hear: a tugboat whistle on the river at 2 a.m., then another.

Julia Barnett Rice (1860-1929) began her campaign after a worker at Bellevue Hospital told her that tugboat horns made "patients imagine demons are after them."⁸⁷ Columbia students counted about 5,000 unnecessary tugboat horn blasts a night.⁸⁷ In 1906 she founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise,⁸⁸ and the next year the Bennett Act let steamboat inspectors regulate whistle use.⁸⁷

The Society also ran a children's branch that kept noise down near hospitals.⁸⁷ Its name made the argument for it: the target was not all noise, only noise nobody needed. That distinction between necessary and unnecessary sound still underlies many city noise codes, which tend to regulate how and when a sound is made rather than whether it may exist.

New York measures its noise (1929-1936)

What you hear: elevated trains, riveting, car horns and radios - the city of the late 1920s.

By the 1920s, people had instruments for measuring sound. NoiseOFF's timeline records Homer Clyde Snook making early instrument-based street measurements in New York in 1925.⁸⁸ In 1929 the city set up a Noise Abatement Commission, which began studying street noise using the decibel.⁸⁸ The Commission took instruments across the city and ran questionnaires in newspapers asking what kept people awake.⁸⁹

Its 1930 report, City Noise, ran 308 illustrated pages.⁸⁹ It proposed reducing noise at its source and amending the city's sanitary code.⁸⁸ By CityRealty's account, the report "would ultimately have little impact."⁸⁹ The push did continue: in 1935 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia promoted "noiseless nights," drawing about 20,000 letters, and in 1936 New York adopted its first comprehensive noise code.⁸⁸

The lasting change was the method. Measuring street sound in decibels, and asking residents what bothered them, are still the two halves of how cities study noise. NoiseOFF is a noise-reduction advocacy group, so its timeline is a starting point rather than the last word.

The Commission was appointed by Health Commissioner Dr. Shirley W. Wynne, and the library record for City Noise lists Lewis H. Brown as chairman.⁹⁰ About 11,000 New Yorkers returned the questionnaire; according to The Spectator's December 1930 review, motor traffic topped the complaints at 36 percent, the subway, elevated and streetcars came second at 16 percent, and radios third at 12 percent.⁹¹

The US Noise Control Act of 1972 and the office that vanished

What you hear: nothing at the federal level, which is the story.

The Noise Control Act of 1972 directed the US Environmental Protection Agency to regulate noise from products sold across state lines, from railroads and from interstate trucks, and to handle labeling, federal purchasing, coordination and research.⁵⁹ EPA set up the Office of Noise Abatement and Control (ONAC) to do the work.⁸⁸ The Quiet Communities Act of 1978 added grants and technical help for state and local noise programs.⁵⁹

The Act also preempted state and local emission standards for products EPA regulated, while leaving states and cities free to set rules on how and when things are used or operated.⁵⁹ That split still shapes local noise law (see who makes the noise rules): a city generally regulates when a leaf blower may run, not how loud the factory may build it.

In early 1981, the Office of Management and Budget decided to end ONAC's funding and Congress went along.⁵⁹ EPA noise staff went from 175 to zero; an NIH panel dated the office's elimination to 1982.⁵⁹ The Act was never repealed, so on paper EPA remains responsible for noise with no budget to act on it. Sidney Shapiro's November 1991 report on it for the Administrative Conference of the United States is titled The Dormant Noise Control Act and Options to Abate Noise Pollution.⁵⁹ Noise control fell mainly to states and cities.⁸⁸

Boston's local layer was built in the same years. Most of the city's current noise ordinance, City Code 16-26, was enacted between 1984 and 1991 and amended through 2008.⁶² Its Air Pollution Control Commission adopted separate noise regulations under state law (General Laws chapter 40, section 21) and the city code, citing the Noise Control Act of 1972 and including clauses that would adopt future EPA noise standards automatically.⁹² How those two layers work today is covered in the sound of Boston.

Europe maps its noise: the 2002 Directive

What you hear: the same traffic as anywhere - but someone is required to count who hears it.

The EU's Environmental Noise Directive (2002/49/EC) was published in the Official Journal on 18 July 2002.¹² It required member states to produce strategic noise maps for large urban areas and for major roads, railways and airports. The first round, due 30 June 2007, covered agglomerations over 250,000 people, roads with more than 6 million vehicles a year, railways with more than 60,000 trains a year and airports with more than 50,000 movements; the second round, due 30 June 2012, lowered the thresholds to agglomerations over 100,000, roads over 3 million vehicles and railways over 30,000 trains. Maps are reviewed every five years.¹²

The Directive standardized the yardsticks - Lday, Levening, Lnight and Lden - but deliberately set no EU-wide limits.¹² Its action plans must reduce noise where needed, preserve areas of good acoustic quality, and inform and consult the public.²⁵ Each country chooses its own limits.

Set side by side, the two approaches split around the same years. The US built a federal regulator in 1972 and unfunded it a decade later; the EU, thirty years on, chose to measure and report everywhere and leave the limits national.

From noise to soundscape: Schafer and ISO 12913

What you hear: a church bell, a foghorn, birds in a park - the sounds a place would be poorer without.

In 1969, Michael Southworth, then a city-planning PhD student at MIT, published "The sonic environment of cities" in the journal Environment and Behavior, the first scientific use of the word soundscape.⁹³ In 1972, Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer began the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University with a study of Vancouver.⁹³ The project grew out of Schafer's course on noise pollution, and its members included Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, Howard Broomfield, Peter Huse and Bruce Davis.⁹⁴

Its output included The Vancouver Soundscape (1973), Five Village Soundscapes, a European Sound Diary from a 1975 trip, Schafer's book The Tuning of the World (1977) and Truax's Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (1978).⁹⁴ The shift was from treating sound only as a pollutant to be reduced toward studying the whole sound environment of a place, including what is worth protecting.

The idea eventually became a standard. ISO 12913-1 (2014) defines soundscape as the "acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in context," and ISO/TS 12913-2 (2018) covers how to collect and report soundscape data, with a third part on analysis.⁹³ The soundscape approach turns up in European research and some city plans, while in the US it is not a regulatory standard. The EU Directive's requirement to protect "areas of good acoustic quality"²⁵ is the closest the law has come to the same thought. Where to find that kind of quiet today is covered in measuring, mapping and finding quiet.

The noise log

The dates behind this guide, from Caesar's wagon rule onward, on one scrollable line.

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