Re'Mi Music2 min read
The noise we don't notice
Most of my working life is about making sound behave: tuning a room, balancing a mix, keeping a crowd's experience clear. So it's a little humbling to read a study about all the sound we make without thinking about who else is listening.
On 5 November, Dr Hansjoerg Kunc and Dr Rouven Schmidt from Queen's University Belfast published a big review in the journal Science. They didn't go out with recorders this time. Instead they gathered 214 experiments that other researchers had already done, covering 177 species that live on land and in water, across six continents, and looked at the whole picture at once.
The headline result: human-made noise changed at least one thing about the body, development or behaviour of 80% of the species studied. The paper also reports drops in fitness and abundance, and disrupted relationships between predators and prey.
Some of the details stuck with me. House sparrow chicks exposed to noise like traffic were worse at defending themselves against predators and showed early signs of accelerated ageing. Young Atlantic cod grew more slowly and were more likely to die when exposed to noise as larvae. And because sound travels further and louder inside enclosed spaces, a hiding spot can turn into a trap, pushing animals back out into the open.
It isn't one simple story, either. Under the same noise, some species gave their young extra care while others gave less, and the researchers even found changes in gene activity. Noise creates winners and losers, which makes it harder to predict and more interesting to study.
Dr Kunc puts it clearly: noise pollution is "an underrated threat to wildlife worldwide," and soundscapes should be protected "with the same seriousness as physical habitats," for example with low-noise zones that give animals a genuine acoustic refuge.
I love that the field is still working this out, asking new questions about what a healthy soundscape even sounds like. Next time I'm out somewhere quiet, I'll listen a bit longer before I add to it.
Takeaway: A soundscape is part of a habitat, and we're only beginning to learn how much it matters.