Noise Pollution: The Unquiet Crisis

In this handbook on a growing public menace, Clifford R. Bragdon applies acoustical engineering and social science to the least understood—yet one of the most serious—environmental hazards of modern society. This book is a precision tool; it gives facts and figures, precise scientific measurements, and accurate data on what noise is, what it does, and how to combat it. The author pinpoints the noise levels—many of them illegal—of automobiles, buses, subways, airplanes, household appliances, and children's toys in numerous charts and tables and relates these data to the measurable social, physical, and psychological damage they do to human beings. He catalogues the "noise-free" claims of manufacturers of these products in an Appendix that speaks for itself.A thorough case study of an area near Philadelphia International Airport and other townships, including five hundred households, the author evaluates existing noise abatement programs on local, state, and federal levels, and finds most of them seriously inadequate. As steps toward the solution to the noise crisis, he proposes a system for rating environmental health, new approaches to community noise management, and a variety of architectural suggestions.The bibliography—probably the most complete and up-to-date source collection on the subject ever assembled—is an invaluable reference work in itself. It lists over five hundred sources, arranged in six major categories: Noise, General; Physical Effects; Psycho-Social Effects; Law; Noise Abatement; and Noise Sources. Noise Pollution is indispensable not only for the concerned citizen but for all those who can, and must, take immediate and effective action in our unquiet crisis: urban planners, architects, hospital administrators, public health officials, transportation executives, lawyers, realtors, sound engineers, manufacturers of transportation equipment and household appliances, and community leaders. It is a vital resource in dealing with the noise crisis that is destroying pleasure, lowering work performance, eroding health, causing physical injury, and even challenging basic human survival.