NOISE AN ENEMY

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21199, 25 June 1934, Page 11

NOISE AN ENEMY

♦_ — SCIENTIST GIVES RESULT OF RESEARCH ORGANISED ATTEMPTS AT REDUCTION URGED LONDON, May 15. "Noise is an enemy, and its main attack is not directly physiological, taut by weapons of an insidious and subtle psychological order." This was the summary given yesterday by Professor F. C. Bartlett, of Cambridge University, of a large amount of recent research in the laboratory at Cambridge into the effects of noise in industry and on human nerves. He was giving a lecture arranged by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology under the Hecith Clark bequest at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Intermittent noise, he said, affected performance more than a relatively constant noise, even when ti.e latter was of greater intensity, while a quiet noise, such as a softly heard grariophone, was definitely more disturbing if it was interesting. "When the noise stimuli first break .in," he said, "they adversely affect performance. Take the small effects which we and other investigators have demonstrated, multiply them by the millions of times they occur in the case of the millions of persons who are daily submitted to the type, and lqvel of noise used in the experiments. Then, even if we agree that the ill results are due to change rather than persistence of noise, the total effect at once becomes a matter of social significance." ' Individual Cases Passing to individual cases, Professor Bartlett quoted three instances, those of a married woman, a student, and an old woman, in which repeated complaints against noise had been demonstrably symtoms of some deeper discontent. "It is not too much to say," he proceeded, "that whenever, in any community, a sweeping and_ passionate condemnation of noise is popular, there are almost certainly a lot of people who are ill-adjusted, worried, attempting too much pr too little. "Once noise is on its way to becoming a primary irritant, its presence undiminished will aggravate, deepen, and perhaps establish the trouble. "In special cases because of its physiological cost, in many more because of its effects on work, in genera), because it can have a profound psychological effect, the case for serious and organised attempts to reduce noise 5 ; overwhelming."