A Quiet Place: Observations of Ambient Noise

I’m quite sensitive to noise. Ask my wife. She will tell you it’s one of my more annoying traits. While she is impervious to a TV blaring, if it’s too loud I become agitated. If it’s much too loud I start to feel claustrophobic. I will mute commercials, which annoys her.

In the days of analog TV I had a small Terk VR-1 compressor-limiter box installed between our TV and the sound bar. It ensures that the commercials didn’t jump out at me. I think I could have been a reference case for the FFCs CALM act. That’s the rule that mandates limits to the loudness of commercials, so as not to make broadcast viewers suffer jarring changes in volume going into/out of commercial breaks.

Further, we live in Woodland Heights, which is just north of downtown Houston, very close to the intersection of I-10 and I-45. The natural consequence of this fact is that there has long been an utterly inescapable baseline of background traffic noise. During COVID times when much business activity was suspended, that background noise was dramatically reduced. It was most pleasant.

We are also across the road from an elementary school. That school building has a big, flat, brick wall facing to the south. Sound emanating from I-10 to the south and west reflects off that large wall. So, sometimes when we’re on our front porch (facing west) what we hear is actually traffic noise from I-10 reflected off the school. To us, it appears to be coming from the Northwest.

The ambient soundscape is also impacted by weather. Sound propagates in different ways of the air is moist vs dry. Hot vs cold. Or if there are layers of air at different temperatures. Sound can effectively be reflected or refracted by transmission between two different air masses.

Sometimes, if I should wake in the night, I just listen to the ambient sounds. Familiar sounds can be comforting, like our dog Julio’s breathing. He sometimes snores. Occasionally a cat will sleep right by my head. If I should stir, he wakes, and starts to purr. On certain days our irrigation system starts up at 4am. I can hear it pass across the various zones in the yard.

The past couple of weeks I’ve noticed a change in the ambient soundscape hereabouts. It’s noticeably quieter in the wee hours. I’ve been trying to work out why.

The weather has warmed significantly in that time. It may be that the traffic noise is bleeding off into the upper atmosphere sooner. Not hugging the ground under a layer to cooler, denser air aloft.

Also, TxDOT has started a project to elevate a section of I-10 just to the south, between Studemont and Heights Boulevard. That has the highway reduced by a couple of lanes. Perhaps this means people can’t drive quite so aggressively down that stretch. There’s definitely more traffic congestion in the daytime. No sure about overnight.

I wish I had some instrumentation to track and measure this.