Joanna McDonald
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I’m Joanna McDonald, a Longitude fellow from Rice University, studying music composition. In this podcast series we are exploring the approaching of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields. For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Nina Kraus.

Dr. Kraus is a professor and biologist at Northwestern University (https://brainvolts.northwestern.edu/) and in our interview, we talked about her book, “Of Sound Mind”, which she describes as her love letter to sound. We started our conversation off with Dr. Nina Kraus telling me about noise, defining what it is and how it affects us biologically and emotionally. So, without further ado, enjoy listening!

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Joanna McDonald
I read your book this summer. And as a sound artist, as someone who works with sound all the time thinking about how to shape it, how to tell a story with it, learning about the external and internal processes of how we hear was so interesting. But there was one chapter, particularly chapter 11, where you’re talking about noise and sound inundation and sound pollution. And I wanted to talk to you about noise. So, could you give like a brief summary or description of what noises?

Nina Kraus
Sure, Noise is a huge, under-acknowledged, issue and problem in our lives. Sound is invisible. We often don’t realize that it is such a pervasive and such a huge force. So, for example, as we think about noise, there might be a truck sitting outside your window, and you don’t even know it’s there. And at a certain point, the driver will turn the ignition off. And suddenly you’re aware of the silence. And you often take a breath of relief. Even though you weren’t aware consciously that this noise was going on. It was affecting your body and your biology. And so this is what I think is really important to think about. You asked me to define noise and how I think about it. By now, most people know that very loud sounds can damage our ear. But I’m not talking about that. We know that. I’m assuming that people know that. But I think what people really don’t know is that moderate level sounds really do affect us biologically in all kinds of ways. I think of noise as unwanted sound, often unnecessary sound.

So, if I back up for a minute and think about the biology of sound processing in the brain, and one of the points that I think really comes through or I hope it comes through in my book is how holistic the processing of sound is. When we think about sound processing, it engages multiple biological systems in our body. So our cognitive, what we pay attention to, how we remember, how we think. Sensory. How we process the information from each one of our senses, how we combine the information from our senses, our emotions. Sound is enormously important for engaging us emotionally. Movement. So, our motor system. By definition, sound is movement. It is particles in motion. And we create sound by moving as I’m talking to you now. I have to move the air and create sound. And also, our viscera, our gut. You know, have you ever noticed that your appetite is a little off when you’re in an airplane?

Joanna
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Nina
People thought for a long time, they assumed that the reason for this is that the air is drier. So scientists who like to measure things, and did some very controlled experiments. And what they discovered is, it was the sound that affected our appetite.

Sound has always been an organism’s warning sense. It’s our alarm sense. Sound is our alarm sense. That’s also one of the reasons that sound and memory are so tightly, tightly aligned. Let me stick for a minute to this idea of sound as our alarm sense. Do you sometimes feel stressed? Do you sometimes feel anxious?

Joanna
Sure.

Nina
Well, these are important psychological feelings. And we know that anxiety, and depression are mounting in our world. Again, I’m a biologist so I think of things in terms of biology and biological evidence. I do believe that our noisy world in part is responsible for the feeling of disconnection that we have. You know, in the same way as when that truck turned off as ignition and you relaxed. I think we’ve all experienced sitting in a kitchen and having the refrigerator cycle off or having the air conditioner cycle off. We don’t realize that these sounds are there until they’re gone. Because we don’t realize these things, we need to make a conscious effort to reduce the sounds that we do have control over. You know, do I really need to know, every time my neighbor locks and unlocks their car door? Every time that happens, you know, I have a biological response and it affects my ability to concentrate, and it makes me feel more tense. It’s harder to keep things straight. Because you know, ideas need space, they need quiet, to form and materialize.

Joanna
What you said about ideas needing quiet to formalize is actually a big part of what our podcast series is about. And I’m so glad you mentioned that because I know for me as an artist, as someone who’s creative, I have to have quiet to create or to have a creative flow. So, how important do you think that quiet or silence for contemplation is? Or maybe completing a project or creative project or collaborating, or maybe just like getting work done? Can you talk about that?

Nina
Yeah, with pleasure. I think there’s really something to the idea that quiet and silence can help us but I don’t think of quiet as the absence of sound. You know, because we can be in a backyard or woods, I think I do some of my best thinking outside where I can hear animal scurrying, and the wind blowing, and there are all kinds of sounds. So I think it’s important to think about: what are the sounds that are the most distracting and upsetting?

Joanna
So, it seems like there are sounds that are healthy and sounds like noise that are unhealthy.

Nina
Well, also does the sound have meaning? You know, part of having a sound mind is when we make a lot of sound to meaning connections. Sound to meaning connections are, in fact, tremendously important and many of the sounds that affect us biologically and that get in the way of our ability to sleep and to think our sounds that have very little meaning, like the sound of an engine or a sound that doesn’t have a particular message. It’s often an industrial sound, or a technological sound, or a sound of fluorescent lights, or computers, all of these things have this inherent sound that we don’t realize consciously is there but is affecting us.

But let me get back to your question about really thinking about being creative, and your oral environment. First of all, people really differ. We all have very different brains and our sound minds are really different. I know this is a fact. I measure people’s responses to sound biologically every day in the lab. We’ve done this to 1000s of people. And you know, everyone’s response is different. We all have a different signature. We have made different sound to meaning connections in our lives. So, some people are able to concentrate into work and to be creative in places that another person might find objectively noisy, and that’s just the way it is. But I think that it’s important for us to be introspective and to think about, well, what is it that we need? I know some of the things that I need are like, I need sleep, and sleep is a very, very important part of, I think, the creative process. At least I know for myself, when I sleep well, a lot, or enough, I think better. This may not be true for everyone, but sound and noise can get in the way of a healthy night’s sleep. The fact is that we are primed to make connections with sound, and especially if you are a developing organism, you know, you’re making these connections, you know, children learn to make sound meaning connections very, very quickly.

Also, I know for myself, some of my best ideas come to me, while waking. You know, like, as you kind of go between a dream sleep state, sleeping state and waking up, and one of the things that I really learned during the pandemic, was, you know, I, unless I really need to, I don’t use an alarm clock, because again, who wants to be alarmed awake? Right? And, you know, it turns out that you train your body really well, I wake up more or less the same time every day anyway. But I’ve learned, if I don’t want to deprive myself of that time, as I am just waking up, and there are no other distractions, so it’s quiet for me. And I am in between dreaming and wakefulness, and that’s a time when, when ideas and connections just come to me. So, I’ve learned that and I’ve learned to change my life in a way that enables that.

I started out saying that our hearing system, our hearing brain, and body, you know, this is a huge, interconnected process. Of course, if there is unwanted sound, or meaningless sound, or disruptive sound, alarming sound, that is going to affect not only your appetite, but your ability to think and to remember, and to combine information from your senses, to hear the details and nuances and sound that you may want to as you’re playing back a recording that you have created. You know, all of these things are so very, very important. And I think that the very first step, and I hope that your podcast is a step in this direction, is people need to become aware, they need to realize that this is an issue. You know, I mean, I live in a neighborhood where the lawn machines that go on in the fall in the spring. We can hear when a neighbor’s a block and a half away with their leaf blowers or whatever. It’s not the company’s fault. It’s, you know, it’s us, you know, we pay for these services, and we should not be paying for these services. There are ways of keeping a lawn, however you would like it, in ways that are not so noisy. And people just need to know that it’s an issue, that it’s a problem. And so, becoming aware of this, I think, is something that I hope that your podcast will do.

And I try my very best to pull together information, what we know about other species and how they depend on sound, to do their creative activities. I think most people really want to do the right thing for themselves, for their health, for their ability to think, the ability to create for their environment, but they don’t know. And so you know, having information and biological information about how animals and creatures including plants, and trees, know, vibration, this is this is a very important part of natural life. So being aware of these things is, I think, is a really important first step.

Joanna
Yeah, I love what you’re saying about people wanting to do what’s good for themselves and for their health, but they don’t know how. And I’m kind of curious. My generation, like Gen Z generation, we are an anxious generation, for lots of reasons. I wonder like, how much the sound inundation that we’ve grown up in has also affects that. Could you maybe talk about what might happen or what might be some results physiologically, emotionally, of a generation of like my generation for example, growing up with way more noise than people my age might have grown up like 200 years ago?

Nina
Yeah, I think it’s a real issue. And it’s one where I just kind of feel like, I want to get out in front of the bus that is going to kill your generation with noise, with technology with…Don’t get me wrong, I depend on technology for the work I do, I have huge respect for the medical advances that we have made. But again, it’s a matter of thinking about how we spend our time. So, if I know nothing else, as a biologist, it is that we are what we do. How we spend our time really, really matters. And if we spend all of our time on our electronic devices, for example, we are less connected to each other personally. And there is much more to connection. I mean, you as a composer and a musician, you know that a live performance is a very different experience than a recording.

Joanna
Absolutely.

Nina
So we are depriving ourselves of these live performances with each other. And we also we need to practice. So, your generation isn’t practicing. You’re getting more anxious about even being with people and talking to people, because you don’t have very much practice doing it.

Joanna
That’s so true.

Nina
Talking to each other is tremendously important. And I think that we are depriving ourselves of the development of the biological systems of the whole generation and of the generations moving forward.

Think about this; our technology is stealing our thoughts. If we are in line at the supermarket, or at the airport and so right away, you’re checking your phone, and you know, say, oh, I can get some work done while I’m standing here. And so you’re interacting with this thing. So you have lost what can go on in your mind when you think. You know, what if you just sat there and thought. You know, I mean, these technologies are stealing our thoughts. I could be thinking about this next book I’m working on. Or I could be just looking at the interactions between this and that person next to me. Or I can just be letting, you know, you said before the idea of letting your mind go where it needs to go. So, creating environments for yourself, where you’re letting your mind go. And you’re not letting some technology steal that time and steal your thoughts and steal your privacy in terms of your creative and non-creative ideas. I mean, letting your mind just work.

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Joanna
I hope you enjoyed our conversation about noise. What was helpful for me to learn from our interview was what noise is: noise is sound that is absent from meaning.

I also learned how much noise is connected to the technology we use and how both noise and technology can distract us, stress us, and steal our internal dialogues, all of which are crucial to incubating creative ideas and problem solving.

Dr. Kraus said something I think is important when she mentioned how many aspects of everyday noise we encounter have solutions if enough people first become aware of the noise and hear it, and second, understand its harmful effects. So, I hope this episode can be the start to realizing how much noise is really around you and then what role you might play in reducing unnecessary, unwanted noise in your life, and consequently, in the lives of those around you.

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To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

Suggested articles by Dr. Nina Kraus:

Leaf blowers – A small part of a larger movement Evanston should lead:
https://evanstonroundtable.com/2023/05/17/guest-essay-leaf-blowers-noise-mental-effects/

Keep it Down: The dangers of human created sound:
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20211012/281762747437865

Hearing Too Much in a Noisy World:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hearing-too-much-in-a-noisy-world-11631296563