I have seemed to become sensitive to sounds and noises in my adult life. During my years living in Asia, I became especially sensitive to noise pollution. I always expected that dealing with noise pollution would become easier for me as time went on, but to the contrary, I experienced more and more stress.
At one apartment complex that we lived in, a water truck would arrive every morning around 6:00 am. Our complex hand piped water, but this was evidently water for drinking. In Chinese olden days, merchants had to bang a pot or pan to let everyone know that they had arrived and were ready to sell their product. This was still going on when we lived there, and every morning people would ride through our complex on their three wheel bikes banging their pots and pans – they collected clothes, recycling, anything that somebody wanted to get rid of. Sometimes they even sang a short phrase (kinda like the priest singing "bring out your dead" except it was, "bring out your junk"). Back to the water truck – things were developing in China and, instead of pots and pans, these guys had purchased an electric bull horn which had a pre-programmed and really obnoxious song that they would blast in the courtyard. You can imagine how much I enjoyed this all happening ride outside my bedroom window while trying to sleep.
People would arrive all times of day and night in their cars and just blast their horn incessantly letting whoever they were picking up know that they had arrived. There was just no sense of preserving the general peace, or any ideal of privacy.
Over the years of living in apartments in various cities, I feel like I’ve heard it all in neighboring aparments: spouses screaming at each other, parents screaming at or sometimes beating their kids, drunks tumbling down the stairs, and jackhammers in the apartment just above blasting away concrete for a remodeling job. In China, pretty much every car has an alarm on it. They make them quite sensitive and whenever there was a thunderstorm, every car alarm in the apartment complex (in one place we lived there were hundreds of cars parked outside) would sound off with each thunder boom – a real treat if the storm went on for hours during the middle of the night.
When I walk outside my office these days here in Southwest Indiana, I tend to pick up on all the sounds and noises right away – the lawn equipment, the train horns or fire truck sirens off in the distance, construction equipment, the whirring equipment on top of buildings, and of course, the traffic. But I also hear all the birds… something I never heard in China. The only birds that I observed there were sparrows and swallows – neither of them song birds. When I step outside now, I can hear all sorts of song birds – they sing all day long. One of my favorite birds is the northern Mockingbird. This bird’s songs are really amazing. They have a repertoire of approximately 50-200 distinct songs/sounds! There seems to be several of these birds living on the campus where I work and each time I go outside, besides listening to all the man-made noises, I get a real treat as I hear these birds sing – constantly changing to a different song. It is a little simple pleasure that I take time to enjoy each day.
I recently captured a Northern Mockingbird on video - have a look!
Cheers,
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