Say what? Welcome to our ever-louder lives

For once, it didn’t sound like a freight train.

Nathan Goodman was sleeping in his DeKalb County home when a sudden roar woke him around 3 a.m. His wife, Jamise, jumped out of bed and bolted down the hall to collect their two children and head for the basement.

“She thought it was a tornado,” said Goodman, a software product manager. “It was the loudest noise you can imagine.”

What it was, was a jet. The Goodmans live three miles from DeKalb-Peachtree Airport, and even though pilots are asked not to take off or land from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., night flights still happen. While this one was for a worthy cause —- a medical emergency —- that didn’t excuse the rest of the round-the-clock rumble for Goodman and other neighbors of Georgia’s second-busiest airport.

“Sometimes,” he says, “it sounds like the Space Shuttle taking off around here.”

Atlanta’s phenomenal growth is producing another unwanted side effect. Along with air, water and traffic issues, noise pollution is spreading across North Georgia like aural sprawl.

As the metro population more than doubled in the past 25 years, once-tranquil countryside filled with the sounds of leaf blowers and squealing brakes. In the urban core, increasing numbers of condo dwellers are learning that city streets and stacked quarters can be far noisier than suburban cul-de-sacs.

“When you get more people, you get more noise,” said Jesse Ehnert, a sound-mitigation engineer with Arpeggio, an acoustic consulting firm in Atlanta. “More cars, more sirens, more trains, more dogs barking, more car stereos thumping away at all hours.”

There’s no way of knowing if Atlanta or any other city is louder than it used to be. But the footprint of noise has undeniably expanded with population growth and development.

“The biggest change in the soundscape has come in the suburbs and rural areas,” says Les Blomberg, director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization in Montpelier, Vt. “It’s like we’re suburbanizing noise.”

Got earplugs?

Helena Solodar reaches into her pocketbook and produces a Radio Shack sound-level meter —- and something else: a pouch full of custom-made, decibel-lowering ear plugs.

“I never go anywhere without these,” she said.

Solodar, a partner with Audiological Consultants of Atlanta, has treated hearing loss since 1980. In the process, she has taken so many sound readings at concerts and other loud places that she has suffered high-register hearing loss herself.

On this autumn morning, Solodar leads a quick tour of typical Atlanta noises: A jet at DeKalb-Peachtree (108 decibels —- about as loud as a power saw). A leaf-blower in front of a fast-food joint (96 —- equivalent to a pneumatic drill). Trucks thundering down Buford Highway (86 —- almost the level of a train whistle).

“Short-term exposure to these noises isn’t going to make you go deaf,” Solodar said. “The problem is they’re everywhere.”

The potential health effects of environmental noise range from sleep deprivation to increased stress to elevated blood pressure. Not for nothing does noise come from the Latin word for seasickness: nausea.

There was a time when noise pollution was considered a matter of national importance. In the Noise Control Act of 1972, Congress empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with the problem.

Less than a decade later, the Reagan administration defunded the operation and left noise control to state and local governments. Airport, highway and workplace noise are the three main areas the feds still police.

Most communities have ordinances that ban nuisance noise or set decibel limits and times for specific activities. Some venues, such as music amphitheaters, abide by special rules. Chastain Park’s 11 p.m. curfew has silenced several entertainers, including James Brown, who was cut off during his final Atlanta appearance as he sang “Sex Machine.”

One of the newest local ordinances is DeKalb County’s. This fall, DeKalb police brought in a noise expert to instruct 35 officers on enforcement. Eric Zwerling of the Rutgers University Noise Technical Assistance Center took them to a big box store and showed them how to measure decibel levels from common sources like loading docks and car stereos.

“The noises that bother me are purposeful,” Zwerling said, mentioning “straight pipe” motorcycles with no muffling, semi trucks with grinding “jake” brakes and boom cars with bass-throbbing sound systems (one of which, from Sony, goes by the trade name Disturb the Peace).

Young people have always been notorious noisemakers. “Rebellion,” he said, “is denominated in decibels.”

Bring in ‘da noise

That youthful vibe may explain why a night on the town can be such a deafening experience these days.

Nightclubs have always trafficked in sound. Restaurants, which once offered plush serenity, have more recently followed suit, thanks to open-space designs and hard surfaces. Two critically praised restaurants in Inman Park illustrate how tough it can be to find the proper balance.

When Sotto Sotto opened almost 10 years ago, the trattoria did not live up to its name, which means “hush-hush” in Italian.

“This place was as loud as an oncoming train,” chef-owner Ricardo Ullio said. “People complained, so we decided to do something about it.”

An engineer by training, Ullio read up on noise control and spent $12,000 on a sound-sponging ceiling with fiberglass panels covered in blue fabric.

“It absorbs 92 percent of the sound waves,” he said, clapping his hands to demonstrate. “See? No reverb.”

They have a similar problem up the street at Parish, a hot new restaurant in a converted factory building that’s so clamorous some diners have gotten hoarse trying to hold a conversation.

“We always talk about absorbing sound,” said Bob Amick, whose Concentrics Restaurants owns Parish and nine other establishments. “But we don’t end up making many adjustments because we don’t want to sacrifice the look. Dining out has become entertainment, and people expect a certain excitement level.”

Parish has ordered soundproofing materials for the underside of its tables. But Amick will not touch the hardwood floor or the original brick walls and tin ceiling, which reflect sound like a pinball.

“I hate acoustical tiles,” he said.

Movie theaters are another public space where the sound level seems to have been cranked up.

Harvey Deneroff, an instructor at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus, got so tired of complaining about the volume at the Midtown Art Cinema that he wrote an online column about it. Last spring, after enduring some skull-pounding previews, he demanded his money back and has not returned.

“I actually went out and bought earplugs,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to use earplugs when you go to the movies.”

Deneroff has lived in New York and Los Angeles and finds Atlanta far less boisterous than either metropolis. But there was one unfamiliar sound here that vexed his wife, an L.A. native. “Those insects in the summer,” he said.

Cicadas?

“Yes, she finds those very annoying.”

Too much fortissimo

Perhaps no one in town has a more highly trained ear than Atlanta Symphony Orchestra music director Robert Spano. Noise pollution is a pet peeve of his, but he doesn’t object so much to the jets, jackhammers and blowers that bother most people. “At least those serve a purpose,” he said.

What bothers him is unwanted environmental noise —- especially intrusive music.

“I’ve noticed it in Midtown,” said Spano, who lives a few blocks from Symphony Hall. “You can walk down Peachtree and hear clashing music from all the restaurants with outdoor speakers. It’s like an epidemic.”

Spano doesn’t mean to sound cranky. He has serious concerns about what ambient noise, whether it be music or overheard cellphone conversations, is doing to our senses.

“There’s so much noise in our society that we learn to tune things out,” he explained. “If you try to have a conversation in a loud public place, you have to learn to tune things out. We’re conditioned not to pay attention. We hear, but we don’t listen. We’re becoming desensitized.”

Last holiday season, the problem came home for Spano when he noticed that Muzak was playing in the lobby of his condo building.

“It’s infuriating,” he said. “I don’t know anyone here who wants it. I think I should appeal to the board. It’s not a question of the type of music; I’d be opposed if it were a Beethoven string quartet. It just isn’t the time or place. What’s the purpose of music when no one is listening to it?”

The maestro stops and chuckles as it occurs to him that he has been playing his piano most of the afternoon before a reporter phoned.

“Some of my neighbors might not like listening to me practice,” he admitted. “I might be part of the problem.”