The Lombard Effect
by Celeste Pang
May 26, 2020
“Mr. Kang and a colleague, Francesco Aletta, are interested not just in the sound they can measure, but also in how people perceive what they hear. Recently, both recorded sound and perception of it are shifting. Sirens seem louder, or more common, but people are also listening for them in heightened ways. Sidewalk chatter that once made neighbourhoods seem vibrant can now provoke anxiety: “Are those people practicing social distancing?”
Even as cities have grown measurably quieter, noise complaints aren’t necessarily down; the sound of neighbouring televisions and leaf blowers can seem even more intrusive in quarantine.
In other ways, we’re suddenly nostalgic for noises that once annoyed us.
“People have said they miss the sounds of New York City,” said Arline Bronzaft, an environmental psychologist who has long studied noise pollution in the city. “They miss the honking horns, the crowds. And they would probably be the first people who were critical of those sounds. But it’s not that they miss them. They miss their lives.”
And then there are the birds — so many birds, who all seem so much louder. In fact, it’s likely that they’re actually quieter now than before the pandemic. They no longer have to sing louder to be heard over the racket of the city, a behaviour, known as the Lombard effect, that has been observed in other animals, too.”
On May 22nd, the New York Times published an article titled “The Coronavirus Quieted City Noise. Listen to What’s Next”. Reporting on the changing city soundscapes during lockdown—captured in New York City by microphones previously installed to track noise pollution—authors Quoctrong Bui and Emily Badger discuss the significant drop in noise levels in major city centres, as the sounds of human voices and car horns have faded and bird song sounds louder, in “days that sound like nights”.
The Lombard effect, according to Wikipedia, is “the involuntary tendency of speakers to increase their vocal effort when speaking in loud noise to enhance the audibility of their voice”. What these city mics have captured is the flip-side of this phenomenon—birds are quieting, with human competition at bay, yet people are perceiving them as louder than before. It is a question of relativity, and also marks an adjustment on the side of us humans.
The corner where I sit to work is ground level. Looking out, my eye line is about half a meter above the grass. In this half meter I see a rail outside the window, a tree trunk, a bush, and a sea of green and bent dandelion stems (the superintendent cut the grass, with her new lawn mower, on Sunday at 8am). Indeed that sound was one of the loudest I have heard in a long time—between the husky voice of the neighbour who smokes on the stoop and chats on the phone, some more distant chatter, and a few vehicles passing by, they are mainly the sparrows I can hear. They don’t sound louder, but they are a consistent presence, seemingly in a constant state of hopping about, and constant breakfast.
How the sounds of the cities have changed over these past few weeks comes with questions of other differences changes in human patterns of behaviour have wrought—some relief in air pollution, more brazen wildlife. How the sounds of cities will change into the future is a way to speculate I hadn’t considered before: will we be literally more muffled? Will more of us be over-compensating with new loud lawnmowers in early weekend hours? When I was little my parents took me and my siblings down into the subway system to listen to “the last whistle”, the final blows before the TTC went moved to the automatic ding-ding-ding announcing the closing of doors. There was announcement and ceremony to this. And I remember. How to trace the more subtle changes, and our patterns of listening?