Illustration: Michelle February
Joyce Cohen lives in a soft apartment. Plush rugs line the floors of the Upper West Side one-bedroom apartment she shares with her husband, and there are terry cloth mats draped over the kitchen counters. The alternating order—plastic, then glass, then plastic, then glass—orders the bottles in the fridge, which sit atop vinyl shelf liners. “I know people who have been catastrophically injured by glass bottles clasped together,” Cohen told me. In the bathroom, the shower curtain is gingham, as is the toilet seat cover. “We can’t have two hard things together,” her husband explains. We call it a home base.
Cohen suffers from hyperacusis, or acoustic shock, a a rare disease Where ordinary sounds can cause discomfort, and in severe cases, unusual pain. Hyperacusis is still little understood, but it is a disorder in the way the brain’s central auditory processing center “perceives noise.” according The American Academy of Otolaryngology. there emerging theories About its causes: Damage to the auditory nerves. A problem with the facial nerves that control the intensity of the voice. Some other trigger that has yet to be discovered. (Researchers are “far away from understanding” hyperacusis and its onset, professor of otology at Harvard Medical School He said in 2013, “It’s not a good idea to make anyone think there is an answer.”) It’s a small community of people who own it—one in 50,000, by some estimates—and Cohen and her husband, who met through Online hyperacusis Message Board, they are among the smaller units who are extremely sensitive to noise and live in New York City. It’s a noisy place in between The loudest in the country. Why live here if you can avoid it?
Cohen says her vocal trauma began about 16 years ago, after prolonged exposure to a noisy workplace fan. She is also a carrier of The noise susceptibility gene, which may affect 10 to 20 percent of the population. (Her husband says his symptoms first developed after years of going to concerts — his hyperacusis is It is closely related to tinnitus — and some exposure to noise in the workplace.) Cohen found the early years of dealing with pain unusual as grief, writes once that it began “by letting go of things, as people are supposed to do before they die.” Her ability to manage her condition improved over time, as she learned how to navigate life in a way that minimized the noise.
I’m not the first person to ask Cohen why you live in New York City. for one thing, Density for its part: life elsewhere will likely require her to drive. She says the car is really just a noisy machine. Here she can get to the things she needs with very little friction: Stores are close, and deliveries are plentiful. But living comfortably in a city with sirens and 4 a.m., it required some retrofitting. “We made the interior of the apartment as quiet as possible,” says Cohen. She considers herself lucky: The stable-rent apartment she’s lived in for nearly 30 years happens to be on a quiet side street, and the building has no kids, dogs, or elevators. They’ve installed soundproof windows and solid interior doors to try and block out the noise of errant ice cream trucks, impatient drivers, or excited teens. Protective earmuffs are the saving grace and are basically part of the interior design: In every room, a pair sits on hand in case a fire truck explodes. “They’re all over the house just in case something happens,” says Cohen. “I look like a baggage-worn handler.”
A freelance real estate reporter, Cohen works from home, but can generally move around town if she needs to, even taking the subway occasionally. Before she walked out the door, she armed herself: earplugs inside a synthetic earmuff. It has developed a number of tricks to help it navigate the noisy streets – researching the status of excavation permits to avoid noisy construction; He infiltrates the lobby of nearby buildings when a siren passes by. The janitor is usually nice about it, but if she gets any resistance, she’ll pretend to slowly tie her shoes until the noise passes. People’s sympathy can vary: I once asked a subway performer to stop his drumming, to no avail. But the staff at her favorite Gap location will now turn off the music for her, the manager at the local Fairway tries To make sure no one is using power tools while they are inside. But there are parts of the city that are largely inaccessible. She and her husband avoid restaurants and movie theaters, but sometimes take late-night walks in Central Park. (Even those can be dangerous—people whistle for their dogs, motorcyclists ring their bells).
The restaurants are likewise a nightmare As for Gina Briggs, who lives in Boroom Hill and has a milder case – she’s sensitive to sound but can’t feel pain. (“It makes me irritable, like the feeling you get when you have a pebble in your shoe,” she says.) She realized for the first time that she might have a problem with noise while eating brunch one day. “I felt kind of pissed off,” Briggs says of the restaurant — all the rough, crunchy surfaces to the music, the noisy bridal shower eating nearby. “I was like, This is not normal. I have to find out what’s going on.In an effort to ease her own experience of the city and share this information with others who might need it, Briggs created a site called Quiet City Maps where she took decibel readings for various institutions. (She fondly remembers a monastery-style pub called Perp Castle, where bartenders kick people out for making too much noise. “I talked to them and said, ‘Oh my God, this is a civilized place. “) She doesn’t wear earmuffs when she’s walking around, but she often has earplugs on hand for situations like an office party. For sudden noises—the screeching of the subway, or the piercing sirens—she works a relatively low-key method: She plugs her ears with her fingers.
However, not all noise-ridden New Yorkers make the same choices that Cohen and Briggs do. John Wallace, a quiet, cautious speaker who works for a hedge fund, says he believes he developed hearing loss after a number of mundane events — ear pressure from an air flight, a box falling from a truck on a city street. The final straw, he told me, was accidentally putting his headphones on at full volume during his quarantine in Connecticut early on. Corona virus disease. “I kind of laughed it off, but within 24 hours I was on a business call and bam, it was like a light switch – the whole world changed, says Wallace. “I had tinnitus, and suddenly I discovered that I was sensitive to all kinds of sounds.”
It took Wallace a year and a half after the headphone incident before he could even return to Manhattan. His few trips to the office required planning—he had to execute every step perfectly: ear protection all around, ways to minimize time on the street. It wasn’t long before he realized he needed to leave permanently: “There are so many ambulances, sudden car sounds or construction noises. I just couldn’t live.”
But is any place really quiet if every noise is a potential danger? Cohen sees trade-offs everywhere. The country has finches and cicadas. Suburbia means leaf blowers and lawn mowers. “You end up trading one noise for another,” she says. Although she considered moving out of town, at least temporarily to avoid a nearby construction project. There was a house in rural Connecticut that looked promising. Then I talked to the lonely neighbor, trying to make sense of the local noise scene. She only needed to hear one word, she says, before she decided the place wasn’t for her: “Woodpecker.”
Show all