Honking cars, blasting stereos, babbling neighbors: consider it all part of the symphony that plays daily on New York City streets. Everyone knows the city is loud, and politicians have waged a long, losing war against noise. Now they have a new weapon: noise cameras.
The cameras, which are paired with a sound meter to detect noise of at least 85 decibels from a source 50ft or more away, have recently been installed on certain streets in Manhattan’s wealthy Upper West Side.
It’s part of a program run by the city’s department of environmental protection, and last year the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, signed the Stop Loud and Excessive Exhaust Pollution (Sleep) Act, which raised fines for cars or motorcycles that have been illegally modified to be noisier. The deafening vrooms from vehicles are the primary targets of these noise cameras, which will lead to fines ranging from $220 for a first offense to $2,625 for a repeated default.
It’s not just New York City. Knoxville, Tennessee; Miami; and sections of California are working with the UK-based company SoundVue to add noise detectors on streets. SoundVue is owned by Intelligent Instruments Ltd, and Reuben Peckham, a director, said the baseline infraction of 85 decibels that the cameras register is “similar to the noise level from a lawn mower at the operator’s position”.
Peckham would not reveal how much these cameras cost. He said the basic structure uses a microphone and algorithm to detect noise, and then logs the offender’s license plate.
“The microphones are spaced a small distance apart, which means the sound hits each microphone with a tiny delay relative to the other,” he explained. This machine uses this delay to pinpoint where the sound comes from.
Erica Walker studies the relationship between community noise and health at Brown University, where she is an assistant professor of epidemiology. She believes most noise comes from poor city planning rather than individual bad actors, and that noise cameras are merely Band-Aids for a more systemic issue.
“I just think noise cameras are a very lazy and superficial solution,” she said. “A better noise mitigation strategy should be a pro-peace perspective, where everyone has to come to the table and agree to a solution, rather than the city just shutting down the acoustical culture of a community.”
Walker used to do research in Boston, where people who lived near Fenway Park would often complain about noise streaming from the baseball stadium.
“It’s not like they are going to put noise cameras in the middle of the field, and every time it hit a certain decibel, the Red Sox would be fined,” she said. “What’s more likely to happen is that the cameras are going to be put in a neighborhood with a lot of Black and brown kids who play loud music. So yes, you can punish and fine a lot of people, but it’s not going to address these bigger picture issues.”
When asked to address the argument that noise cameras could over-police communities of color, Peckham, the manufacturer, said: “Nonsense.” He added: “If no violation is committed, then there is no risk of surveillance.”
Noise is more than merely unpleasant; researchers say there are serious risks that come with prolonged exposure to loud sounds.
“Most people recognize that too much noise damages your hearing, but we’re getting increasingly concerned as there is a rich body of literature connecting noise with cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, risk of heart attack and strokes,” said Richard Neitzel, an environmental health studies professor at the University of Michigan. “It’s harming us in ways that are potentially fatal, and much more common than we historically understood.”
While experts typically study noise in the city, Neitzel says people who live in rural areas also suffer from its effects. The Apple Hearing Study at the University of Michigan studied noise across 130,000 people in the US, and found that in some cases, smaller towns could be just as loud as urban areas.
“There are different sources of exposure,” Neitzel said. “In the city, it’s mass transit, airplanes and roadways. In rural areas, it’s the workplace, agriculture or manufacturing plants.”
But perhaps no place has tried to turn down the cacophony quite like New York City.
In 1906, the Upper West Side physician Julia Barnett Rice began the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, which counted Mark Twain and Thomas Edison among its members. Out of Rice’s activism came a flurry of reforms, such as legislation prohibiting steamboat captains from sounding their whistles without reason, city-mandated quiet zones and arrests of people setting off Fourth of July fireworks near hospitals.
But as the 20th century unfurled, New York only became noisier. In 1935, Fiorello H La Guardia made conquering noise a top priority as mayor, tearing down some elevated subway lines and building playgrounds so children wouldn’t shout as much on the streets. The city passed its first noise bill a year later, restricting acoustic activities such as playing loud music, and the use of loudspeakers. It was updated in 1972 to account for more modern nuisances such as air conditioners, car alarms and horn-honking.
These laws did not fix New York’s problem, and only added more issues. In the 1990s, the NYPD launched “Operation Soundtrap”, a crackdown on boom boxes that primarily targeted young men of color.
According to Audrey Amsellem, a lecturer at Columbia University with expertise on sound and surveillance, in that case, “the regulation of noise had more to do with the identity of the noisemaker than the sound itself.”
She also expressed concern about the surveillance capabilities of noise cameras. “Once these devices are installed, they rarely come down,” she said. “These are AI-driven, meaning capabilities can be added over time. We know that noise cameras are equipped with – at least – sensors and cameras. What other kind of data, apart from traffic noise, can they gather? Does this present a privacy risk for residents of the city? Who does it punish, and who does it protect?”
Last year, the writer Xochitl Gonzalez became a finalist for the Pulitzer prize when she wrote about the classist policing of noise. Gonzalez, a Brooklyn native, grew up listening to the sounds of the city, and then attended an Ivy League university where “silence was an aesthetic to be revered”. When she moved back home after college, she noticed her neighborhood was being filled with monied white transplants who lodged noise complaints against her friends and family. To Gonzalez, “the sound of gentrification is silence.”
