I know it pales in comparison to unemployment rates, the war in Afghanistan, and global warming, but noise pollution is on the rise and getting worse every day.  With the noise constantly around us, it’s getting harder and harder to actually listen to anything. That includes music, and each other.

You want to know my theory of why more people don’t come to concerts?  Because you have to actually sit and do nothing but listen.  But the ability to listen requires the availability of silence in the world.  And silence is an increasingly rare commodity.

It’s getting to where I want to follow the example of TSO Music Director Harvey Felder, and carry earplugs with me at all times.  If only I could find the darn things.

Certain noises of modern urban life are necessary.  The TSO office is two or three blocks away from a downtown fire station.  The din of a five-alarmer is a minor annoyance, particularly when it disrupts my phone conversation with a donor from whom I hope to stimulate a contribution.  Nevertheless, I realize that those whose house is on fire may consider the sound of approaching sirens more beautiful than, say, a Beethoven symphony.

And I find rather charming the crosswalks in downtown Tacoma that, for the benefit of the vision-impaired, chirp like a bird when the “walk” signal is activated.

I love the foghorns of a big car ferry.  The dirty old coal-burning railroad ferries on Lake Michigan would blast you right out of your deckchair when they blew for departure.  I wish the ones in Puget Sound would let rip occasionally.  They’re much more… polite.

At the risk of offending motorcycle aficionados, I dislike the noise of a Harley-Davidson.   The only thing I dislike more is a pack of Harley-Davidsons.  I applaud the law that says I will be ticketed for driving my car without the benefit of a muffler and tailpipe.  I don’t understand why the same law apparently doesn’t apply to Harleys.

Or to personal water craft, more popularly known as jet-skis.  When the solitude and peace of my afternoon sail is interrupted by these, what little Christian charity I possess deserts me.

Among my other pet peeves:  pop music played at an intrusive volume in a restaurant where I am trying to enjoy dinner; leaf-blowers of any kind, at any time (what’s wrong with a rake?); orchestra websites that, when you open them, automatically start playing some symphony or other; people talking at elevated volume into their cell phones in the middle of a bookstore; bus-persons seemingly intent on breaking every dish in the restaurant; flight attendants on the cabin intercom who are either inaudible or at ear-splitting volume; and my neighbor’s yappy little dog.

One person’s noise  may be another person’s music.  I love my Minimoog Voyager analog synthesizer.  It can produce any sound of which my imagination can conceive.  My wife tolerates it out of her affection for me.  My retired concert pianist father referred to it, somewhat ungenerously, as a “giant kazoo.”  (He also said Peter Frampton's talk-box guitar solo on "Do You Feel Like We Do"--  circa the 1977 Frampton Comes Alive album -- sounded like Donald Duck, which I thought rather a good description.)

Some composers have actually incorporated modern noises into music – the best known perhaps being Gershwin’s use of actual taxi car horns in his orchestral work An American in Paris.  The French composer Edgar Varèse employed sirens, along with a battery of percussion instruments, in his work Hyperprism of 1923.  In the 1940s, a group of composers used magnetic tape to capture and modify various sounds, natural and mechanical, to form a kind of music that became known as Musique Concrete.  This was really, in the words of one, “the reunification of music, noise and language.”  Three decades later, the rock group Pink Floyd incorporated barking dogs (presumably not my neighbor’s) into a song titled, appropriately, Dogs.

But there is a time and place for everything.  I can appreciate the car horns in American in Paris.  I don’t appreciate them coming from the jackass in the car behind me who blasts out merely because I have the temerity to parallel park, thereby subjecting him to a 15-second delay.  I like quite a lot of different kinds of pop music, but not when I’m trying to enjoy a nice dinner out with my wife.  The howling and barking on Pink Floyd’s Dogs is eerie and mysterious, but there is no mystique or charm in my neighbor’s runty canine.  And I love symphonic music, but not when it unexpectedly blares at me from the website of some orchestra (who of all on Earth ought to know better).

I remember Bobby McFerrin remarking to a group of schoolchildren, “your ears are precious; they’re an entrance to your mind.  Be careful what you let in there.”  I don’t think I fully understood that at the time, but perhaps I do now.  Bobby thinks music is as important to humanity as food.  So do I, or I wouldn’t be doing what I do for a living.  Becoming better at listening to music is something I’ve been working at for years.  Having access to silence helps.  Noise Pollution doesn’t.