The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want by Garret Keizer

Author:Garret Keizer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Public Affairs
Published: 2010-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

SPRINGFIELD, USA

The first motorcycles manufactured in the United States were made in 1901 at the Indian Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, now the location of the corporate headquarters for handgun-makers Smith & Wesson. (I know about the Indian bike because my grandfather drove one in his youth, when he ran with a pack that called itself “The Knockout Club.”) The state’s third-largest city after Worcester and Boston, Springfield was once known as “The City of Homes,” many of which still stand out today with their elaborately painted Victorian porches, though for several decades the City of Homes has been losing its manufacturing base and showing the effects. The median income in Springfield is well below the national average and considerably below that of Massachusetts. Several years ago the city made national news when a baby shower ended in a gunfight. These days I think of it mostly in connection with Herb Singleton, principal of Cross-Spectrum Labs, “sound and vibration consulting.” When I first began working on this book, Singleton took me for a drive through the neighborhoods of Springfield, which he knows well. He was born there and, after graduating from MIT and working at an acoustical engineering firm in Boston, he did what Thomas Wolfe said you couldn’t do and came home again.

I met Singleton for the first time at an international conference on noise in Honolulu, where he delivered one of the most interesting papers I heard during several days of interesting papers. Subtitled “A Tale of One City,” it had to do with the unsuccessful crackdown on loud car-audio systems that Springfield officials had undertaken in 2006. More broadly it had to do with the need for acoustical engineers (most of his audience) to grasp “the reality . . . that perceptions are just as important as empirical data in shaping citizens’ attitudes toward noise control.” Most of the perceptions Singleton addressed had to do with race and class, which figure heavily in a place like Springfield, where African American, Hispanic, and Asian citizens make up more than 40 percent of the population.

Singleton himself was a minority at the noise conference. He was one of only a few presenters who based his research on the place in which he lived and on the politics of that place. He was one of only two black people I saw in several days of sessions. And he was a minority of one, a singleton indeed, in being the only presenter who dared to appear without a “PowerPoint presentation.” Instead, as befitting someone talking about his hometown, he showed us slides of the city as he spoke.

Singleton’s “A Tale of One City” was straightforward, insightful, and, for anyone who cares about the future of Loud America, a bit discouraging. Complaints about “boom car” noise, mostly from racially mixed but also from predominately black communities, led to several public hearings around the city. But quite soon the city leadership realized it had gotten off on the wrong foot. Some residents were understandably concerned that the crackdown would target minority drivers and be used as a pretext for shaking them down.

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