Photo credit: Elina Sazonova
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
My title for this post reverses the punctuation in The New York Times title: “Dining out too noisy? Try earbuds.“ The article, written by former Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, suggests using earbuds to deal with restaurant noise. In his Apple AirPods Pro 2 earbuds’ accessibility settings, there are hard-to-find features called Conversation Boost and Ambient Noise Reduction. Wells explains that when activated, “Conversation Boost uses directional microphones to isolate and amplify voices that are directly in front of the listener. Ambient Noise Reduction dampens sound coming from other angles.” Other brands of earbuds may have similar settings.
Wells tested these settings in a “makeshift home laboratory” and found that they worked. Next, he tried them in a noisy restaurant with a friend. He found that his AirPods didn’t make thumping music disappear, but they helped him hear his friend. He could do so without AirPods, but he had to work at it, “leaning forward, watching his lips and making other small efforts that can make a night in a noisy space exhausting.”
Music doesn’t have to be at crazy levels to make a space loud. The Lombard effect, also called the “cocktail party effect,” will ensure that a packed restaurant with relatively loud music will get screamingly loud in short order. The Lombard effect describes when people raise their voices in a noisy room to be heard over background din. When everyone does this, the ambient noise level soon prevents understanding of what is said by anyone. He dares to say that “a couple on a date with tiny speakers plugged into their ears may strike us as unromantic, but it shouldn’t if it helps them talk to each other.”
I disagree. It would be strange to be on a date — even if it’s “date night” with one’s spouse —while wearing earbuds. People young or old, dining with friends or family, shouldn’t need assistive devices to have a conversation with companions. It is possible to design restaurants in which noise levels are modulated so that conversations can occur. As acoustic consultant Steve Haas, a member of Quiet Communities’ working group on restaurant noise has said, the goal isn’t to kill the noise, just to tame it. Most noise fixes will require some expenditures, but the simplest noise fix costs nothing at all: turn down the volume of background music.
Restaurant noise is a disability rights issue for people with hearing loss. I wrote about another disability rights problem in the current issue of Hearing Health magazine (see page 29 in the online edition). That topic was the need for auditoriums, theaters and even churches to provide assistive amplification devices to those with hearing loss. As I noted in that essay, lack of assistive amplification devices for theatergoers with hearing loss is as much of a barrier as a restaurant without an ADA ramp would be for someone in a wheelchair. It’s a similar story for people with speech-in-noise difficulty, in places with high ambient noise. Restaurants shouldn’t need to provide earbuds to diners just so they can converse. Hearing loss is common in older people and difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments is probably more common, even in those with normal audiograms.
As I suggested in Hearing Health, it’s long past time for the U.S. Access Board to set accessibility standards for ambient noise in what the Americans With Disabilities Act calls “places of public accommodation.” Those are basically any place open to the public. If the Access Board won’t do this, perhaps someone with hearing loss can file a lawsuit in a state or local court to force compliance with the ADA, just as people did in the civil rights era to force compliance with the Civil Rights Act. In fact, restaurant noise may be deliberately used to discourage older patrons from dining in a restaurant.
Quieter restaurants that allow people to converse easily will help contribute to a quieter world, which will be a better and healthier world for all.
