Tuesday, April 25, 2000

The sounds of silence are music to the ears of city noise activist

Jennifer Prittie
National Post

There's not much glory in being an anti-noise activist in Toronto.

Ken Burford, who has been slogging around the city since 1994 to bring about some peace and quiet, has concluded that people simply don't think of noise the way they do other kinds of pollution.

"If the air was black or the water was smelly, you'd go 'eech,' this is terrible," says Mr. Burford, a member of the advocacy group NoiseWatch. "Well, the air is certainly not clean when it comes to noise."

Mr. Burford, who lives at Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue, wears earplugs at night to drown out the sound of airplanes. His neighbours know how he dislikes noisy lawn machinery.

He has enlisted the help of police to stop a store from blasting sound out onto the sidewalk, and distributed cards to shops and restaurants to get them to turn down their music.

When he arrives at his local grocery store, the manager shuts off the soundtrack. Mr. Burford says supermarkets now afflict customers with ads as well as music, and also use satellites to beam sound simultaneously throughout their chains.

"It just keeps going, and you wonder, where does this end? It's getting very Orwellian."

Testing for noise is done fairly regularly around Toronto. The city monitors sound levels, and Alan Mihalj, a senior project manager with consulting firm Marshall Macklin Monaghan, says noise checks are common for new building projects.

Mr. Mihalj says it's difficult to pinpoint particular noisy spots in the city -- other than the airport and major roadways -- but does note that downtown streets must cope with both increased bustle and a "hard" environment, where sound is reflected off concrete and buildings.

That's an obvious concern of the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology (CASE), which features a "Soundwalk" of downtown on its Web site (http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/CASE/Homepage).

A series of 13 recordings present a succession of frenzied noises, from the clanging garbage cans and trucks of Yonge Street to the "classic Toronto soundmark" of cars passing over streetcar rails, a rhythmic "bidump, bidump" noise.

But CASE also believes some urban sounds are worth preserving. In June, the group will present a "historical soundscape documentary," The Toronto Sound Mosaic, featuring bygone noises from the city's waterfront, social life and various modes of transportation.

Mr. Burford, too, talks about some fast-disappearing sounds of today, and says he'll miss them. One is the bell of the knife-sharpeners who used to walk around the city's neighbourhoods, drumming up business.

"That's one that doesn't bother me," he says.