Episode 2 Bang Goes the Theory

Hello welcome to Bang and Monday morning rush hour at St Pancras

International in Central London and it is noisy. It's a bit noisy. Love

St Pancras, but it's noupbs, station announcements, trains

coming in. From the moment you're wrenched from your sleep by a

beeping alarm clock, it's a barrage of noise. There's radio, traffic,

police sirens, dodgy ringtones. Until eventually you fall asleep to

the gentle lull of traffic on the street and people having a Barney

outside your binnedo. So this week, we are asking the question: Is

modern life too loud? Tonight, Jem takes us beyond human hearing to

listen in on the quietest of the quiet.

You can actually hear it eating! Liz looks into the way that sounds

can affect your mood. I'm going to be showing how a single sound can

give away your age. If this has gone according to plan, we should

have the older person at this end, down to the youngest at this end.

First do we need to worry about all the background noise that we're

constantly bombarded with? I've been on a mission to find out with

my new favourite gadget, the sound metre. Let's have a listen to St

Pancras station. Can you see that, it is about 81 decibels something

like that. What exactly does that mean? My life seems to be filled

with noises as bad as that train. Let's see what the background noise

level is. Round about 71, going up to 80 there. It's pretty loud. It's

quiet confusing the scale, double the number of decibels doesn't mean

double the volume. For example 80 decibels isn't twice as loud as 40.

90 is actually twice as loud as 80. The nice peaceful canal, what's

that? About 55. My rather loud high advise jacket may be affecting it -

- high Vis jacket may be affecting it. I've noticed as I've got older

my hearing has changed. Is that normal. Is there anything I need to

worry about? This is a good place to startment Can we have a look at

the ear. Last time I looked at the model of an ear was many years ago

in O-level biology. You have three main parts, the outer ear. Then the

ear drum, this bit here. Separates the outer ear from the inner ear.

So the vibrations against transmitted through the bones. It

starts a chain of events which carries the sound through to the

stapes. Once the stirrup starts to move, behind the oval window is

fluid. The fluid goes all the way up to the cochlear. So simple and

yet complicated. It's a big chain of events. Hearing, I think, maybe

I'm a bit biased... You can be biased. Is probably one of the most

complex of our senses. There's this mechanical bit going on and before

it becomes electrical impulses to the brain, so it's a complex system.

We live in a noisy world. I've had my decibel reading for a few days.

Normal traffic in London is between 80 and 90 decibels. Road works with

a guy with a big hammer, 100. Police sirens and ambulance sirens,

110 decibels. It is all very loud. But the impact that it actually has

on us will depend on how long you're hearing that loud 110

decibel siren for. I've noticed as I've got older, occasionally I get

really loud buzzing in my ears. I suffer from a mild tinnitus,

there's a mildly permanent ringing. I'm wondering how that happens. To

find out whether my world of noise has affected my hearing, first we

needed to check for signs of physical damage. Shall we look in

your ear. I apologise if they're not that clean. We'll have a look.

You're going to be able to see on the television screen. Oh, no!

there is wax, you're going to see it. Of course, I was right to be

apologetic. The full horror of my ear canal was about to be revealed.

It's horrible. I don't want to look. You have very small ear canals. Do

you see like a blob of something there, that Brownie bit. That's wax.

It's really an unpleasant view. I apologise if you're having supper.

My ear canal was so cloged we could hardly see the ear drum. Can you

see something that's pearly grey like a window almost. Yes. That's

your ear drum. Wow. The amount of wax you have in your ear is

perfectly normal. Wax is there to protect the ear canal. I couldn't

really see, it was like the lost world in there! To me that looks

hideous. Not at all. How are your ears? My ears are pretty clear.

I look in your ear.? Why not. way of comparison. Pull back of my

ear to straighten the canal. Look at that. Oh, see now you haven't

got any wax and I can see your ear drum perfectly. That's amazing.

Your ears are officially a lot nicer than mine. My ear drum looked

OK, but how well was everything else working? To find out, I was

played a series of tones at different frequencies and volumes.

All I had to do was press a button if I could hear them and then wait

for the results. Break it to me. Give me the bad news, give me the

good news. Good news actually. So here's your hearing, what we're

plotting is the softest, you're able to hear, you sort of averaged

at about five to ten decibels, which is actually pretty good for

someone your age. We looked at the snail shell which had the hair

cells in it. If you can imagine the hair cells as almost a field of

wheat OK. Over time, noise exposure can cause the cells to swell. After

prolonged swelling, sometimes they can even rupture and then those

cells die. Imagine them sort of falling over like somebody had

driven over a field of wheat. Once you've actually damaged them, they

can't regrow or repair. You would expect that the high frequencies

start to deteriorate first. At this point in time, I wouldn't expect

you to have any concerns. Your hearing looks to be well within

normal limits. As I've got older there's natural hearing loss, but

it's like tough, live with it really, this is not unusual. That's

correct. We listen to a lot of music through head phones. How

careful do people have to be? Are they setting themselves up for a

fall later in life? It is a concern. People tend to be in a noisy

environment in London so we crank up the volume. When you turn it up,

what you're doing is making yourself a bit more vulnerable

because the sound pressure level, is a lot higher in the ear canal.

One of my biggest bug bears on the train trying to relax, somebody

else's head phones, you can hear the lyrics and everything. It must

be really loud. I bet if we tested anybody walking through here it

would be too loud. As luck would have it, two people behind us are

listening to music. Can I borrow this. I'm delightly in love with my

gadget. Put the ear phone over the end and have a listen. Excuse me,

we are doing a scientific test to see how loud people's music is in

their head phones. Would you mind if I tested yours? Yours first.

Thank you very much. 85, not too bad though. What about you? 80 to

83. Thank you very much. We hit 85 with the gentleman and 83 with the

young lady. Do you remember when that train went by up there that

was about 83, 84, it sounds like a the turbo charger on a train.

your point, yeah. For a generation today, overexposure to loud head

phones hasn't been an issue, but that doesn't escape the fact that

as you get older high pitched sounds get harder to hear. Look at

this: Trying to get people to do things at a station is always

difficult. They're trying to get somewhere. We're going to round up

a few people. We want to see how good people's hearing is. Welcome

to London. It's all about hearing. Nice to meet you. Welcome to Bang

Goes The Theory. Do we have enough people? I've got a random group

assembled. They stand in a line and raise their hands. I'm going to

play them a sound which will increase in pitch. When it's too

high for them to hear, I want them to drop their hands. You can do

this at home too. We will play the note now, here we go.

After a while it's too high for some people to hear. That's number

one, number two. If you're listening at home, it is still

going, can you still hear it? You won. What I would like you to do is

write your age on the back of your piece of paper. Can you rearrange

yourself in numerical order? Don't reveal your age. Perfect. This is

the order in which you put your hands down. Now if this has gone

according to plan we should have the oldest person at this end going

down to the youngest at that end. If you could now turn over your

sign. 71. 68. 59. 45. 42. This is interesting, 16, 20, nearly. 19, 18,

19, and eight. It kind of worked. We have the oldest person at this

end, all the way down to the youngest person at this end.

Between the 18, 19, 20s, there's a bit of difference. But there's

obviously other things to do with that as well, how loud you have

listened to muse nick the past. Genetics will affect it as well.

It's an interesting correlation between age and how our hearing

changes especially the upper frequencies. Thank you very much.

Has been missed their train? I'm sorry. It's not just your hearing

that can be damaged. Pedestrians getting hit by cars because they

don't hear traffic coming with the head phones on. In America it's

trebled in six years those incidents. The other thing that

really interests me is that our ears are the most astonishingly

sensitive organs and I kind of get to wondering, if we were to get rid

of all this background din, what are the tiniest, most delightful

noises we could hear? This is an anechoic chamber. It's a room,

suspended within a room suspended in another room. Not only is this

room absolutely insulated from any noise from the outside world, it's

also made with wall that's produce no echo whatsoever. This is

actually a research facility at the University of Salford. We want to

do some research of our in -- own in here. We can answer questions

that you couldn't answer anywhere else like how loud is a shrithering

snail? Or maybe, what is the footfall of a centipede. These are

sounds that may never have been heard by the human ear. I needed

some help. When it comes to extreme recording in the natural world,

Chris Watson has near legendary status. Do you think a chamber like

this would be the best chance we've got of hearing them? Absolutely. It

doesn't get any better than this. The natural world is not as quiet

as this. What kind of kit do you use to capture the sound of the

practically inaudible? There's two techniques. The simplest one I use,

most of the time in the natural world is simply to get the

microphone as close as I can to the source of the sound, because what

we want to do generally is get the very best signal, which is the

sound the animal's making to ambient noise ratio.

Even in these perfect conditions, standard microphones won't be

enough. The other piece, instrument I've brought is not something that

works with changing air pressure. It work was vibration. This is a

contact microphone. What we can do in this case is actual lay tach the

contact microphone to the surface on which your animals are going to

be placed. With both microphones rigged, Chris chose what he hoped

would be the simplest challenge. Let's try the maggot.

Imagine how it is for the animals inside.

Just tip a few out. Stop breathing. That's working. Yeah. We'll do a

bit more with this. That's so clear. That's astonishing. You think that

they're completely silent. You think that a creature like that

with no legs at all would be utterly silent. They sound lick a

little crisp pact rustling their way around the world. Even more

amazingly, it allowed us to hear the maggots without the use of

microphones at all. It's like snap, crackle and pop.

It's like a bowl of rice Chris piz. Oh, yeah, yeah. Next up the

centipede. Here it comes. I might have to be quick with these

subjects. What we're hearing now is via the contact mic. Fantastic.

Amazingly, we have actually heard the footsteps of a centipede and

they are tiny beyond belief. Now I don't feel so bad for never having

heard it before, because even with all this equipment and the most

precise recording environment available, it's still only just

audible. They are the tiniest foot steps.

Two down, now just one more animal to go, the snail.

This one's moving, like this one is looking quite dynamic. So I'm going

to move it in. He's on his lettuce. to move it in. He's on his lettuce.

You can actually hear it eating. That is fantastic. That's the best

thing I've ever heard. I still wanted to find out what a snail

sounds like on the move. Well done, mate. But we soon found

out there was nothing to hear at all. That's pretty quiet. Yeah.

actually can't hear it, but that gliding movement appears to be

silent, inaudible. So the headline news here - sliding snail in the

quietest room in the world with the best sound equipment in the world

is actually silent. I love the sound of the maggot wriggling

around, very cute. I can imagine the crunch of a snail in your ear

drum getting on some people's nerves. Did you find it grim?

no, it was all right. It wasn't my favourite sound in the world.

amazing how certain sounds can evoke a gut reaction. Others make

you smile. Some sounds make you cry. Exactly, which is why I've put it

to the test. I've gathered a collection of different sounds

which I'm going to play to the commuters here and see how they

react. Can we have a quick word with you,

are you in a hurry. I have a bunch of different noises, some of them

are nice sounds. Some of them are... Horrible. Your words. I'm

interested in your kind of, with your face, I'm interested in seeing

how you feel. OK. WATER NOISE SHEEP BLEETING

BABY GURGLING GUNSHOT

BURPING Excuse me vicar. SCREAMING Very scary. Farting Any particular

ones that you really didn't like? The woman screaming. The woman

screaming; I hated the screaming. It made me jump, the screaming.

gunshot was the only one that stands out. The screaming.

Interesting reactions going on there. But is this just a

conditioned response, a reaction to the things we associate with a

particular noise or do we actually have a deeper psychological or even

psychological relationship with sound? I'm going to listen to those

same sounds that Dallas has been played back, but to explore the

depth of my emotional responses, Dr Harry Witchell set out to record my

tiniest and most revealing facial expressions, which involved an

That's hilarious. So I think we'll be able to have measured some of

those responses clearly, particularly some of your disturbed

responses. What can we tell from this. This graph is the brow height,

this goes down when you are in difficulty, so that can be

confusion or anger, fear etc. What's this first one there then?

That very brief one is a burp. You That very brief one is a burp. You

can see that the depth of it is not that deep. It doesn't last very

long. By contrast the huge one is just lasts about three times as

long as the others, is vomiting. Throughout the entire time you must

have been thinking this is horrible. Of all the sounds that was the

worst for me. Is this reaction to these sounds mostly emotional or is

it evolutionary, bit of both? of both. Some of the surprise

reactions that you're getting, that's going to have to do with

shock, like to the gunshot. That's going to be something that's

vaguely evolutionary. It's definitely hard wired into us from

the start. What else can we see my reactions to the sounds? The other

thing was mouth width, representative of a smile.

interestingly my biggest smile was to the scream. Did you not take it

seriously? No, I figure today was a comedy scream from a bad horror

movie. Individual differences come into play as well, depending on

what you associate things with. It can be a comedy movie instead.

Exactly. So the difference between nature and nurture, what you've

learned is fundamental to how people respond. Something as strong

as the sound of vomiting for example, surely that can't be

changed. I'm sure that most people associate it with something very

unpleasant from their childhood. But I think you can learn

deliberately to like almost any sound. You probably could even like

to sound the vomit. I don't believe you for one second. It would be an

aenquired taste. Raids I'm not convinced that you can learn to

love that. For me, there's loads of unnatural noises, like drills,

lathes whatever, they remind me of lathes whatever, they remind me of

happy times in the work shop. true.. What is the most unpleasant

sound? Dr Yan might have theance. The sound is just astonishing!

All sorts of noises make people cringe. But there's one that a lot

of people just find unbearable. Can you guess what it is and why it

makes people's skin crawl so much? It's awful. If your ear drums are

up for the challenge, find the answer at/bang. While you're there

follow the links to the Open University for more information

about noise, from combating pollution to laser enhanced hearing.

Noise can be deeply disturbing, that's why so much effort has been

put into reducing noise from planes, from trains and especially cars,

but is that always such a good thing? The modern world has got a

lot noisier, but really that's just because there's more planes, cars.

The actual machines themselves, that make the noise, have got

quieter. I think about my dad's old car when I was a kid, you used to

have to shout to make yourself heard. The interior of a modern car

Maybe car designers have just got too good at keeping the noise out.

After all, the sound of your car is a very emotional experience. If you

can't hear the engine or the accelerator or the sound of

changing gears, then you're sort of disconnected from the entire

driving experience. There's no audio feed back. So how does that

affect your ability to drive? Here at the University of Warwick, I'm

not quite in control of a very special driving simulator.

Remarkably the aim here is to put the noise back into driving to find

out how much noise we need to drive properly. The sound of the car is

built up of all the different components of the vehicle making

their own sounds. So this is the structure borne road noise. If I

add in the wind noise. Then finally, we can turn on the engine. There we

go, giving it a bit of gas and I can hear the engine now. It's all

about getting that blend in the right balance. There's like a

symphony. The whole driving simulator is needed to understand

how sound affects my driving because the way I hear is affected

by what I'm doing and what I can see at the time. The sound of the

car reacts and changes with the way that you drive it and the way that

you drive is influenced by the sound of the vehicle. As car sounds

have changed over time, has that actually affected our driving? Have

we become worse drivers or better drivers? It has been an influencing

factor. If you remove a lot of the wind noise and the tyre noise,

people drive it a lot faster than they would normally drive a vehicle.

And sometimes that's not desirable. No, so it really does have a

psychological effect on us? It does absolutely. There we go, that

sounds much more like a kind of sporty engine. Instead of -- the

sound of me hurtling towards my mid-life crisis. That's a sporty

car, Ferrari that kind of thing. Let's go for a modern electric car.

This is the sound of the future. Which to me sounds a little, it's

so odd having no engine noise at all. I just feel you're

disconnected from the whole experience. I prefer to have a bit

of engine noise. I prefer to hear it and feel it. There is a case for

manufactures adding artificial engine sound to make people feel

comfortable with the vehicle that they're driving. Drivers aren't the

only ones who benefit from a decent sounding car. Recent statipltics

suggest at low speeds pedestrians and cyclists are twice as likely to

be hit by a hybrid electric vehicle than a normal car, simply because

they're so quiet. So the researchers at Warwick have been

testing how electric cars could sound to help pedestrians hear them

coming. I couldn't resist this. The guys at the university have come up

with this, this is elvin, and the clever thing is you can programme a

different noise that it will emitt as it drivers along. You can choose

whatever you want. For example you could make it sound like, I don't

I felt a little self-conscious. I managed to not kill anyone. I got

strange looks. You think about it, it's not a bad idea. We have all

this emotional attachment to different sounds, but can you

imagine in the future we'll be able to choose what sounds we have for

our own cars, maybe you'll be able to download them a bit like a

ringtone. Good idea? Or could be absolutely hideous.

I definitely want a car that sounds like the millennium falcon. Or a

snail or your maggot. That would be good. As a cyclist a loud car is a

good car. Exactly. That is your lot this week. Nex week, it's all about

securing your digital technology. Maggie Philbin is back asking how

safe is your phone. Liz has her head in cloud storage and Jem helps

me erase digital files for g. That's the sort of thing. Yeah I