Greetings,
Moin Yahya has invited me to blog this year. To introduce myself, I am Graham Purse, a second year law student with a background in music, history, economics, travel, and photography.
As a first article, I have chosen to observe and comment on noise pollution.
In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on a dispute in the city of Montreal regarding a strip club's right to broadcast music and commentary over a loudspeaker in the main entrance of the club (Montréal (City) v. 2952-1366 Québec Inc., 2005 SCC 62). The loudspeaker would hopefully induce passersby to choose that particular strip club over others in the area.
The case is of immediate interest because the SCC was tasked, in part, with defining what constitutes noise and noise pollution. After canvassing a history of the impugned bylaw, the majority found that the objective had been to “preserve the peaceful nature of public spaces.” In attempting to ascertain the intentions of the writers of the bylaw, the majority wrote that, “the main characteristic of disruptive noise is that it stands out from environmental noise. Disruptive noise is noise that interferes with the peaceful use of urban spaces, and is distinguished from noise in the literal sense.” I urge you to read paragraph thirty-three (and possibly the entire case, time permitting); the majority's classification schema for different kinds of noise would hardly pass muster in even an introductory logic class (which is not to say that the dissent was any more lucid). Unfortunately, the case has not informed many other cases on noise pollution, so it remains to be seen whether another court will hammer out the ambiguities of defining noise and noise pollution.
The Oxford English Dictionary is not too helpful either:
Noise
1.
a. Sound; the aggregate of sounds occurring in a particular place or at a particular time; (also) disturbance caused by sounds, discordancy, (in early use) esp. disturbance made by voices; shouting, outcry; also in {dag}to keep noise (obs.).
b. Any of various kinds of music characterized by use of dissonance or inharmonious noise, esp. loud distorted guitar, amplifier noise, feedback, etc. Freq. attrib. Cf. noise-rock n. at Compounds 2.
2. As a count noun.
a. A sound that is
characteristic of a person, animal, or thing. Also fig.
b. A sound
of any kind, esp. a loud, harsh, or unpleasant one.
Noise Pollution
n. harmful or annoying noise in the environment.
Consider, for instance, definition 1.b. – Jimi Hendrix's music (which employed dissonance through the frequent use of the E7#9 chord, a chord that implies both a major and minor third) and Igor Stravinsky's music (which famously, in Petrushka, imposed a C major triad over an F# triad in first inversion) could be considered noise by this definition. Definition 2.b., too, is delightfully ambiguous; to borrow from the French, chacun à son goût. At least the definition of noise pollution captures the essence of the physical limits of sound that a person can endure – an annoying externality indeed.
Tom Tietenberg has written that “one of the characteristics of an efficient property-rights structure is exclusivity. [...] This is violated in practice leading potentially to externalities and market failure.” In practice, when people live in close proximity, noises escaping from their property (whether real or chattel) will inevitably impose externalities on others; each person's subjective taste at a given moment in time will determine to an extent whether that externality is positive or negative. What, then, can be done to objectively regulate an almost purely subjective taste? (Certainly, noise is not purely a subjective taste because noise beyond a certain sound pressure causes pain, as suggested in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of noise pollution)
One might argue that Ronald Coase could come to the rescue. But, I offer this real-life example of the occasional impracticality of Coasean bargaining: while camping in Yellowstone this summer, my wife and I were woken at 6:00 am by a Harley rider's bike. When I walked into the washroom to brush my teeth, the gentleman inside did not say good morning; instead, he said, “Did you hear that damn Harley driver?” Coasean bargaining can be impractical: consider the Harley driver negotiating a fee with each camper the night before his early-morning ride – there are simply too many economic agents involved, particularly with sounds.
Moreover, we can't truly measure the utility that the Harley rider derives in 'utils' (now, an almost useless term); only ranking of preferences (namely, ordinal utility) is possible. Thus, we cannot say that the Harley driver reaps 400 utils of benefit whilst the campers suffer 500 utils of disutility. Even if numbers could be ascribed to utility, the scholarly criticism of utilitarianism is vast – after all, what is 'the good'? For example, in one of Dan Dennett's brilliant books, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett suggests that the Three Mile Island incident brought suffering to some while adding fuel to the anti-nuclear movement. Yet, to me at least, in the Harley example above, the aggregate dissatisfaction of 400 campers eclipses the Harley rider's right to enjoy his motorcycle and its sound (which, interestingly, Harley has sought to trademark) – but that metric is entirely a product of my own subjective opinion.
As with a Harley and, say, an errant strain of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan emanating from a boombox (the former bothers me while the latter pleases me – albeit only at certain times), David Hume has written that, "a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right: Because no sentiment represents what is really in the object. It only marks a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind. [...] One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce to his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others." Indeed, I would argue that tastes are so varied that one man's More-ish music- or motorcycle-induced utopia could easily be another man's Metropolesque dystopia.
Is there any point to all of this? Perhaps. First, the SCC majority wisely found that it would be impractical to use decibel level as the sole criterion by which noise pollution could be determined. Citing Chamberland J. A., they wrote that, “[I]t would take a forest of sound level meters and an army of qualified technicians lying in waiting to monitor the noise produced by sound equipment at different times of day and night, everywhere in greater Montréal.” Second, we are still left without a clear definition of what constitutes noise and noise pollution.
Finally, in a world with a growing population (albeit at a decreasing rate of growth), where one man's ceiling is increasingly another man's floor, and given that people are leaving their bucolic lives for the Pumpkin Spice Frappucinos of the cities (increasing, in some instances, population densities), it is likely that noise pollution, whatever it is, will continue to exist despite legislators and judges' best efforts.
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