“What?”
“Say again?”
“Huh?”
This gripping conversation is happening right this minute at a restaurant somewhere on earth. Remember when you could whisper to your dinner companion or eavesdrop on the strange couple at the next table? It was dinner and a show. Now you’re shouting, mumbling, or texting the person across the table just to make yourself understood.
Restaurants aren’t the only issue. Walk into any Barry’s Bootcamp or SoulCycle and you’ll likely find the E.D.M. is cranked up over the roar of the machines while an instructor shouts into a microphone. Have a nice workout, and be sure to grab a pair of earplugs on your way in!
Parties, gyms, concerts, IMAX movies, Jet Skis, subways, leaf blowers, the construction upstairs, the jackhammers on the corner, the noises in your head—the world is getting more cacophonous while it simultaneously bursts into flames.
Amy Butchko, of the Springs Collective, designs interiors for restaurants, including Le Veau d’Or, Frenchette, the Four Horsemen, and the Nines in New York City, and she tries to encourage owners to prioritize acoustics. “Sometimes it’s a fight I lose,” she says. The New York Times gave Frenchette three stars, with Pete Wells describing the noise level as “thunderous in the bar” and “a dull roar in the dining room.”
After the restaurant opened, Butchko and team had to install acoustical ceiling tiles to try to soften the blows. Le Veau d’Or, from the same restaurant group, is grappling with the same noise complaints, even with its Infatuation rating of 9 out of 10.
La Côte Basque, La Caravelle, La Grenouille—all those fine French restaurants of New York’s past were known for their carpeted and tableclothed hush. But that changed in the late 1990s when many restaurants replaced the padded formality with buzz and energy.
Mario Batali raised the decibel level further when he opened Babbo in 1998 and blasted Led Zeppelin in the dining room. Now it’s hard to find a restaurant that doesn’t have a distinctive soundtrack. The music, the conversation, “it becomes an escalating crisis of amplification,” says Butchko. “You’re forever in a zero-sum game of pain.”
As the world becomes louder, noise-related hearing loss is a growing risk for younger and younger people. A 2010 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that one in five U.S. adolescents suffers from some degree of hearing loss—an increase of 31 percent since the early 1990s.
It may not be as sexy as NAD+ infusions and cryotherapy, but protecting your hearing is clearly more crucial for wellness and longevity. “When we talk about hearing loss, we rarely put it in the context of healthy aging and all the implications,” says Stefan Launer, vice president of audiology and health innovation at Sonova, a Switzerland-based maker of hearing technology. “But people with hearing loss become less active, and they don’t talk as much. And that has an impact on other behaviors.”
Joseph Montano, an audiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, treats a number of rock stars whose hearing is shot. He says, “If you wind up with hearing loss as a result of noise exposure, one of the most tragic effects is social isolation. You stop going to restaurants because you can’t communicate, and then you stop seeing your friends and doing the things you want to do in life.”
It may not be as sexy as NAD+ infusions and cryotherapy, but protecting your hearing is clearly more crucial for wellness and longevity.
That has a cascading effect. As less auditory information comes into the brain, that area can atrophy, which can ultimately result in dementia, according to a study last year at Johns Hopkins. The auditory region of the brain is close to the one associated with Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting an association there as well.
And as if that weren’t enough, “hearing-impaired people also have a higher risk of falls and more incidence of diabetes,” says Launer. “It impacts other health issues.”
These risks can be mitigated by hearing aids, but good luck getting sufferers to acknowledge their problem. That’s partly because hearing deteriorates so gradually. When Montano shows his patients a graph mapping the cold, hard facts of their hearing test, they often say, I have no hearing loss.
That’s when he gives them a self-assessment scale and a subtest to reveal their degree of denial. One of the questions is “You’re at a wedding and you’re sitting next to the band. Is it difficult to communicate?” “Somebody in denial would say, ‘Never’ or ‘Hardly ever.’ But anybody with normal hearing would say, ‘I just can’t hear them if I’m sitting next to the band,’” Montano explains. “Hearing loss is so slow; I’m talking decades. I don’t really like to classify people as deniers. It’s just their perception of how they live with their hearing loss.”
Pretty much no one wants to wear hearing aids, and that adds to their determination to ignore the problem. It’s like broadcasting your age to the world, says Montano. “People would rather live with their hearing loss than get hearing aids. We only reach maybe 25 percent of people who need them.”
My friend Jane has been on a mission about the shattering noise levels at restaurants and parties, telling all who can still hear her that they’re destroying their health. One birthday, she gave me noise-canceling earbuds, and I wore them the other night to a concert at Madison Square Garden. We had a great time, chatting and listening to Dave Matthews as if it were chamber music in a parlor.
My noise-canceling earbuds are by Bose. But there are stylish earplugs from Loop and Eargasm for as little as $35 that lower the volume without muffling the sound quality. And the AirPods Pro 2 have new software that helps the earbuds screen out background noise and enhance the ability to detect conversation.
The most sophisticated hearing aids use cutting-edge technology to improve intelligibility in difficult situations. Sonova’s latest invention is the Sphere Infinio, which holds a chip that applies A.I. to heighten the clarity of speech against varying background noises, squeezing the tech to fit behind the ear. When Launer encounters someone who refuses to wear aids, he takes them to lunch, hands them a pair, and tells them to pop them in. By the end of the meal, they’re convinced. “Men are typically more difficult than women. I ask them, Does it help? And they’ll say, No, not much. ‘So do you want to give it back?’ No, no. It’s really best to push them to try it.”
Slowly, people are changing their behavior. Launer says the use of such devices has doubled in the U.S. and wear time has increased. And even though many of these aids are produced in colors other than beige or black, most people want whatever’s least visible. “It’s a bit of a bummer,” says Launer, “because that says it’s still stigmatized.”
Meanwhile, restaurants may at last be hearing their guests’ complaints and finding better ways to reduce the racket. At the Four Horsemen, in Brooklyn, one of the owners, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, happens to be obsessed with acoustics. In the restaurant, “you can hear every note of every album they play and every whispered word from your dining companions,” says Butchko. “It’s really perfect.” The only remaining challenge is getting a reservation.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look
