Federal Office of Noise Abatement

Let's talk about the current state of noise in the United States. What did you say? i couldn't hear you. From inside your home? Yes, it was a jet flying over our neighborhood, or was it a recreational prop plane on a Sunday excursion, or is it a C130 from Fort whatever? I'm not sure, but they seem to have free run of our airways despite the millions of Americans that live directly below them bathing in the wash of their airplane noise. What did you say? I can't hear you. The Federal Office of Noise Abatement (What the heck is that?) has gone unfunded in the EPA since Reagan was in office. (not the Federal Office of Noise Abatement) the office of the Presidency. Does such a thing exist, an office within the Environmental Protection Agency, to protect we the people from the burgeoning phenomenon of Harley Davidson rumble, muffler resonators, the thump of bass in so many vehicles, and who knows what else? Well, it ain't happening. There was a "sting" this weekend in a particular town meant to target the driving force of some of this noise, agressive drivers. An agressive driver is one that tailgates, changes lanes too often, runs red lights, and intimidates other drivers often with the thump, thump, thump of a menacing sounding 500 watts of bass in the rumble seat. Well to segue, that seems to have been the style for almost the entire last decade. What is it about infrasonic sound that people find so appealing? Almost every movie in the last decade began to use those invariably dull droning, jungle drums in the opening credits of their film. After one or two this was a cliche. Now it seems to be the widely accepted norm for a movie sound track. Just add a little 20-50 Hertz noise on the bottom of the foley and score and voila! A hit film? Or just really annoying unrealistic antagonizing noise. The latter for moi. Humans associate infrasound with impending doom and disaster as with a tornado, a hurricane, an avalanche, or an encroaching dinosaur. Boom, boom, boom come the steps of the predator, coming to eat you. Is this the tone, the message, the mood that every major Hollywood film wants to impart at the beginning of every film? Terror, doom, gloom, death. What happened to pleasant sounds? The chirp of a bird, the clanking of a cowbell, the rustling of a brook. Are we as Superheroes, Kung Fu fighters, Devil's Rejects, and Crime Scene Investigators not worthy of a little foreplay of sound? Is this really the modern Dark Ages according to Hollywood cinema? That cliche is dead, and it is time for composers to get over it and begin composing meaningful scores again. Forget the samplers, the plug ins, the loops, and everything else related to computer sequencer based composing. I dare Hollywood to junk the computer and make their music be performed live on a sound stage like the Golden Years of Hollywood. Can they do it? You mean feel and express music with phrases, sentences, gradually lilting up and down like golden speech, not metronomic and square like a computer sequencer or a Nick Thorp score? Forget the constant droning 8th note pulse like badly performed Baroque music, everything the SAME dynamic level, every note the same inflection, no crecsendo, decrescendo, no tension/release, no MUSIC. Hollywood and the commercial music industry need to get over this dark period of creativity and resurrect the band. If not, the piano may become obsolete in commercial music and this cacaphony of noise we experience every day will continue to push murderers over the brink of insanity.