Summer brings about a sharp rise in noise. We are born in a world of silence punctuated with the sounds of life, laughter and crying, the bellowing of a bull, the roar of a waterfall, the crack of thunder, the song of a happy bird in the tall trees.
Sound, however, becomes unhappy noise when it does not respect the intervals of silence, when it rises above what we can bear, when it causes us harm.
To some of us it might come as a surprise that unwelcome noise can cause harm. When the subject is brought up in discussion, some invariably argue that it is in our culture to be noisy. They seem to be quite oblivious to the cultural philosophy that not everything in a culture is worth preserving or worth bragging about.
In any case, noise pollution can hurt. It can be caused by a number of sources, including traffic, aircraft and industrial equipment.
In Malta, we may add excessive noise from neighbourhoods, street hawkers, door-banging at night, happy horn-hooting inside towns and every time our team wins or the enemy loses - and, of course, petards and fireworks even in the early hours of the morning despite all promises of protection from on high.
The truth is that we have not begun (effectively) to take stock of the noise pollution situation.
What harm can a little noise do? An EU Commission reports that some of the persons that are annoyed by noise may also experience other effects. These include sleep disturbance, interference with communication or even mental health effects or noise-induced hearing impairments. It also reports that hypertension or ischaemic heart disease may occur in case of long-term exposure to noise levels above 65dB.
Moreover, it goes on, in the EU, 17 per cent of the population is exposed to this very high level of noise pollution. But this figure goes up to 50 per cent in the east European countries. One wonders where Malta would stand, or whether it would stand at all.
Who would believe that noise cost money? But it does. Noise pollution comes at a financial cost. These include medical costs, cost of lost working days and in certain cases even costs from a reduction in the price of housing or from the possibilities of land-use.
So civilised countries make laws against noise. EU laws cover the ordinary appliances we use every day in our homes. They cover noise at work as well as provide a standard method for noise measurement.
In our country, noise pollution is hardly regulated at all and our awareness on this issue is not yet sufficiently high. But gradually, the public is becoming less indifferent to annoyance from noise.
Noise connected with discos has been discussed before, but mainly with neighbours' distress rather than the harm done to the people dancing. Noise pollution from outdoor meetings, festa-making, concerts and piped music has hardly ever been the subject of attention by the authorities.
One has only to experience Valletta on a happy day or night when music, sound and noise from different sources, and half a dozen different styles of attack, can be enjoyed simultaneously, and all, as it were, for the price of one!