"Hush ... silence!
The night hangs from the sky!"
Federico García Lorca.
Noise has become one of the great impediments to achieving an adequate quality of life in large cities. The problem is difficult to solve since 90 percent of the noise comes from road traffic. The situation is increasingly worrying and, in many cases, the levels to which we are subjected border on the limits that Hygiene and Medicine consider dangerous for health.
In Spain, noise pollution is the one that most worries individuals and institutions. Concern about noise exceeds that of air pollution. The situation that has been reached is not strange if we consider that our country is the noisiest in Europe and the second in the world, after Japan, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
Mediterranean culture is not exactly a culture of silence. Noise has become omnipotent and there is no awareness of the serious damage it can cause. Currently, the noises produced by the daily activity of a city have become a true acoustic aggression for citizens.
90 percent of the noise endured by the inhabitants of cities in any country with a medium or high degree of motorization is caused by road traffic. As the automobile fleet grows and the road network increases, the sources of noise expand, increasing the levels of noise pollution. However, this noise is more tolerated by people than that from clearly localized or personalized sources against which a clear rejection is experienced. This is the case of bars, nightclubs and entertainment venues that monopolize the largest number of complaints and grievances. Most of the claims that are made are related to community and industrial sources. It is common to hear the complaint that the houses have paper walls, but people continue to buy or rent apartments without demanding the slightest guarantee of acoustic insulation.
As for industries, they have become one of the main sources of noise because they do not meet the necessary insulation requirements.
Noise has become a difficult problem to solve due to the variety of sources that produce it and the lack of awareness of the citizens themselves to reduce the levels of noise that they themselves produce.
Regardless of the alterations suffered by the auditory system, noise pollution can cause serious damage to physical and mental health, which affects social and work relationships.
Greater awareness of citizens is necessary so that the inhabitants of large cities do not gradually become deaf, but the fight against noise pollution must be supported by clear and concise legislation that allows the competent authorities to regulate the main sources of noise.
In the fight against noise there can be no waiting, it is not possible to escape, but it is possible to cry out to the heavens to say, with the poet: "The silence of each day / give us today, Lord. / And forgive us if on earth / we do not hear you better".
Francisco Arias Solis
