I am wondering which industrial noise is most common for the residents of North America.
My nominee is the railroad grade crossing air horn cadence of long, long, short, long.
Your thoughts, please.
I’m not sure what qualifies as an industrial noise. The garbage truck coming to pick up my garbage? The beep-beep-beep of a big truck backing up?
How about noontime sirens?
This was what I came in to say. It’s not just big trucks that make this noise, it’s also common on construction equipment like Bobcats. It’s also starting to appear on regular vehicles. My father recently bought a new F-150 and it has the backup alarm.
I hear both the train horns and aircraft (I live almost directly under one of the downwind approach lanes to SeaTac airport). Neither one bothers me because I grew up hearing both; in fact, I think I’d miss them if they weren’t there. Garbage trucks and backup alarms are also kind of background.
If the wind’s right I definitely hear freeway noise, especially if a trucker pulls a Jake Brake. But I’m not sure whether that counts as “industrial noise.”
In 2007 a propane tank exploded at a foundry about a mile away as the guttersnipe flies, and I certainly noticed it. Definitely industrial, but not exactly common.
And every time you go into a store, or even outside as in gas stations. Everything beeps at you.
I find the noise ranges, depending on the beeper, from mildly to acutely unpleasant. And how can it possibly serve as an alert signal when everything’s beeping, all the time?
Only some people hear train horns. I’m one of them; but I’ve also lived places where you couldn’t. A lot more people hear continuous or nearly continuous car/truck traffic; this may be even more ubiquitious than the beeping.
We live in the country. There is a railroad crossing ~4 miles from us. If I have my hearing aid in, I can sometimes hear the train horn.
The most obvious thing to me is engine noises.
It’s an unusual day from late April through October in the Bluegrass that the sounds of commercial lawn mowing aren’t somewhere within earshot.
Thankfully, people around here mostly don’t bother with weed-whacking or (even more thankfully) leaf-blowing.
Everywhere I’ve lived in the past few decades has been within the sound of train whistles. But it’s been a long time since foghorns in the harbor were commonplace.
At the old place we were nearish to railroad tracks and quite close to a school.
The train noise was mostly the horns blowing as it approached the crossings and a small amount of direct click-clack sound. It was quite easy to get used to the horn noise.
With the school, the main thing was the very early morning noise from the dumpsters being emptied into the garbage trucks. The metal lids and such banging around was quite annoying.
We were sometimes under the flight path for a busy airport. Planes “whooshing” while losing altitude could be quite loud. (But not as loud as the single-engine plane that flew low directly over our house. It’s propeller clipped our tree-tops and then the plane crashed a couple blocks away.)
At the current place the main noise is the large amount of construction and construction traffic. Even in our immediate few blocks, despite all the homes being finished, there are all sorts of upgrades and what not going on all the time. E.g., a neighbor had a new cement patio put in last year. And now a Trex deck is being put over the top of it. And all these things get really stretched out due to shortages of supplies and workers. So it just goes on and on.
I live in a place where you’d think that would be common, and probably was at some point. However I’ve never heard one IRL. The only place I’ve ever heard it is on a youtube channel because the guy’s shop is across the street from a place that uses a siren to let everyone know it’s lunch time.
Wait, is that what you’re talking about or do you mean tornado sirens?
You’d be amazed at how much that’s improved over the years. I live very close to an airport and I work directly across the street from one. I hear airplanes constantly, but due to them getting quieter and tuning them out after 40 years, I really don’t hear them that much anymore. But go back to the 80’s/90’s and you’d have to pause your conversation if a plane was overhead or you wouldn’t be able to hear the other person.
It was common enough that even if you were on the phone when it happened, both people knew to wait a minute.
Though trying to explain that to someone (on the phone) that wasn’t near the airport sometimes proved difficult.
As much as I love watching the planes and I don’t mind hearing them, I am glad my house isn’t under a flight path. I’m used to the noise, but they are loud when they come in low and right over your head.
I live less than a mile from the railroad tracks. The trains come through my small town pretty regularly at around 2230 to 2330 every night.
I’ve lived here long enough now that I have to make a conscious effort at listening in order to hear them.
How often does the train go by?
No, I meant the siren, whistle, or other sound everyday at 12 noon. I don’t know how common it still is, a town in PA was still doing it a few years ago.
The one I’ve heard (in the background of a youtuber’s video) is in a small town in New York.
We might live fairly close to each other. When planes are taking off to the south from Sea-Tac, most end up flying right over my house. Plus I can hear the noise from the big rail yard in Auburn and traffic noise from Highway 18 rolls right up the hill adding to the noise. Plus there is a drag strip a couple miles away. And I shouldn’t forget the guy with the small saw mill a few blocks away.
A couple of them still do it around here. (Finger Lakes area New York State.)
The closest railroad crossing in my city in 7-8 miles away and on some days I can hear the horn sound loud and clear all the way to my house. I have to have my windows open in that direction though.
I live in suburban Chicago; the area is a major rail hub for North America, and seven of the eight Class I railroads which operate in the U.S. run though the area. I have three different rail lines (BNSF, CN, and Illinois Harbor Belt) which run within a mile of my house, so train horns are a common part of the audio landscape. Only the BNSF tracks are close enough to actually be able to hear the train on the rails, and that’s only on quiet evenings, with the windows open.
Beyond that, it’s truck engines, and airplane noise. Planes leaving (or approaching) O’Hare are usually high enough up that their noise isn’t particularly loud, but if the wind is coming from the east, then the primary approach route to Midway goes directly over my house, and that gets loud.