New York's prodigious crash-bang-rattle-screech, in the estimation of Health Commissioner Shirley Wilmott Wynne, engenders juvenile neuroses. The city's Noise Abatement Commission has found classrooms in nearly one-third of the public schools so din-ridden as to be virtually useless. In its researches the Commission (which does no actual abating but carries on investigations of noise) uses the "decibel," which measures differences between sounds and absolute silence. One decibel represents a sound just audible. Ten decibels make one "bel" (named for the late Inventor Alexander Graham Bell), which represents roughly the amount of sound...
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