Audio Stimulus Dependency Disorder: A Proposed Diagnostic Classification
Michael Phillip Wright
Norman, Oklahoma
Copyright 2002
All Rights Reserved
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March 10, 2002

I have lived in the University of Oklahoma area since my college years in the late 1960s and early '70s. In 1980 I began to observe a strange development in some of the campus bars. Large TV screens were being installed, and bar owners were adopting the practice of turning on the TVs but without sound. Instead, they would play loud entertainment noise from their stereos. One could be watching a TV newscaster without hearing what he was saying, while from the stereo there would be ugly screeching amelodic noise with thumping bass and percussive effects in the foreground.

I turned 33 in that year, and my ideas about what music was all about had been formed at a time when melody was considered to be the essence of music rather than booming bass and frenetic percussive effects. The noise blasting from the stereos struck me as garbage and I found it irritating. It was also loud to the point of making me uncomfortable. At that time I had never seen any literature nor heard any expert opinion on the problem of noise-induced hearing loss, but I had an intuitive feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong and even unhealthy about this arrangement.

From my common sense perspective, it seemed stupid to have the TV on without the sound. What were we supposed to do? Read the newscaster's lips? At that time, I didn't quite understand what was happening.

The explanation occurred to me a few years later. A new generation, born since 1960, had come to dominate the college scene by 1980. The bar owners, in order to maximize their profits, had to adjust their facilities in order to meet the needs of the younger group. Their childhood experience had been vastly different from mine. They had received a much larger dose of communication from radios, TVs, and stereos, and they were uncomfortable in the absence of continuing stimulus from these electronic surrogate parents.

The changing circumstances of the typical American home also figure into the explanation. Compared to the 1950s, far fewer children born since 1960 enjoyed the advantage of being nurtured to adulthood in a household with both biological parents and a mother who stayed at home and read them bedtime stories at night. In the '60s, single-parent families and households with both parents working outside the home became far more common. Under these conditions, the TV became a convenient and affordable child-care assistant, and many children born into these households were placed in front of televisions before they were out of diapers.

In this situation the TV became normalized for these children as a continuing presence -- often simply a video stimulus rather than a carrier of intelligent communication. Radios and stereos were present as sources of audio stimulus. For students of the 80s whose home environments had provided continuing exposure to audio and video devices, there was nothing strange about entering bars operating TVs with their sound turned off while stereos were blasting away. Further, a dependency had developed which manifested itself in discomfort and distraction when the stimulus was absent.

As of 2002, sociologists, psychologists, health professionals, and educators appear not yet to have figured out what bar owners implicitly understood in 1980. In 1980, I remember asking a bartender why he played loud screechy noise on the stereo. He described an occasion when a few fellows came inside and there was no "music" pumping from the speakers. "There's nothin' happening here," one of them complained, and they left.

For those who are burdened by the affliction I propose to call Audio Stimulus Dependency Disorder (ASDD), loud entertainment noise must be present in order for something to be "happening." Noise is necessary to validate experience as worthwhile. Discomfort and boredom are the consequences of its absence. The afflicted are unable to entertain themselves with their thoughts, imaginations, and conversation. Noise fills the empty space between their ears.

The ugly new circumstances of the campus bars were an unfriendly development for me in the '80s. Although never a heavy drinker, throughout my college years the campus bars and cafes, free of booming stereos, had nourished both my social and intellectual life. I could walk into any of several places in the area and always know I would find compatible people as partners in conversation. I even developed marketable musical skills on fiddle and mandolin in this environment.

I never had a single class in computer science, but I acquired computer programming skills through trial and error and some personal tutoring. In the '70s I used to take print-outs with error messages on computer programs and spread them out at a campus cafe to study them over endless coffee refills. I had a friend who was a trained mathemetician and programmer. He used to scribble solutions for me on napkins. All this was possible because the atmosphere was free of ugly booming noise pumping from stereos to nourish the needs of the ASDD-afflicted.

Under the circumstance of a quiet environment where I could interact effectively with the talented people of a university town, I developed skills in a variety of areas outside my formal training in sociology. In 1987 I was a guest soloist performing Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto with the Norman Chamber Orchestra, a distinguished group of OU music faculty and Oklahoma Symphony players. In the early '90s I was awarded four federal grants for health risk assessment computer software development. These endeavors also led to three health science publications catalogued at the National Library of Medicine (see biographical website).

During those days before the age of noise pollution, I never thought to be grateful for the fact that I was living in a quiet world. Quiet was a gift I did not appreciate until it was taken away from me.

What It Was Like in the Sixties

During my college student years, bars typically had juke boxes which were fed by coins. Music was played only at the customers' initiative, and it was never loud enough to be irritating or to interfere with normal conversation. I remember the black-and-white television in the Library Bar, west of the OU campus. It would be operated during some event of special interest, the sound would be on, and bar patrons listened to the TV. During these events, it would have been considered extremely rude to play the juke box. I specifically remember watching and listening to the 1974 Nixon resignation speech at the Library Bar. The whole room fell silent. The patrons wanted to hear what he had to say. We would talk about it later.

For the younger people who have known only the age of noise pollution: the earlier environment I have described is the way it is supposed to be. We no longer have a sane relationship to media technology. We have chaos, overstimulation, huge TV screens, whirring video games, flashing lights, ASDD, and barroom environments which serve no purpose other than to promote heavy liquor sales, hearing impairment, and the suppression of intelligent human-to-human communication.

My Developing Awareness of the Noise Pollution Problem

The first impact which I suffered from the emergence of noise pollution was upon my social life. Loud ugly stereo noise, while a welcome experience for the younger ASDD-afflicted crowd, simply destroyed the social conviviality of the campus bar scene for me. I do not like to shout to be understood, and I enjoy in-depth conversations. Noise pollution in bars imposes a death sentence upon intelligent communication and limits conversations to truncated banalities.

Under these new conditions my own personality, which had been formed in a far more quiet atmosphere more supportive of verbal skill development, became compressed, for personality is not expressed outside of a social setting, and sociability does not exist without communication. A man living with no other humans on an island has no personality. Noise pollution subverts our social instincts.

Social isolation was only the first of many problems which would present themselves on the vicious agenda of noise pollution. I began to wonder if hearing impairment would be a consequence of the booming loud stereos. In pursuit of this suspicion I visited the Oklahoma Department of Health in 1982, and was given an audiology journal article entitled "Hard Rock Music and Hearing Damage Risk" (Ralph Rupp, et al., Sound and Vibration 8, No. 1, January 1974, pp. 24-26).

The authors reported a survey of rock bands which found the average decibel level of performances to be 105. They also reported that decibel levels greater than 85 for a two-hour exposure created danger of hearing impairment. Since the decibel scale is exponential, 105 decibels has 100 times the sound intensity of 85.

Hearing impairment is America's most prevalent chronic illness, with an estimated 28 million cases. Federal health officials believe that at least 10 million cases of hearing impairment have been caused by excessive noise, and loud rock music is frequently mentioned as an important contributor to this problem ("Noise and Hearing Loss," Journal of the American Medical Association 263, No. 23, June 20, 1990, p. 3185).

Evidence of ASDD

Evidence of Audio Stimulus Dependency Disorder can be found everywhere in our society. I have heard students admit that they cannot study without a radio or stereo. Some admit that they cannot go to sleep without the TV or some other electronic media device. Around finals time I notice students in the OU library studying with stereo earphones. They are turned up so loudly that others can hear the stimulus. It isn't music. It's just a "boom-shooka boom-shooka" percussive effect -- a drug for the noise-addicted.

The OU Student Union provides a setting for observing the way in which the university administration has accommodated the campus to the needs of the ASDD-afflicted. The main dining room at an earlier time was a quiet dignified setting in which students could study and engage in stimulating dialogues. Now it is an entertainment center with a loud CD-player offering thump-boom stimulus. The lobby of the Union is now encumbered with a huge video screen with a continuing stream of banality along with OU's cable TV station from which student operators take delight in blasting their noise whenever the mood strikes them. Other students occupying booths to peddle tickets to their events bring their portable boom boxes along to attract attention. The union lobby has deteriorated into a torture chamber of audio warfare. Students who desire quiet while browsing in the adjacent bookstore are out of luck. At OU, noise rules.

A couple of years ago a new restaurant and lounge was completed in the Union building. Six large video screens were installed in the area. There is one large room with a video at both ends. They are usually tuned to different channels, so that any viewer who seriously wants to hear the dialogue from one TV will have to contend with noise from the others. This situation makes no sense, unless one understands that the point is not to stimulate thinking or even entertain the mind by engaging the viewers' attention on a story line. The point is to nourish a need for video stimulus.

Collapse of Etiquette

As ASDD has become more common, traditional social etiquette in our society has been collapsing. One reason for this is that people have been learning to communicate more with devices than with other people. As illustrated in the extreme case by the boom car cretins, there is also a growing tendency to express identity and even pursue domination through one's relationship to devices. Given this state of affairs, it comes as no surprise that respect for other people and for common rules of civility observed during earlier times is collapsing.

The rude behavior of students in the University of Oklahoma library provides impressive evidence for this development. Students now gather in once quiet study areas and converse loudly as though they were in a bar. They often bring their portable computers and play noisy software. A ban against cell phones in the library was announced in the spring of 2001, but violations happen with great frequency and the ban is not enforced. The noise-makers in the library have little respect for the quaint rule that the facility is a place for quiet study and less respect for their fellow students -- few though they may be -- who still take that rule seriously. In the meantime, indifferent OU library administrators draw their comfortable salaries and pretend not to notice the problem. Unless interrupted by conscientious action from administrators, this situation will only deteriorate as new students entering the university follow the examples set by their older peers.

Study Links Violence to TV-Watching

A Washington Post article (3/29/02) reports a Columbia University study that found watching more than one hour of TV daily is followed by increases in the rate of assaults, fights, robberies and other aggressive acts in later years. I would suggest that violent expression associated with stimulus from electronic media sources is a more extreme form of ASDD. The study had been published in the journal Science (3/29/02).

What Is in Store for the Future?

As a species, we are de-evolving. As indicated by the trends in human behavior being observed in the age of noise pollution and ASDD, our veneer of civilization is slowly peeling away. At the extreme end of the spectrum of human behaviors, within the last decade we have seen violent crimes which were unspeakable at mid-20th century: cannibalism, random school shootings, and murder of children by their mothers. In March 2002 we were greeted with the news of 25-year-old nurse's aid Chante Mallard being charged with murder for plowing into a homeless man with her car and leaving him to die from shock and blood loss over the course of two days. Audio thugs, their vehicles armed with powerful bass speakers, unleash their noise aggression throughout American cities and take joy in their ability to inflict anger, annoyance, and sleep deprivation on other members of their communities. At the other end of the continuum, in places where we expect polite behavior, we find deterioration. Along these lines I have already offered the growing epidemic of rudeness in the University of Oklahoma library. Unfortunately, I doubt if the OU situation is unique.

August 2002 Update

The following is taken from a Yahoo news item reported on August 14, 2002:

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) - A 17-year-old boy and his 12-year-old half-sister have been arrested on suspicion of killing their mother because she wouldn't let the girl go to a party.

Police said the two allegedly smashed Francisca Comparan, 43, in the head with a frying pan, then strangled her with an extension cord Friday. Her body was found stuffed in an outdoor storage closet.

Human creativity springs from imagination, which is the ability to entertain oneself with one's thoughts. Those afflicted with ASDD do not know this experience. Noise pollution is ushering in mass stultification and will ultimately result in the loss of our humanity unless this trend is brought under control and reversed. What is it that makes us distinctly human? It is our language, and language developed in the course of face-to-face communication among humans. As face-to-device communication becomes the norm, we can expect the quality of language to be reduced, and humanity to diminish accordingly. As indicated by the pathetically poor use of grammar, spelling, and punctuation in much of the hate mail I received from the boom car boys who discovered this website, the process is already well under way.

Update: The "Lively" Norman Public Library

April 24, 2002

This afternoon I was speaking to a librarian at the Norman Library. She is 85 years old and still working. She remembers the days when libraries were expected to be quiet. In the current period, when many people appear to be troubled by the absence of audio or video stimulus, this once sacred rule of civil conduct in libraries is collapsing.

I told her how much I hated the fact that the announced ban against cell phones in the OU library is never enforced. She told me that she had tried to convince the administration of the Norman Library to enact such a ban, but they rejected her suggestion.

As I was leaving the building, I was handed a questionnaire form asking me to evaluate the library on various criteria. One of the questions asked was whether I considered the library to be "lively" enough ! I scribbled my comments on the form:

"Huh? Since when is a library supposed to be "lively?" Libraries should be QUIET."

Their concern for the question of whether the library is "lively" enough is shocking. It indicates that librarians are abandoning their responsibility to provide an atmosphere for reading and quiet deliberation engaging long attention spans. Such capabilities are diminishing in our population. Librarians are capitulating to the over-stimulated generation's need for continuing stimulus and entertainment. Nero would be proud of them.

See also Cultural Decline and ASDD in Ancient Rome

Call For Action

Mental health agencies and educational institutions need to recognize ASDD and begin to treat it. Unfortunately, these organizations are not controlled by idealists, visionaries, and men of principle. They are controlled by cynical bureaucrats who will not address a problem unless their agency is funded for it.

Change will happen when enough sufferers from noise pollution organize to demand it. For the specific problem of ASDD, political pressure needs to be placed upon the National Institute of Mental Health and those committees in Congress which fund government health agencies. When grant monies for this problem start flowing to state departments of mental health, all of a sudden the pompous uncaring bureaucrats in charge of them will discover enlightenment.

An Audio Stimulus Dependency Disorder Checklist

Are you an ASDD case? Answer the questions on this simple checklist to see:

1. Do you usually have the radio or stereo on when you read or study?

2. Do you usually have the radio or stereo on, by your own choice, when doing your job?

3. Do you usually like to have a radio or stereo on when socializing with friends?

4. Do you usually have either radio, TV, or stereo on during waking hours in your home?

5. Do you need a radio, stereo, or TV on when going to sleep?

6. Do you always have the car stereo or radio on when driving down the highway?

7. Do you feel some sense of discomfort or stress when neither the radio, stereo, or TV is on?

8. When driving down the highway, are you unable to entertain yourself with your own thoughts?

9. Do you operate a vehicle on public streets with powerful bass speakers which can be heard by people outside the vehicle?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, then you are an ASDD case. The severity to which you are afflicted increases with the number of yes answers. If you answered "yes" to number 9, then you are not only an ASDD case but also a public nuisance.

Treatment

To my knowledge, the mental health and counseling professions do not even recognize ASDD and have developed no treatments. I see this as a very treatable disorder, though. Recognition of the problem is the first step. The next step involves self-discipline.

Try living a day of your life without any exposure to radio, TV, or stereo. Find a good friend and a quiet place and just converse. Tell stories. Daydream. Play checkers, dominoes, or chess. Exercise your imagination. Develop the habit of entertaining yourself with your own thoughts. Repeat the experience until you are free of the noise habit.

Take up acoustic guitar. It can be very relaxing, and since it's not amplified you won't risk hearing impairment with it and won't annoy your neighbors.

Find a hiking trail and take a hike. Don't bring your boom box. Teach yourself that you can live without audio or video stimulus. Remember, humanity thrived on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years before TVs, radios, and stereos were invented. We have no natural need for them. The need is artificial and was created by marketers.

Define yourself. Don't let the marketers tell you who you are.

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Related Article: Media Violence, Noise Pollution, and Gunfire