Hate noisy restaurants? Stick this in your ear

Earbuds can carve out a personal quiet zone in crowded spaces such as restaurants. Photo / Marissa Alper, The New York Times

Apple earbuds and others can help you hear dining companions. Here’s how to use them.

Booking a table for two at Tao Downtown, I hesitated when I got to the box asking whether I had a special request. I did, but I wasn’t sure how it would go down. Would I be the first customer in history to ask for a noisy table?

This is not a normal ask, but I had my reasons. Recently I’d been trying to find out whether the way to hear and be heard in a dining room filled with booming speakers and screaming diners might be as simple as wearing a pair of earbuds. To put it to the test, I needed something I usually try to avoid: a hellishly loud restaurant.

As you may have heard, Apple announced last month that it would soon introduce new software enabling its AirPods Pro 2 earbuds to act as over-the-counter hearing aids for mild to moderate hearing loss, adjustable to your own ears. (You will be able to take a simple exam from Apple on your device, or upload the findings of one given by an audiologist.)

What you may not know is that the AirPods Pro 2 already come with a setting that can turn up the volume on the voices of people you’re talking to and another one that tamps down background noise. Other earbud makers, including Sony, Samsung, Beyerdynamic and Soundcore, also offer functions meant to make conversation easier in noisy places. AirPods outsell them all, though, which is why I wore a pair to Tao and several other Manhattan restaurants known to wreak mayhem on the eardrums.

Over my 12 years as a restaurant critic, few problems I wrote about drew as many emails and comments as noise, and no issue came anywhere close to sparking as much white-hot rage. When I admitted that I like loud restaurants, up to a point, many readers were angry with me. They were even angrier with restaurants.

I get it. Long exposures to loud noise can cause hearing damage. Even at less brutal volumes, not being able to hear the other people at the table is maddening. Not being heard – having to repeat yourself and raise your voice until you sound as if you’re in a screaming match – is worse. All this is more punishing for people with any amount of hearing loss. Drowning in an angry sea of background noise, most of us finally give in to helplessness. We seethe, silently.

Many users overlook the AirPods settings that can help bring conversations into focus. Photo / Marissa Alper, The New York Times

Before taking my Apple-white AirPods out to dinner, I tested them in a makeshift home laboratory. I sat in a chair with bookshelf speakers on either side of my head loudly blaring Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed’s room-clearing experiment in crunching guitar dissonance. Several feet in front of my face I set a third speaker, tuned to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, on which a botanist was being interviewed about fall foliage.

In the first round, with my naked ears, Lou totally annihilated Brian. For the next round, I stuffed the AirPods into my ears set to what Apple calls Transparency Mode. The point of Transparency Mode is to allow the ambient noise in, and boy, did it ever. 2-0, Lou.

Then came the real experiment. Still in Transparency Mode, I burrowed down into the Accessibility settings until I had toggled the Conversation Boost and Ambient Noise Reduction switches to their lime-green On positions. Conversation Boost uses directional microphones to isolate and amplify voices that are directly in front of the listener. Ambient Noise Reduction dampens sound coming from other angles.

Now the botanist came through loud and clear. Lou’s guitars purred raggedly but semi-quietly, like an asthmatic house cat.

In the wild, my earbuds’ performance was less dramatic.

Inside two restaurants on the stretch of the Lower East Side that some people call Dimes Square, I ran into a problem I hadn’t expected: The dining rooms weren’t very loud. This is not the usual complaint about Dimes Square, but it was a warm night, and more people were eating outside than in.

Both restaurants had also thrown open their windows. This meant that sound waves, instead of bouncing off the glass to bombard the ears of everybody indoors, went sailing out of the room like paper planes.

Bars and restaurants clustered around Dimes Square, on the Lower East Side, are a magnet for diners, drinkers and noise. Photo / Timothy Mulcare, The New York Times

Even though the din wasn’t as murderous as I’d hoped, it did lead to a discovery I hadn’t expected. I went with a friend who also owns an AirPods Pro 2 set. Each time he plugged them into his ears and turned down the background noise, he dropped his voice to a murmur, as if he were in a genuinely quiet room. Nice for him, but I could barely hear a word he said – even with the help of my own AirPods.

Tao Downtown has no windows or outdoor seating. As our host took a right at a reclining Buddha the length of a moving van and led us down the 12m staircase to the sunken dining room, I saw full tables everywhere. The music was thumping along. It wasn’t hellishly noisy, but it would do.

My AirPods didn’t make the thumping disappear. They helped a lot, though. It was as if I’d dialled the volume down to three from seven or eight. My dinner guest across the table came through clearly. I could hear him without my AirPods, too, but I had to work at it – leaning forward, watching his lips and making other small efforts that can add up to make a night in a noisy space exhausting.

That I could hear him at all was no doubt the result of painstaking planning by Tao’s designers. Building a restaurant where you can talk to your dinner companions is a tricky proposition. Background noise can come from street traffic, subway tracks, air-conditioning, exhaust hoods and subwoofers. The No 1 enemy of conversation, though, is simply other people.

“Your biggest source you have to control is the human voice,” said Albert Maniscalco, a partner at Cerami & Associates who has helped massage the acoustics of Union Square Cafe and Eataly.

The voices you want to hear are in the same frequency range as the ones you don’t, Maniscalco explained, so there’s constant competition for your ears. This crowding is especially critical in the higher frequencies produced by consonants, those quick bursts of sound that make the difference between, say, “Spain” and “stain”. Your friend’s voice may carry across the table, but crucial bits of information that make her intelligible will be missing, especially as higher frequencies build up around you.

And build they will. People who want to be heard over background chatter will, invariably and often subconsciously, start to vocalise more and more forcefully. This tendency is so well documented that it has a name, the Lombard effect, and it is not unique to humans. It has been studied in cats, canaries, marmosets, bats, frogs and beluga whales.

Music, like the records played at Port Sa’id in Manhattan, can drive up the volume. But the chief enemy of conversation is other people. Photo / Lanna Apisukh, The New York Times

Braxton Boren, an associate professor of audio technology at American University, has described the Lombard effect in crowded rooms as a version of what social scientists call the tragedy of the commons, the tendency of people to overuse a shared, finite resource until they spoil it.

In Boren’s analogy, the resource is peace and quiet. Diners in a crowded restaurant probably know that they have a shared interest in keeping the volume down to a conversation-friendly level. But they also want to be heard, even when it means talking too loudly. Self-interest wins out over the common good.

“Every person who gets a little louder is a betrayal of our common pact to stay quiet,” Boren said.

The two standard ways to prevent the tragedy are regulation and privatisation. We might all agree to speak more quietly in restaurants – a form of social regulation. “But the mechanics of the Lombard effect make it very unlikely that a group of people will do this for any length of time,” he said.

The other answer is to privatise parts of the commons. In a restaurant, Boren said, this could mean installing booths with partitions that block some of the noise coming from the big, shouty table in the centre of the room. But he is also intrigued by hearing aids and earbuds with directional microphones. In effect, they allow the wearer to stake out a personal quiet zone inside a loud space.

A couple on a date with tiny speakers plugged into their ears may strike us as unromantic, but it shouldn’t if it helps them talk to each other. Diners have different hearing abilities and different ideas of a good time. My signal may be your noise, and vice versa. The restaurant that can please all sets of ears does not exist.

So why aren’t more people tweaking the volume of crowded rooms to their own preference? In the case of AirPods, one answer may be that Conversation Boost and Ambient Noise Reduction are so well buried in the settings that each time I wanted to switch them on, it was like crawling through a heating duct in the ceiling.

Both functions are nested inside the Accessibility settings, where people who don’t believe they have hearing loss aren’t likely to look. They should become easier to find when the hearing-aid and hearing-test functions are rolled out in the coming weeks.

Based on my experiments, I would not suggest buying a pair of AirPods Pro 2 just for these features. But if you already own them or one of the other earbuds that have similar settings, I would recommend taking them out for dinner. Even a modest improvement could make the difference between real communication and silent rage. And it’s cheaper than a trip to Spain.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Pete Wells

Photographs by: Marissa Alper, Timothy Mulcare, Lanna Apisukh

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