The city is always humming, which you may only notice when you leave it and realize what real quiet is. City hum is not the hum of wind or waves, but of men, coming and going even while other men sleep, of their machinery endlessly working: the lullaby of organized effort. It is a good sound. It means the only wolves here are human, and on their heels will be cops.

There are other good city sounds. The I-IV-V jingle of the ice-cream truck. Every spring it parks itself by the charter school to tempt the neck-tied boys and plaid-skirted girls, then roams during their summer absence for adults. Birds: sparrows claiming crumbs and light posts, crows up to no good, occasionally something melodious. Street musicians. I was in a group of melodious ones four decades ago; they ended a recent concert, including alumni, with a motet by Josquin des Prez (Little Joe Fields). Whenever passersby drop coins in the director’s music folder, he gives them back. They sing for the glory of glory.

Then there are the sounds we have all gotten used to, the rackets that hang in our ears like sonic campaign ribbons: truck horns, backhoe beeps, sports-bar yells, firemen to the rescue, subway trains singing the first three notes of “There’s a Place for Us” as they swing around a curve. If you have heard it here, you can bear it anywhere.

But — have you noticed? — the city has gotten louder. The daytime soundscape, always cranked up to eleven, flirts with 13. I can identify two causes.

Whenever I hear an ambulance I feel a double twinge: sympathy for the passenger, admiration for his or her attendants. Life or death may hang on the journey. But stirring as they are, many ambulances in succession can be trying. I cannot think why there should be more of them than in former years — crime is down from its disco-era peak, even with the last mayor’s spike — and what with consolidation and renaming I cannot tell from the signage on ambulances’ flanks whether there are actually more hospitals in the neighborhood. What I know in my cochlea is that there has been a change in siren technique. The long up-and-down wail, the sound a banshee would make if it were in a cage, is postmodernistically modified: a slice of wail, followed by staccato bursts: kicks in the tailpipes of the cars that will not pull aside. Problem is, they kick the passing pedestrian too — or the renter, a dozen floors up, trying to eat, read, or, heaven help him, listen to music. They say that the default Euro siren tone, ee-ah, ee-ah, ee-ah, like a mechanical donkey, beats our banshee for effectively getting drivers out of the way — theirs directs attention, ours induces panic — so maybe the new ambulance bleats work too. But the old wail was in our heads from long experience of traffic and TV-cop shows. What is familiar can be discounted. Now every blurt counts.

The other cause of sound mayhem is the perverse effect of a blessing. I first moved to the city in the era of the boom box, when heroes of culture broadcast their music from portable containers the size of suitcases. Their enablers wrote rapturously of how we all became partakers of their culture thereby. Boom boxes were the audible equivalents of subway graffiti, produced by a few, forced on all. But then someone invented earbuds. (Relative) quiet descended. In time, however, restless man hooked the technology up, not to recorded music, but to conversation. With the simple addition of earpieces, looking less and less like the Frankenstein monster’s head bolts with every slimming iteration, you can talk, and talk and talk, with your friends and co-workers as you walk. Why sit at a desk? Let the city be your desk.

Great — except that everyone you pass becomes your auditor. Make that your part-auditor. You can’t tease a stock tip or a rom-com episode out of the half phrases you overhear as you go about your business. But you will hear fragments of everyone else’s business. They talk loudly too. This is yet another effect of earbuds used as music-appreciation devices. I once saw a performance piece inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Major weirdness ensued, but the bit of business I most remember was a prone man with his head pinned against one side of a bass drum while a grinning tormentor beat the other with a mallet. That’s what the youth of America have been doing for fun, for years. As a result, when they speak, they speak up.

The sight of them is as unnerving as the sound. There was a time when a person talking to himself was presumed to be crazy. Now the mad are everywhere. How do they avoid running into scaffolding, or being run over as they cross the street? They make no effort to avoid me. If I had the patience of an archaeologist sifting through pottery shards, I might re-create an entire civilization from their chatter. I don’t, so I am just bombarded.

Conscience asks if I am succumbing to the prejudices of old-fartdom. Orwell wrote a wounding characterization of Tolstoy in his DIY Christian phase. Stop running around, Tolstoy seemed to be scolding the world, and sit still like me. But youth (the world) needs to move and do. I am not Orwell, much less Tolstoy, even tired late Leo. But I acknowledge the possibility that I resemble this vignette. If the ear trumpet fits, wear it. I just wish my fellow travelers would tone it down.