Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Turn Up The Noise!

I fly to New York on the shuttles that run regularly out of Boston's Logan Airport. Over the years I've noticed gradual cost reductions in their service. I'd like to say it's like the approach of winter, when all the leaves turn their colors, and then fall of the trees. Snow comes. With the seasons however, we at least know that spring will eventually return. Somehow in the airline industry I don't think that spring will ever return, so the services that are now gone, are most probably gone forever.

There used to be a sizeable snack in the evening on the flight, and then that became pretzels. I don't know about you, but I don't usually eat pretzels for dinner. In the morning there used to be a real bagel with some sort of dried fruit snack, and then it became a fake bagel (you know the kind that come in shrink-wrapped bags?). Now it has become a shrink-wrapped donut of questionable nutritional impact. I suspect we will soon be getting a donut hole on the morning flight, followed by nothing.

Magazines have tremendous surplus of unsold goods, and the shuttle service took advantage of this problem in the publishing industry by providing all sorts of free magazines to pick up at the terminal for your flight. Most of the magazines were of the undesirable category (thus they were surplus), but once in a while you'd find a title that you might have heard before and actually wanted to read. The quantity of free content has been heavily downsized of late, and thus the pickings are indeed slim.

Truly desperate to read something on my return to Boston, I picked up an IEEE Spectrum ... which I don't personally find as exciting as a People magazine of course. In this issue there was an interesting story about noise. I found the identical online content right here. The premise was that older people lose their sensitivity to changes in their environment, and that unexpectedly, by adding noise to a target signal it is possible for people of lower sensitivity to experience the target signal. In other words, when the ground is shaking, it is easier to balance oneself for some people. You would think that noise would make more difficult to perceive something—for instance when you are in a room trying to read and your kids are blasting the stereo. Indeed if there's too much noise, then you are going to lose. The point of the study was that there was a critical point where noise actually helped. They cite the example of an experiment by Frank Moss where they discovered that crayfish are able to perceive their predators better in roiling water because they use the stream's turbulence to amplify the predator's signal of presence. Gotta love those animals! Man, are we the dumb ones.

Which brings me to the Sixth law of simplicity,

I was glad to find that there is scientific validation in this assumption I've held for a long time. People love noise. And we can't stand it at the same time. It's that classic love/hate relationship thing. I contrast this concept of noise as different from the Law of More (number five) as it is a kind of more that is like a fragrance versus a heavy sauce.

Music is noise, and we love it. But bad music is about too much noise. Music helps us feel—it places us into a space that we are sensitive towards "feeling." Perhaps it all goes to our origins in the womb of our mothers as we floated there and just ... listened.

There is visual noise. We usually call it "art." There is physical noise. We usually call it "texture." There is noise in life. It's called "chance." Heck, this blog is noise. Let me turn it down for you.

Super-author Virginia Postrel writes, "I'm writing to correct your misleading impression of the magazines on the shuttle. The magazines in question are not in fact surplus or, at least in the eyes of their publishers, undesirable. Magazine publishers pay to have new issues put on the shuttle because the shuttle's passengers are highly desirable readers. I've been out of that business for five years, so I'm not sure why there are fewer magazines today. Perhaps the airlines upped the charges." Or perhaps we shuttle riders aren't deemed as desirable anymore. Sob ...

Designer Steve De Mar from Microsoft corrects my science: "I think you may have misinterpreted the context of the article you reference from the IEEE Spectrum on noise and sensory input that you use to support your law. The article isn’t very good at explaining at a mechanical level why the noise helps people with sensory input problems to better perceive nerve signals. The detailed description is almost none existent in the article referring only to a vague explanation that the noise provides a 'pedestal' that allows the weak signal to ride over the nerve threshold. This is so vague as to invite misinterpretation. I think what is more accurate is that the nerve system, as it becomes less receptive (aged, damaged, etc), becomes more 'gated' where it takes some stronger signal to open the pathway, hence allowing a weaker signal to pass now that the nerve is in a state where it is open to pass signal. This is very similar to how electronic gating works in audio signals processing. So I think the message in the article isn't that noise is good or bad, it’s that it basically forces the threshold of the nerve to fire and allow any signal there to pass along. This doesn't seem to fit your argument for noise." Thanks Steve!