You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

One of my biggest pet peeves is overly loud places.

For some reason, our society has confused loud places as fun places.

They're not.

I'm usually the first person to leave a party when it gets too loud.

In my opinion, nothing productive happens when you have to start yelling at each other just to be heard.

Sadly, this perception of louder is better stretches across all of our society.

Concerts, parties, restaurants, clothing stores, and even churches have jumped on the bandwagon

of uncomfortably loud music. Ironically, though, public restrooms are way too quiet.

Honestly, that's the one place I wouldn't mind a little death metal. For the longest

time, I felt like it was just me and 90-year-old who cared about this. Well, that was until I met

Kate. Hi, my name is Kate Wagner, and I'm an architecture and design critic based in Baltimore,

Maryland. You might know of Kate through McMansion Hell, which is her website.

It deconstructs some of the idiocracy in modern suburban house design. However, her other

intense passion is sound. I was working as a recording engineer and was a music student as well

and was very concerned about hearing loss, paranoid more like it. I was always afraid that

one day I would wake up and not be able to hear. I was developing these oral skills to be

able to listen to sound at very specific frequencies, to be able to hear things like the

Overtoned series and whatnot, and all of the sort of ear training you do

when you work in recording.

And I was afraid that if I listened to music too loud or if I went to a bar and it was too

...