That Ringing Sound

We live in a sonic world, immersed in vibrations that stimulate microscopic hair cells deep inside our ears. This unseen energy influences our mood, our learning, even our health. We experience it as comforting music, as information-laden speech, or—all too often—as irritating noise, a by-product of our increasingly mechanized world. Despite all the ways sound affects us, we often let it slip unnoticed into the background of our lives. Hoping to understand it better, I set out to explore the mysteries of sound in the course of one day.

At 6:50 a.m., my alarm clock begins the assault on my ears as the groggy gray matter between them is rudely yanked toward consciousness. My eyes shoot open, and as awareness slowly crystallizes, a single idea crowds out all others: Make the noise stop. My right hand knows just what to do and immediately puts an end to the awful blare.


I like this lede because the writer puts you in all of the situations of sound associated with your everyday life. Things like waking up to the alarm clock to the busy subway, to a silent room in your own home are all things you don’t think of when you go through the day. The intro also makes me want to find out what her sound-filled journey was like, so it successfully drew me in to read the rest of the article.