> Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties.
This first sentence makes it seem as if the paper was written by aliens. Not even deaf people would gain anything from that sentence.
I think LLMs have caused me to be more perceptive to and annoyed by stuff like this.
My thesis supervisor used excessively flowery language like that in papers, and I had to have a few tugs with him over needless verbosity all while learning to write a paper for the first time. I think there's a subconscious "look at how wise I am" whiff that comes off this type of writing. And sure, yes, impressive, but let's leave creative writing to creative writers. As a scientist, you should instead be focusing on communicating a (probably complex enough) idea as clearly and as simply as you possibly can - just not any simpler.
By the time I wrote my thesis, I was far more assertive in politely declining many of his edits.
When I was a research fellow in anesthesiology, my supervisor constantly made edits that seemed to me unnecessary, almost as if he felt it was required of him to demonstrate his mastery.
After he changed something I'd revised per his instructions back to my original copy I decided I'd had enough: I revised only where I thought it improved the papers and ignored the rest.
He never said a thing.
> my supervisor constantly made edits that seemed to me unnecessary, almost as if he felt it was required of him to demonstrate his mastery.
There are many stories of savvy workers engaging proactively including a flaw in their work being reviewed, something small but obvious and easy to fix, so that their managers can feel involved. One that often comes up in software is an apocryphal "duck" in an unreleased attack animation for the queen-unit in Interplay's Battle Chess game.
Closely related are the appearance of changes, such as a tale that Michelangelo was pressured to "fix" the nose of his David statue, so he climbed up and knocked off a little bit of material and the superior down below was satisfied without being able to verify anything had really changed.
Also known as the hairy arm technique or a revision bait.
I wrote an article for an early Java dev website thinking I might do that more professionally. I don’t know what crawled up the editor’s butt, but he kept suggesting edits that took sentences I sweated over to be precise and basically edited them to say either nothing at all or the opposite of what I meant. My last round of edits I sent to him came with my own comments about why things needed to stay worded a certain way, because I thought he was trying to make me sound like an idiot - not plain-speaking but plain wrong.
It was exhausting and stupid and I stuck to blogging after that. Who knows, I might have written books. But not dealing with shit like that. I can torture myself much more efficiently, TYVM.
self-publishing books... just sayin
I was always on the fence about whether I had enough to say to fill a book. It's more that the experience made me stop asking the question.
My English professors in college beat this kind of stuff out of the students. One went so far as to grade all papers that started with something like "since time immemorial, man has..." with an F.
The issue here is not so much that it’s flowery but that it’s completely unremarkable, bordering on a truism, in its content. The sentence literally means: sound is relevant because you constantly hear it.
The sentence is badly written, which is why it feels like a truism. But there is content in it.
> Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, ...
Sounds are always being heard by your senses: ears + bass that you feel in your body.
> Sound ... continually engages our auditory and mental faculties.
The continuous usage of our senses then lets sounds force our brains to think in particular ways. This is distinct from above - brain vs ears.
> Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience ...
The continuous engagement results in sound being important to what being human means. Note that human experience is larger than what you think. So this is also distinct from above.
I’m sorry but you have taken a lot of words to basically say: you hear sounds.
Special mention to “ Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience” which is itself a truism in the truism. Yes, sound is an experience and experiencing is a significant part of being alive. You are welcome for this insanely new and deep nugget of information.
Honestly, you can remove the first paragraph of the introduction with no loss of information involved and end up with a better article.
Given the obsequious near limitless tolerance we extend to operators of loud ICE engines in the public realm, I don't think this is nearly stressed enough.
I'm seriously considering moving because I live near an interstate. By near, I mean about a mile away, but the trucks with the straight pipe exhausts that engine brake drive me _bonkers_. On top of those, the sound just carries sometimes. I can't see the highway from my house, so it's not a line-of-sight thing, just acoustics.
I've started recording the outdoor sound levels using a USB sound meter: https://i.imgur.com/IdYdhA8.png
When the quietest it gets is above 55 decibels, I don't like being outside. It's not just cars passing by, it is a pulsating drone which never ends.
I moved from the city to the beach a little over a year ago, and though the sound of the waves is roughly the same level as the city’s car drone was, it being a natural sound made a huge difference in my sleep quality and overall comfort.
It makes me wonder if the noise profile that cars make could be modified to be less annoying, even if not necessarily less loud.
I would love to hear the crash of the ocean 24x7. The highway noise bothers me because of the echoing nature of it. It's not uni-directional, and it feels like there's always a vehicle coming at me.
My youngest has one more year of high school remaining, but maybe it's time to downsize / find a quieter place after she graduates.
Cars are extremely noisy, and it's so hard to predict how loud any given address is without actually living there for a while... Beyond the obvious reasons anyway.
My current address would be perfectly fine if people drove according to the rules, but it turns out that people in this town don't adhere to speed limits whatsoever and there is literally no police control.
Consequently, the 50km/h speed limit is ignored entirely with most cars driving around 70km/h.
That shit gets loud!
I have the same problem. The difference on a snowday e.g. is night and day. no speeders, so much more quiet.
Two of my neighbors on our block bought electrical cars, and not exaggerating, it made such a difference to quality of life, no longer hearing them pull up or drive off.
I lived in a "walkable city" for a number of years. The noise outside my window was all human. Footsteps, people talking, ... At night was dead quiet. Much more quiet than the suburban street I'm on now.
City life is not inherently shitty, it's tolerance for antisocial behaviors that make it shitty. I really think americans can't always put their finger on it, and end up moving out at some point, thinking it has to do with the overall "busyness" of city life or something. But it really is just noisy cars.
In my case the area has become a haven for warehouses, and large (18-wheel) truck traffic is up 90% in the last few years alone. I've lived here for over 20 years, and it's hard to see it change like this.
I entirely agree that there is substantial tolerance for vehicle noise tolerance and this drives me crazy. Cities aren't loud, cars are! I just want to make clear though that replacing the ICE part with electric engines solves the problem for low speeds only -- once they're going at a reasonable speed, engine noise doesn't dominate (if you exclude the antisocial behaviors of deliberately loud vehicles, most motorbikes).
I sometimes miss the constant din of the city, I have heard nothing but wind and waves for the past week and those are louder than any densely populated area I have lived in. Now that they have settled down the crows can hear each other so they have been at it all day. When it actually gets quiet is when I miss the city the most, I like the quiet but every noise breaks that silence which demands your attention making it difficult to concentrate on anything. It is now below freezing and everything green is gone, everything is getting hard and that is when things really get loud here, nothing to absorb sound but plenty to reflect it. Nature is pretty noisy for the most part, while it seems quiet compared to the city it is actually just different.
Sometimes when it is quiet here I wonder what the noises of nature must have been like to people a century or two or three ago when the wind was not just wind but something which could destroy your crops and make the next year very difficult for you. Or the extended lack of noise constantly reminding you that the drought continues and even the animals have had the sense to move on while you watch your fields slowly die. City or nature our relationship to the sounds around us have changed quite a bit, we can now choose to ignore the majority of sounds and write them off as meaningless or irritating if we can not manage to ignore them but those sounds are never meaningless, they all signify something more than our irritation.
Right now I am missing the wind and the waves and feeling the constant low rumble, I really hate listening to the compressor on the fridge but if it stopped making noise I would probably be more irritated by the thought of spoiling food and the potential inconveniences which that would cause. Never could hear my fridge when I lived in the city, if it stopped working it would just be an issue to deal with when I discovered it was no longer cold, not something I had a constant reminder of.
It's interesting that you didn't once mention the sound of humans. Background human noise, where you can't catch the words, is very nice to hear.
I love the constant din of cities, but the din of people. Not the din of cars. If one is lucky enough to live in that sort of city.
>It's interesting that you didn't once mention the sound of humans.
I think they are implied by the din of the city which is the din of people even if it comes from a loud car, that loud car is loud because of a person. For the driver of that loud car being able to really hear the engine could mean the driver is the sort of person who wants to hear the engine and is the sort who can isolate each and every sound the engine makes telling them a great deal about how well it is or is not working. Or their engine might be about to fail and it is a constant reminder of another thing they need to figure out how to pay for and praying it holds out until next month when they get their Christmas bonus even if that means the kids will have not have much of a Christmas. Or it might just be that it is their way to block out the constant din of the city. Or they may just want the city know that they are there, that they exist. screaming to the heavens as it were.
All those sounds which make up the din of the city have meanings and are personal, they connect to a person and a life. But I did make a conscious decision between natural and unnatural noise, nature vs city, people are sort of a grey area there and getting into that would complicate my point. The person living out in middle of nowhere miles from anyone is generally allowed to make as much noise as they please unless you happen to be camping near their property, then they are probably going to be considered rude for disturbing the tranquility and your vacation from the city even though you are the one encroaching on their life, not the other way around. As far as you know no one lives within 100 miles of your campsite and here are all these noises which do not belong 100 miles from civilization.
> Nature is pretty noisy for the most part, while it seems quiet compared to the city it is actually just different.
Variation. In countryside, a cow mooing or a rooster whatevering will quite reliably wake one up. In suburbs, a car passing by will annoy the shit out of you watching a movie. In a city, one does not even notice emergency services passing by with sirens blaring.
In a countryside noise floor is so low you can hear leaves falling. In a city noise floor is the cars passing by and we adjust to that.
To add to that, public transport based on trains is and always will be a source of noise, even if they are purely electrical
That depends entirely on the tracks, and the wheel(sets) of the trains, though.
No matter if streetcars/trams downtown, or so called 'light-rail'/fast-rapid-mass-transit reaching out into the periphery, or neighbouring towns.
They can also be buried by applying that strange concept called 'subway'.
Hrrm, what happened to all those hyped loops, btw?
i'd trade the predictable rumble of a train a couple of hours a day over the unpredictable roar and rumble of trucks and muscle cars.
Cars aren't loud; commercial vehicles are. (Relatively) So are motorcycles, and food truck generators.
The illegal street racing near me says otherwise.
You can't equate "illegal street racing" to "cars". I mean you can but how is that going to address anything?
If I am walking down the street, listening to something on my earphones, I inevitably have to pause/rewind if a non-commerical car is passing by.
I could maybe get headphones, or some noise cancelling earphones, but I shouldn't have to.
Valid; I should have clarified. This is a matter of degree, not kind.
Commercial vehicles are much louder than cars. Especially at the lower speeds where engine noise dominates tire noise.
Are pickup trucks "commercial vehicles"? Either way there's plenty of them in residential areas, revving up at 5am or rumbling home in the dead of night.
They really don't need to be, but jerks sometimes do modify them to be loud even when idling. About five years ago I lived in a neighborhood where some jackass would idle his modified truck every morning at a quarter till 5am. He'd leave around 5am and you could hear the truck for at least a minute as he left the neighborhood and started accelerating hard on the highway. His house was across the street and four doors down and his truck still could be heard through my bedroom window which faced the backyard. I don't know how his next door neighbors tolerated it. This was an exurban area with lots of pickups and even a few commercial vehicles in the neighborhood but he was the only one whose vehicle was loud and it obviously was made that way intentionally.
No; they do not have the loud engines I referred to.
You've obviously never been passed by a straight piped Dodge Ram while riding a bike.
The Mustang that parks my street and operates 100% of the time in Sport Mode is the loudest vehicle I hear on a regular basis.
I will update this: Y'all have valid points regarding cars making noise:
Non-modified personal vehicles are significantly less loud than commercial vehicles, motorcycles, and food truck generators.
Writing like this makes me sigh, exhaling air, the omnipresent chemical stimulator, which holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our biological and mental faculties.
I think your sentence demonstrates the difference between trying to fake "sounding smart" and just writing in a complex way.
Like seriously, "[exhaling air] continually engages our [...] mental faculties" is pretty nonsensical, since breathing is something autonomic. "Omnipresent chemical simulator" seems irrelavent in context. All in all, its a nonsense sentence
Now compare with the original sentence. Its an introduction to the paper. They are trying to establish why they are doing the research they are doing and why you should care. And it tells you - we did research into sound dapening because sound is all around us and its constantly effecting us. Which is something as a human i find to be true - the modern (urban) world is quite noisy. When there is too much noise it can be mentally exhausting and can tax my ability to understand those around me. After reading that sentence I now know why they are researching this area, and agree it is a worthy thing to research. That introductory sentence did everything an introductory sentence to a paper is supposed to do.
Sure, they use some fancy words, but they aren't even that fancy. It is a formal paper, i think high school level reading ability can be presumed.
The opening sentence isn't "complex" or "fancy" writing. It's LLM writing.
The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts." This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.
I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.
Although no hat populates my head, I take off my hat to you, while jealously cursing your cunning wielding of the English language, my good sir.
I strongly disagree. The example sentences you give would be very out of place in a scientific paper. If i saw them there i would assume an LLM wrote them because they are inapproiate to the genere of writing and LLMs sometimes have trouble with that type of context.
Writing is all about context. What is a good sentence in one context might be a terrible sentence in another context.
To go in more detail > The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
That sentence doesn't say anything about the definition of sound at all. It makes 2 claims that are important - sound is everywhere and sound affects people. Neither of them have anything to do with what sound is. I imagine the author (correctly) assumes the target audience already knows the definition of "sound".
> Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
Sure, that might be a fine sentence in some other article, but why would it work here? It promotes the aside, that sound is important to humans, to the main idea. However that makes no sense in context. The author isn't writing an essay on the importance of sound. Sound being important is not the primary thing the author is trying to set up here, so why would you cumulate with that?
Re the fancy one - I would say the same thing. There are plenty of contexts where that would be a fine sentence, but this isn't one of them. It is inappropriate to the genere in question and communicates the wrong idea. Sound might be powerful but this isn't an essay on how sound is powerful.
In this case they could have just said "hearing is trivially important to most humans" without any loss of value to the paper. The purple prose seems to add nothing at all.
I agree - the motivation provides important context to the rest of the research. It helps the reader quickly parse and sort.
I took it as a play on the common meme of "You are now breathing manually." which I did find pretty funny.
That first sentence has been a totally standard way to open a research paper for at least twenty years now. (As I have seen from both publishing myself, and as a side gig, doing editing of myriad papers by non-native English speakers working in many other branches of the sciences.) A writer has to start somewhere, and that has always been a matter of social convention.
From the way that paragraph continues:
> The importance of sound is underscored by its dual nature, serving as both a vital tool for communication and a potential source of harm, exemplified by the pervasive issue of noise pollution.[1] Considered to be a public health issue by the World Health Organization, unwanted noise can have harmful health effects on people who are chronically exposed to it.[1-5] In the US alone, an estimated 145 million people are exposed to hazardous noise levels.[5] To suppress noise levels, both active and passive solutions are used.
I suspect it may be angling to funding or a journal/conference purpose or something? Without that, the rest of the paper's not really going to care about noise pollution, even if it potentially indirectly offers a way to mitigate it.
Its low on informational content, but as an introductory sentence seems fine to me.
It's very motivational. IMO, my answer to it is a sound "hell, yeah! can you help with it?"
But the way it's written is bad. The OP would have a point if the complaint was about the form, and not the contents. Whatever makes people believe they have to write papers this way (whether it's true or not) needs fixing.
Yeah I kinda liked it. It made me stop and listen where I was, realizing all the weird noises happening around me that I was mentally trying to cancel out.
For papers sometimes you need to hit a page count to make your sponsor/advisor/conference happy. I've been told "this is a great paper but can you pad it out to 12pgs?", maybe that happened here as well.
It shakes up people, reminding them how shallow their vocabulary really is.
