But low-level noise, the unwanted and persistent kind that's not loud enough to kill our hearing, is insidious in many other ways.
It can wreak havoc on our physical and mental health; it can turn us into fidgety, impatient, angry, aggressive monsters with high blood pressure and short fuses.
"There's plenty of evidence that noise is harmful to our health," Arline Bronzaft, a New York psychologist and a member of that city's Council on the Environment, tells me. In her Big Apple, about 100,000 complaints are made to a quality-of-life hotline each year, and 85 percent are about noise.
"Look what it is doing to you," says Bronzaft, who has conducted several studies on noise and its effects on people. One of her early studies found that sixth graders, whose classrooms were next to an elevated train in Manhattan, were one year behind in reading scores compared to students on the quiet side of the school.
"You're angry with your neighbors. You can't sleep," she says, after I tell her about my noise issues. "You can't concentrate. Maybe your heart is not giving out, but your quality of life has been diminished.
"Noise makes people very angry," she says. Noise equals aggression, and sometimes, she says, people kill over it.
Before you say that's New York for you, Hawai'i has more than its share of noise problems. Throughout the Islands, complaints are lodged daily against noisy helicopters, airplanes, roosters and barking dogs, garbage trucks, and construction sites. In Honolulu alone, barking dogs typically account for about 2,000 complaints each year. And Honolulu International Airport lodges about 60 complaints per month. In densely populated Waikiki, noise complaints are quite common.
Sometimes, noise comes from unexpected places. At Schofield Barracks on O'ahu last year, officials sprayed hundreds of gallons of citric acid to kill the invasive coqui frogs, which were keeping residents awake with nocturnal songs as loud as a chain saw. The Big Island has been less successful in controlling the coqui frogs, whose colonies have multiplied to about 200 today.