But Dorchester’s rich cultural diversity also lends evocative countermelodies to the main theme. “You have planes, you have trains, you have automobiles,” Walker says. The dominant note of Dorchester, for example, is transportation. Walker has discovered that each Boston neighborhood carries a unique acoustic signature. She began to suspect her auditory torment was not isolated. Plagued with headaches and sleeplessness, she sent out an impromptu Craigslist survey asking about annoying footstep sounds and was flooded with responses. The children living in the apartment above hers “ran across the floor literally 24 hours a day, and it drove me crazy,” says the Mississippi native. It’s all in a day’s research for Walker, a former artist who was compelled to undertake the study after suffering her own noise nightmare. A few, alarmed by the paraphernalia of her sonic surveillance, have reported her to the police. Most people have approached her with curiosity and, on learning her mission, gratitude. Chan School of Public Health, has pedaled nearly every inch of the city on a purple commuter bike-hauling a bulky sound monitor, a boom microphone, and a camera in her backpack- all in the service of plotting sound levels in 400 separate locations and collecting residents’ subjective responses to the aural onslaught.
The 36-year-old researcher, who will receive her doctorate in environmental health next year from the Harvard T.H.
Erica Walker, SD ’17, biked around Boston to take the measure of a city’s noise and its effects on residents.
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