By Dr. Robert Thorson

During a summer dominated by bad international news — Ebola, ISIS, climate change — I made a conscious choice to be positive about something that really bothers me. So, I decided to share my attitude adjustment before summer officially ends Sept. 22.

My moment of choice came at Echo Lake, near Conway, N.H. The weather was perfect, the beach sandy, the water warm, and the mood effervescent. My wife had her beach book, and I had mine. With toes in the water, I sat for nearly six hours, gobbling up “Solar,” an Ian McEwan novel about an aging professor who should have retired years earlier.

The lake where I sat is aptly named. It’s an echo chamber, a water-filled bowl of glacial gravel directly beneath the granite sounding board of Cathedral Ledge. Every noise was amplified. I overheard conversations from 10 yards away and the splash of a solitary swimmer at 10 times that distance. From across the lake came the joyous chaos of kids swimming at the main beach.

This pleasant soundscape was intermittently punctuated by the distant roars of unmuffled motorcycles, cruising bikes called hogs, Harley-Davidsons and their wannabes. Like locusts, they swarm the summer roads and taverns of the so-called Freedom State. Unlike locusts, they’re usually heard long before they are seen. This was certainly the case for that day at Echo Lake. Though I saw no bikes, I heard the roars of hundreds moving up and down River Road, approximately half a mile away. Initially I let myself be irritated by the illegality of this intrusive noise. But as the day wore on, I decided to reframe my thinking and hear it as minimalist music.

Minimalist music consists of melodic or rhythmic patterns repeated over and over in phrases subjected to gradual changes. At my listening distance, the sputtering rumble of each bike became a deep staccato of notes written at the base of the bass clef. The higher pitches had been erased by the attenuation of woodland leaves and the humid air. The bike arrivals and departures created an acoustic Doppler effect, converting the staccato into two extended musical phrases, with one pitched slightly higher than the other. The shifting of gears within these phrases became a simple melody whose notes stepped down the scale. Each passing bike played this minimalist tune with its own variation.

Reframing noise pollution as minimalist music made me wonder if the biker community knows of the recent experimental work by psychologist Dennis Y. Hsu and his colleagues at Northwestern University. “The Music of Power: Perceptual and Behavioral Consequence of Powerful Music” was published online Aug. 5 in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science. His research team answered a question I’ve been wondering about for many years: Why do motorcycle enthusiasts intentionally and expensively retrofit their bikes to make bigger, deeper noises, when they could more easily be nearly silenced?

The main answer is power. Emotional power. Based on five separate experiments, Hsu proves that music with a strong and deep bass line empowers its listener. This explains why the lower notes of hip-hop music pound the air waves when a car pulls up next to you at a traffic light and why that car’s windows are so often rolled down. The driver of that car, usually a young man, feels more powerful when those sounds are present and wants to project his power into public social space. Why should it be any different with gray-bearded bikers?

Additionally, Hsu’s team concludes, “At the behavioral level, power can also promote action and risktaking.” This may explain why muffled bikes are more often associated with helmeted riders. Could it also be that the bass-clef rumbling of big bikes is less the result of risky joy-riding than one of its causes?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still opposed to the gratuitous infliction of bike noise into public social space. But until it’s quieted by stiffer laws, I’ll just deal with it, and be less hostile in the process.