Chaucer's Decibels

The decibel is a numerical expression of the relative loudness of a sound. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, the difference in decibels of two sounds is ten times the common logarithm of the ra tio of their power levels. Fortunately for the point to be made in this discussion, Chaucer never heard of a decibel; equally fortunately for literary considerations, the term decibel has entered the general vocabulary as an expression meaning “noise level.” The analysis which follows will be about exactly th a t: the noise levels in Chaucer’s poetry, noise being p a rt of the human condition about which he wrote so memorably.