Listen. According to acoustic consultant Greg Tocci, if you are on the Vineyard you are probably hearing some combination of traffic, mechanical noise, wind rustling foliage or surf. This is the Island’s ambient background noise. It is the low unintrusive ever-present hum of Island activity. Will the sound of massive carbon fiber blades slicing through air soon be added to this audible collage?

On Wednesday evening the Martha’s Vineyard Commission invited Mr. Tocci of Cavanaugh Tocci Associates to address the prospect of wind turbine noise on the Vineyard.

The talk began with a technical primer on sound propagation. Audience members nodded solemnly as Mr. Tocci presented slide after slide on acoustic descriptors, grazing attenuation and adjacent octave bands.

From then on it was gloom and doom as Mr. Tocci exhibited the results from a study of wind turbine noise prepared by his associate which measured the average noise level 150 feet from a land-based wind turbine at around 56 decibels. The whoosh-whooshing of wind turbines is an especially bothersome species of noise, he argued, citing the testimony of communities, most living within a mile of wind projects, who have reported a lower threshold for the sound as compared with that of aircraft, road traffic and railways. One possible explanation for this unique discomfort is in the noise’s amplitude modulation, that is, the decibel change over a short period of time, which can be particularly distressing to those trying to ignore it. Another possible explanation Mr. Tocci offered was infrasound, or ultra low-frequency pressure waves produced by the turbines, which can cause physical and psychological distress in individuals that some have described as akin to a sort of sonic Chinese water torture.

“I’m a fan of wind power but this came as a bucket of cold water,” Mr. Tocci said.

The presentation had the most relevance for immediate neighbors of residential wind turbines. In a report prepared by the commission a scale ranked a variety of noises by decibel level. From 350 metres away a wind farm creates 35 to 40 decibels of noise according to the report, ranking it just above “quiet bedroom” at 35 decibels. Sound diminishes by three to six decibels with each doubling of distance. No commercial project currently proposed is closer than nine miles to Vineyard shores.

Mr. Tocci wavered when pressed on whether noise would be an issue at the distances currently proposed for wind farms off Vineyard shores but Martha’s Vineyard Commission executive director Mark London effectively undercut any argument when he admitted that he had “never seen anything that suggests that there are significant noise issues at more than a couple of miles away, even across the ocean.”

FAA restrictions radiating three miles outward from the Martha’s Vineyard Airport have, for the most part, eliminated the possibility of large-scale land-based turbine projects of the type currently causing the majority of noise complaints.

Still, audience members seemed receptive to the idea that wind power would be noisy. Twenty per cent of the general population is inherently sensitive to noise, and Mr. London suggested that there was a selective pressure on the Island population toward more sensitive hearing.

“When you have a place like Martha’s Vineyard it may well be that given the sacrifices people have to make to live here, we might have a higher percentage that have chosen to give up something else in their lives to live in a tranquil place, so those numbers might even be higher,” he said.

He went on to offer a measure of sympathy for bat-eared Island citizens.

“If they talk to someone who’s not sensitive to noise they’ll say, ‘Isn’t that noise driving you crazy?’ and the other people will say ‘You’re just a whiner. You’re just complaining because you just don’t like wind turbines.’ ”