Since the beginning of the pandemic, the world has seemed a little quieter. But that doesn’t mean you’re not being inundated with noise. Whether the sound is something you chose, like music or our podcast, or something outside of your control, like traffic outside or planes overhead, it’s likely that you rarely experience true silence. According to David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World,” all that noise is permanently changing humanity’s ability to hear.