Stepping outside most international airports brings you from a world of relative calm into your first direct encounter with a foreign environment.

In the developed world, the main difference between the surreal quiet inside the arrivals area and outside on the city's streets tends to be climatic or architectural.

However, leaving Tan Son Nhat Airport, the unseasoned visitor soon learns of one of Ho Chi Minh City's most inhospitable features – its volume.

HCMC can be a painfully loud city.

Making your way from the airport to your hotel, your eardrums will be assailed by a polyphonic chorus of horn blasts, jackhammers, buzz saws and spluttering engines.

Most people will be cocooned inside a taxi, but this provides slim protection from the horns and the roar.

Indeed, the taxi driver will be contributing plenty of his own tooting and beeping to the cacophony.

The Vietnamese seem to have different tolerance levels of noise compared to those from more developed countries, as anyone who has been woken by a home Karaoke machine here can testify to.

Take vehicle horns.

These serve different purposes in this city: each vehicle uses it as a way to speed up their way through traffic; at crossroads, vehicles use them to announce they are coming through; often times they are used to announce one's presence to cars merging into the traffic flow.

Then there is the gentle 10-decibel reminder that the lights have turned green, for those bikes sat three meters past the line.

Finally there is the typically Western usage, as a way to vent anger.

Hotel reviews for the city mention not taking a street-facing room and balconies are more often a source of headaches rather than tranquility.

Outdoor restaurants and bars with roof terraces suffer similarly from intrusive sounds.

It's not just traffic volumes and vehicle horns creating the din.

Construction work is increasingly harder to avoid throughout the city, and unlike in countries with strict laws about environmental noise levels, work can last long into the night and at weekends.

Another problem comes when the city opens up its roads to heavy-goods vehicles at night, which supersize the regular vehicle noise issues.

For those living and working here, there is often an all-too close proximity to factory machines, street stalls, roadside motorbike mechanics and markets, the latter of which start receiving goods as early as 3 a.m.

There are wider issues at stake here than simple annoyance.

People are now waking up to the adverse affects that noise pollution can exert on the human body and mind.

Noise pollution can have more serious consequences, as a study into ‘community noise' conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1992 showed.

They found that community noise could lead to hearing impairment, ear discomfort, speech interference, sleep disturbance, increased stress levels and can even affect cardiovascular health.

Excessive noise levels can also affect mental health and behavior, causing changes in mood and increased aggression.

These health effects, in turn, can lead to social problems, reduced productivity, reduced performance in learning, and absenteeism in the workplace and school.

In 1999, the WHO produced a set of guidelines for community noise looking at noise management, quality assurance plans, and the cost-efficiency of control actions.

The aim of the guidelines was to protect populations from the adverse health impacts of noise.

The guidelines concluded that governments should consider the protection of populations from community noise as an integral part of their policy for environmental protection.

They also believe governments should consider implementing action plans with short- and long-term objectives for reducing noise levels, as well as supporting more research related to the health effects of noise exposure.

If Vietnam wishes to provide an atmosphere that encourages visitors to return and foreign workers to reside here longer, its government needs to begin thinking about this.

And if it wishes to protect the well-being of its own citizens, such noise management schemes have to become an integral part of urban planning throughout Vietnam.

Currently there are only a few pockets of residential quietude in HCMC: Phu My Hung in District 7 and District 2's An Phu, both areas heavily populated by expats.

One can even see signs there forbidding horn usage.

Perhaps one day such signs will appear downtown around tourist hotspots like Dong Khoi in HCMC, providing some much-needed relief for everyone's ears.

Finding a tranquil and quiet spot in bustling HCMC is no easy task

Reported by Neil Fitzgerald