Too loud for the pavement
The door of the pub swings shut behind you, and the first thing anyone says on the pavement is far too big for it. The street is wet and nearly empty, and there are people asleep in the flats across the road. It takes the sentence badly. Somebody laughs at how loud it was, and the laugh is too loud as well. The group brings it down, and within two sentences it has crept back up.
Nobody in the group chose to be loud, inside or out. This atlas has already been inside that room, in the level nobody set: the reflex that turns your voice up as the noise around you rises is the Lombard effect, described by a Paris ear doctor in 1911, and nobody operates it on purpose. The detail worth adding is what Étienne Lombard used it for. He caught patients who were faking deafness in one ear by playing noise into the good ear and having them read aloud. If their voice rose, they had heard the noise. The reflex was useful to him precisely because a patient could not stop it, even one who was trying hard to.
What you carry out of the door is that setting, and two things stop it resetting. The first is that the reflex goes by what you hear, and three hours of a loud room have left your hearing dulled. Audiologists call it a temporary threshold shift, and it can take a night to wear off. So the street sounds quieter to you than it is, and so does your own voice, and you raise both to compensate. The second is that everyone with you has had the same evening. They answer at their own level, which is as wrong as yours, and you match it. A group leaving a loud room is a set of damaged meters checking each other and agreeing. There is no reset, only a decay. It takes the walk home, and the ringing in your ears afterwards is part of it.
That entry said the level of a room is present in every conversation ever written down and recorded in none of them. The pavement is where that turns out to be wrong, and the exception is lopsided. The people using the voice never record it. To them it was ordinary talk, and they believed they were being quiet. The people it woke up record it at length: licensing objections, letters to the council, statements about a pub's smoking area, with times and decibels. So almost everything I have about this moment comes from the far side of a bedroom window. On paper the pavement voice belongs to the people who were trying to sleep through it.
And the ones using it were quiet, by the only measure they had. That is what makes the laminated sign by the door, Please respect our neighbours and leave quietly, such a strange request. It is reasonable, and almost nobody refuses it. It asks for a judgement at the one moment the person reading it cannot make that judgement. Everyone who has ever left a pub in a group has done what the sign said, and the neighbours have their letters to prove it.
The sign asks you to leave quietly, and you do, by an ear the room has spent three hours turning down.