The soundscape of the 21st Century Although the public realm allows for the option of easy escape from extreme environmental stressors, the possibility to access different types of acoustic zones is becoming increasingly difficult as urban soundscapes are gradually becoming more uniform. The constant drone of machine and transport noise impacts negatively upon speech intelligibility in public space and also lessens acoustic contrast in intensity and frequency. In developing countries such as China where 24 hour construction is permitted
(Sim, 2007)
the
possibility to find quiet in time or space is even rarer.
Murray Schafer
(1977)
defines this type of soundscape as “lo-
fi”… “where signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds” and attributes this condition to a loss of perception in spatial distance where only the positions of very close sources are audible through sound: this reduction in spatial understanding is likely to cause confusion and anxiety (especially in those with visual impairment) as “the first stage in coping with a new environment is to obtain information about it….” which “…happens through the various sensory modalities- vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and kinesthesis.”
(Altman and Chemers, 1984)
Therefore, unlike with Gehl’s
fixed measure of the impact of sight recognition on the scale of public space, to achieve acoustic intimacy the scale of the space required also depends on background noise levels.
Augoyard and Torgue (2005) define ‘drone’ as noise of a constant
pitch and intensity. Often it is made up of white noise where the signal is composed of all frequencies: natural drones are the sound of wind, rain and flowing water.
The sound of the modernist vision
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