FEATURE ARTICLE
Traffic signal ITO Image credit: Author
“Listen! Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere. That has to do with the shape peculiar to each room and with the surfaces of the shape peculiar to each room and with the surfaces of the materials they contain, and the way those materials have been applied…But there are sounds, too, in a great hall: the noises in the grand interior of a railway terminal, or you hear sounds in a town and so on. But if we take it a step further - even if it gets a bit mystical now - and imagine extracting all foreign sound from a building, and if we try to imagine what that would be like with nothing left, nothing there to touch anything else. The question arises: does the building still have a sound? …I find it’s a beautiful thing when you’re making a building in that stillness. I mean trying to make the building a quiet place. That’s pretty difficult these days because our world has become so noisy. Well, not so much here, perhaps. But I know other places that are much noisier and you have to go to some lengths to make quiet rooms and imagine the sound they make with all their proportions and materials in a stillness of their own…” What is important to understand is when does a sound
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CITY OBSERVER | June 2016
become noise? The answer could be subjective; people have differing levels of resilience to noise. Generalizing the reception of noise based on age group we can safely agree that older people and small children prefer places that are relatively silent whereas youth and adults prefer places that are full of different sounds and vibrant in nature. Sound is a positive element in an urban setting, but too much or too little of it is undesirable for habitation. The presence of sound is also an indicator of security, and also a required condition for privacy in city life. Noise is sound in disagreement with our hearing experience. The acoustic ecologist Murray Schafer proposed three different types of noises - unwanted sound, unmusical sound (defined as non-periodic vibration) and any loud sound disturbance used in signalling systems. All these are independent features that have the potential of leading to emotional responses, often manifested in frustration.8 We are attuned to ignore ambient sounds that are not particularly continuous or disturbing. For example: 8 Tim Beatley, 2013, The Nature of Cities, accessed 5th June 2016, http://www.thenatureofcities.com/2013/01/13/celebrating-thenatural-soundscapes-of-cities/