Most of us are aware
how noisy big cities can be. The incessant traffic of Rome, the endless
bustling of Tokyo, the never-ending pandemonium of Mumbai and Lagos- simply
walking down the street in cities like these can be exhausting on the ear.
We humans are getting
noisier. As population increases and societies are becoming more urbanized,
noise pollution in cities is on the rise. A World Health Organization report in
2011found that “environmental noise lead to a disease burden that is second in
magnitude only to that from air pollution”. This, of course can have adverse
and wide-ranging effects on people’s health not to mention the environmental
and economic costs.
Built
for the eyes, not the ears
Apart for the obvious
reasons of traffic, and people living in close proximity, many of the problems
stem from the fact that few cities are designed with sound in mind. Rome is a
good example: a lot of its infrastructure was built for another sonic era. The
soundscape of ancient Rome and the coliseum was vastly different from today’s
overwhelming clutter of traffic, sirens and vespas.
According to sound
artist and “sonic thinker” Bruce Odland, the architecture of a city is visually
defined, “We have increasingly become visual since the renaissance,” he says.
“Now all the tools of design have become purely visual, including the
spreadsheets that sell and budget them, the school that train the designers,
and the renderings that sell projects to the developers. It’s just part of our particular culture to
become fascinated by images; it’s not just the designers, it’s everyone.
We have become used to
noise without even being aware of it, contends Bruce. “The way we shut out the
sea of industrial noise that characterize our cities is by creating brain
filters that eliminate these sounds from our conscious awareness. We don’t know
we can do this, but unaware, we have become professional non-listeners,” he
says.
Think
with our ears
There is, of course, no
one cure-all for the curse of noise in our cities, but we could start by paying
more attention to its consequences.” The sounds that surround us are accidents,
the unaware results of some other priority,” say Bruce Odland.
We could, instead of
looking at the city, listen to it with eyes closed. This type of energy
inefficiency would then become more efficient. Fix the loudest sound, then the
next, then the next. By fix, I mean create more efficient motors, less
friction, better design, more tuning in the process. If our culture were all
concerned by energy usage, noise would come to mean wasted energy, and would
lead to design changes that would benefit the humans living in this sonic
‘commons’- or the space we share”.
Credit: widex
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