Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic environments have serious, long-term impacts on our mental and physical health. This is part one in a two-part series supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about how sound can be designed to reduce harm and even improve wellbeing.
Many of the sounds we hear are created with very little thought for how they interact with each other. Some of these are byproducts of modern technologies, like engine sounds or the hums of computers. Others are made intentionally, like alarms or cellphone rings. There are the sounds of overhead planes, air conditioning units, stores pumping out music, sirens and then people talking loudly to be heard over the rest of the noise. Then there are cars, which may be the biggest culprit.[...]
Joel Beckerman, a sound designer and composer at Man Made Music , believes we need a new approach to sound — one where we decide what we hear in our everyday environment. He calls this Sonic Humanism. “[It’s] really about how [we can] use music and sound to make people’s lives richer and simpler,” he explains. He wants sound to be something we’re thinking about all the time. But while cities have more noise laws than ever, over half of the world’s population live in urban areas experiencing way too much noise.
No comments:
Post a Comment