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Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an industry-funded qualitative interdisciplinary research project that has produced a new approach to motorway noise management called “noise transformation”.
Design/methodology/approach
Four iterative design tests guided by listening as methodology. These included field recordings, laboratory tests and two field tests. Field tests were conducted in combination with ethnographers, who verified community responses to field-based transformations.
Findings
Transformation requires an audible perception of both background and introduced sounds in all instances. Transformation creates a 1–2 dB increase in background sound levels, making it counterintuitive to traditional noise attenuation approaches. Noise transformation is an electroacoustic soundscape design method that treats noise as a “design material”. When listening to motorway noise transformations, participants were actually experiencing another rendering of a sound that they had already acquired a degree of attunement to. Thus, they experienced transformations as somehow familiar or normal and easy to feel comfortable with.
Originality/value
Noise transformation is a new approach to noise management. Typically, noise management focusses on reduction in dB levels. Noise transformation focusses on changing the perceptual impact of noise to make it less annoying. It brings together urban design, composition and ethnography as a means to think about the future design of outdoor environments affected by motorway traffic noise, and should be of interests to planners, designers and artists. The authors have structured the paper around listening as methodology, through which both design and ethnography outcomes were achieved.
In a recent article, Claude Mauriac remarks pertinently, “On a voulu expliquer En Attendant Godot par un improbable jeu de mots: God ne signifie-t-il pas Dieu en anglais? Façon de rendre moins inquiétante cette pièce aussi peu rassurante que les autres oeuvres de Beckett.” Although M. Mauriac may be brushing aside rather too quickly a play on words that is perhaps not so improbable after all, he points perceptively in these lines to an inadequacy that mars a number of otherwise illuminating discussions of Beckett's controversial play. Critics, professional and amateur, have, in fact, often been overly concerned with the “message” of the drama, treating it, unconsciously perhaps, as a kind of thesis play and thereby, one might argue, casting implicit aspersions on its excellence as art. The reviewer for the London Times writes, for example, “… the message of Mr. Beckett as a novelist is perhaps a message of blank despair. The message of Waiting for Godot is perhaps something nearer a message of religious consolation … Waiting for Godot—one might sum up these remarks—is thus a modern morality play on permanent Christian themes.”
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