Noise transformation

Abstract

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.

Using Virtual Soundwalk Approach for Assessing Sound Art Soundscape Interventions in Public Spaces

“…This study was conducted with the aim to investigate how a range of sound art installation techniques (passive and active) introduced to public spaces can be assessed using the framework outlined by the ISO 12913 Acoustics-Soundscape series and post hoc laboratory listening tests. So far, soundscape interventions have been extensively looked into when introducing natural sounds [1][2][3] or generic music [4,5], while sound-art-focused studies often featured electroacoustic installations commissioned for the research purposes without a detailed report on the acoustic and psychoacoustic characteristics of the very sound sources introduced [6][7][8][9]. On the other hand, it is not always feasible to conduct a soundscape assessment in the design stage.…”

“…Most commonly investigated characteristics of musical content in the soundscape research literature are dynamics, tempo, genre, context, and familiarity [43]. They cover approaches such as generic popular music introduced to facilitate activities in public spaces [4,43,44], participatory music selection [5], sound art installations combined with active noise cancellation (ANC) for 'creative noise masking' [7] and sound art installations conceived as sonic sculptures [8,45]. However, the theory of music adopted a framework that is looser in categorizing musical content.…”

“…Some of the above-mentioned studies were looking into the soundscape interventions 'as they are' [42,45]. Other were trying to assess their impact by defining a baseline condition and then looking into the conditions such as 'on and off'/'with or without' [44,57], 'before and after' [1,7] or comparing different scenarios and exposure conditions [4,5,38,58]. In terms of selecting key conditions, different time frames were featured, spanning from several years between the conditions [36,44] to several minutes in the same time of day [4].…”