Acoustic Urban Design

The urban soundtrack of any city, particularly a metropolitan one, plays a subtle yet profound role in shaping the characteristics and inhabitability of the environment. A handful of sources have speculated as to the psychological importance of a wide variety of sounds found in any given space and how manipulating and utilizing these sounds could be implemented in the design and overall experience of the built environment. In the essay entitled Experiential Perspective, Yi-Fu Tuan asserts, "Sounds, though vaguely located, can convey a strong sense of size (volume) and of distance." The anomalous characteristics of sound--that it is mnemonic, personal, and transmittable--establishes it as an immensely promising virtual terrain. There has been a fair amount of academic speculation on the subject of sound in the built environment, but little has been contributed in terms of approachable discourse and mainstream application. How can architects and engineers begin to directly incorporate aural stimuli into the design process? "...most people function with the five senses, and these constantly reinforce each other to provide the intricately ordered and emotion charged world in which we live," Tuan states. Taking this into account could greatly broaden architectural practice to include holistic sensory design.

Modernist architecture has obsessed itself with visual transparency. The majority of architectural design and urban planning is generally obsessed with optical aesthetics and the affect that this has on the user, overlooking the powerful influence of other senses. By introducing aural transparency as a design component, architecture becomes exponentially more impactful and gains site specific uniqueness not present in most contemporary transplanted architecture. Amplifying, isolating, or replaying certain sounds gathered from the nearby environment would allow for entirely new experiences to be had by occupants. Swapping or mixing certain noises could produce disorienting even hallucinatory affects. If you don't like the sounds of Shanghai, swap it with the sound of New York. Imagine the different thoughts and experiences that one can have traversing a city listening to popular music. New observations are made and subtleties are realized that may have gone unnoticed without importing alternate sounds. The same could be said for urban soundtracks and the potential of blurring the lines between ones thought process and the sounds of the environment around you. We all become accustomed to various "sound tags" which sometimes even elicit involuntary responses. Hearing a siren, one usually stops the car immediately or pulls off the road. Hearing a gun shot would most likely cause an individual to quickly duck down. Additionally, we use sound recognition to anticipate our own actions. A person riding a skateboard for example may adjust their position of balance based on the sounds and vibrations of different surfaces. If we consider architecture as a truly multidisciplinary field that amalgamates sensory perception, precise sound design within certain spaces could profoundly affect a user’s behavior by facilitating a type of deliberate synethesia in which stimulation of one cognitive pathway leads to automatic experiences in another sensory pathway.

The intent is not to "tune" the world in order to make it sound better. No one can place a monopoly on what "sounds good". But to understand how soundscapes unconsciously but undoubtedly have psychological effects on the behaviors and emotions of inhabitants would be a worthwhile pursuit. One initial goal would be to parametrically model acoustic frequency in select environments, similar to how light is modeled through cities when developing buildings proposals. These sound maps would take into account different times of day, during different seasons, in differing atmospheric conditions throughout the year, and then introducing the flow of people, traffic, and information throughout the spaces. Even further, these models could then be analyzed in comparison to other buildings and open spaces and then re-articulated and transposed into other domains of space. If we consider urban spaces as orchestras, in which each object or building is a unique instrument with differing acoustic qualities, we can begin to postulate how different areas could be "arranged" to produce distinct sonic environments. Certain materials diffuse sound, while others reflect it. Dense urban areas amplify or scatter certain sounds, while vast open spaces allow noises to simply fade away.