Designing Soundscape for Sustainable Urban Development

The European Environmental Noise Directive’s requirement that attention be given to what it called quiet areas has been an exciting advancement - a clear statement that the whole of people’s acoustic experience is important and needs to be managed, not just the low-quality end of the outdoor acoustic environment.  But in contrast to the decades of acoustic research, policy-making and management at the low-quality (noise) end, we are only just beginning these for the high-quality end – and it should not come as a surprise to find that we need to adjust our terminology and our thinking.  While most low-quality outdoor acoustic environments are noisy and loud, many, if not most, high-quality outdoor acoustic environments are far from quiet or silent - think a forest with wind in the trees, waves on a beach, birds singing, church bells in a town square, cattle lowing on a farm, and even the sound of children playing (as a colleague once described the latter - the “music of the future”).  People enjoy and cherish these sounds in their particular contexts, components of human experience so important to the richness and quality of life.  It is these environments to which we must direct our attention, and it would provide greater clarity to adopt the terminology areas of high acoustic quality (as the opposite of noisy areas) in place of the less inclusive, and mostly inaccurate, quiet areas.  Semantics are important in acoustics.

My experience is that Europe is far more advanced than most other continents in starting to direct attention to these matters, but there is still a need to pull together acoustic, environmental and spatial policy that can contribute.  One unifying notion is the concept of diversity – preserving areas of high acoustic quality is an important part of preserving diversity of human experience across cities, villages and countryside.  We are certainly in danger of losing this diversity to the gray blurring of transportation noise – how often when you are outdoors are you not hearing a foreground of transportation noise, or experiencing other sounds that you might want against the dull uniformity of levels set by distant traffic.  Preserving this diversity means, in terms that acousticians would use, that the sounds we want to hear such as the sounds of moving water, the sounds of nature, non-mechanical human sounds (laughter, singing), iconic sounds, should be clearly audible - not masked by sounds we do not want to hear.

Of course, all this raises interesting technical questions for acousticians regarding how we define, measure and control high acoustic quality.  Suffice to say that my view is that our methods of integration of energy (irrespective of sound source) that we predominantly use in noise control (the Leq), will be found wanting as a way to describe high quality noise environments. Finding new instruments begins with another focus and another way of thinking. Europe has advanced along this path and I wish you a lot of success in the follow-up.