In Pursuit of Silence (30 page)

I soon saw that I would have to travel to Europe to see for myself what city noise maps looked like.

As Rice herself once wrote:
“They order these things
better in Europe, where the steam whistle has been largely suppressed. We are indeed a wonderful nation, but have much to learn from the Old World as regards the simple, sane commonplaces of ordinary life, of which protection from unreasonable noise is one of the most obvious.”

A huge seagull bobbed above me. A handful of cars were nestled in the soft, pale grass. My first glimpse of the low, gray Quonset-hut-type structures that made up Brüel & Kjær’s global headquarters on the outskirts of Copenhagen suggested a comfortingly
old-fashioned retreat for naturalists. But when I walked into the lobby everything was slick and steely, with multiple silent flat-screen televisions flickering away on every conceivable surface. It was the future, after all.

My chief liaison for the afternoon was Doug Manvell, a young Scotsman with muttonchop sideburns and a mouthful of official title: application specialist and environmental noise management solutions product manager. We had lunch together in the B&K cafeteria with several of Manvell’s colleagues and I began grilling them on noise mapping.

Manvell told me
that B&K made its money through two channels: legislative and commercial. In 2002, he said, the European Union had passed something called the
European Noise Directive
. The directive, commonly referred to as the END, put noise on the EU agenda and established a framework for reducing noise across Europe that will continue to be the dominant policy road map for many years to come. The central requirement of the END is that all EU member states create noise maps.

But then what was a noise map? I asked.

Someone at our lunch table said that it involved “predictive modeling of the soundscape.” Before I had a chance to ask what this meant, we were deep into the subject of how principles of soundscaping also informed their business’s commercial track.

Manvell explained that companies turned to B&K in order to gain a commercial advantage from adjusting the sound of a product. “Typically,” he said, “this means a manufacturer looking to do soundscaping within vehicles or other things.”

I knew a little bit about the idea of soundscaping motor vehicles. Some years ago, Harley-Davidson was forced to comply
with noise regulations outlawing the cycle’s earsplitting roar. Yet, as Alex Bozmoski, who headed up Harley’s noise and vibration facility at the time, put it,
“The experienced Harley
community demands a certain distinctive and unmistakable sound.” So the company’s goal became to make a motorcycle that would still sound like a Harley but be quieter. They damped out whines, knocks, and other undesirable mechanical noises, while adjusting the design to maintain the desired balance of tone, pitch, and beat from the exhaust and engine. At the same time, Bozmoski reported, they maximized “the frequency and amplitude of excitation wherever the rider and machine interface: handlebars, seat and footpegs.” Basically, they made the Harley into a giant vibrator. Then they patented the sound. Another case in point involves Jaguar. Some years ago, after surveys revealed that
the noise of Jaguar
engines was being poorly received by customers, Leyland Motors developed focus groups to study the issue. Although they’d set as their benchmark the sound of a luxury-car rival known for the sophisticated quiet of its engine, they found that Jaguar drivers actually wanted two different acoustical experiences at the same time: one of refinement, the other of power. Jaguar needed to soundscape its engine to create the right balance between the purr and the roar.

Manvell explained that the idea of commercial soundscaping was spreading from cars to building interiors. This could involve something as simple as creating a miniature indoor waterfall in an office reception area to mask unwanted conversation. Or it could mean shaping the sound inside a hospital so that it would be more conducive to healing.

Kevin Bernard Ginn, a colleague of Manvell, explained
that you might walk around a hospital with the Investigator, B&K’s new handheld sound meter, recording sound levels and types of noises. (It looks something like a BlackBerry grafted onto a Breathalyzer and runs about 10,000 euros a pop.) Then you could decide which noises and sound levels you liked. “Everything is being made to harmonize more and more,” Ginn said.

Manvell added that the same principle might be applied to an entire town square. He asked me to imagine traffic on one side, a park area on another where people relaxed, and a string of restaurants and bars in a third sector where people want to enjoy “the thrill of being in a big city.” New measurement technologies would enable someone to go around the square measuring sound in each zone. This data could then be fed to engineers who would look at the discrepancies between the actual sound in a given area and its ideal. Does the park sound relaxing? Do the bars sound thrilling? The engineers could then say, “Okay, maybe now we can adjust this one and this one.”

I was beginning to get a sense of what Manvell and Ginn were talking about. In the un-soundscaped, “natural” version of the square he was describing, unless the music of the restaurant and bars was unbelievably loud, the only sound you were going to hear anywhere was traffic. But perhaps this could all be manipulated. Manvell spoke of the entire world of sound, both inside and outside, as something controlled by one gigantic sound-mixing board with someone like him at the dial—constantly adjusting the gain on different features to get the balance just right.

Manvell and Ginn agreed that as recently as five years ago people were claiming that any alternative to physical sound-level reduction was against the ethics of noise control. But positions
were softening. As people realized the extreme cost of getting levels down to where experts would deem them completely safe, support was growing for the idea of making the environment at least more appealing.

“The work I’ve been doing for the past ten years has involved trying to compare a city with a vehicle,” Manvell continued. “You have a car—right now, everyone’s going for aerodynamics, everyone’s going for fuel consumption, everyone’s going for color. So
now
we go for soundscaping as another way of positioning ourselves. The city itself, in this sense, is like any other product. Because as a town you’re not alone in the world, this leads into marketing questions. The same way some people are dedicated to Ford purchases—they’ll never buy anything else—there are people living in Berlin who would never live anywhere else. But there are a vast majority of other people who are not so settled—which leads to cities looking to soundscaping and noise issues not just to protect their citizenry but to attract visitors. In the end, it comes down to that.”

As we continued talking, I wondered who would be making the decisions about sonic branding of urban environments in the future.

In truth, the more people I spoke with on the subject, the more I found that the mere sound of the word “soundscaping” generates buzz. Whenever sound professionals start speaking about improving what
anything
sounds like, it has come to mean pretty much whatever the person using the word wants it to mean. Along with the growing commercial interest in soundscaping,
there are also idealistic projects unfolding. The best of these often involve collaborations between artists and urban planners who draw on
historical soundscaping
: the study of types of sounds that characterize an environment over time. With this knowledge in hand, people can work to enhance the audibility of so-called “iconic sounds” of a given neighborhood (old church bells, a town clock, flowing water, or even footsteps). They can support biodiversity so that there will be greater opportunities for hearing the sound of wind in vegetation and birdsong. But the realization of such projects tends to be extremely sparing in the use of technology, and much more concerned with stripping away recent strata of noise than with adding any new sounds into the mix.

Take the work of Max Dixon, an urbanist specializing in soundscapes, who works with the Greater London Authority. Dixon was part of a team that wanted to change the fact that traffic noise drowned out the sound of the fountain at Trafalgar Square. By diverting cars away from just one side of the fountain—the one adjacent to the National Gallery—they not only diminished overall vehicular noise but also allowed sound waves from the fountain a free path to the overhanging portico of the gallery, where they were reflected and amplified for people gathered around the entrance of the museum, exactly the position on the square where one would be most likely to enjoy the liquid concert.

Sometimes soundscaping can also take advantage of cross-sensory perceptions and psychoacoustics to enhance the sense of silence. So, for example, studies have indicated that in
areas with sound barriers
, there’s a ten decibel difference in how annoying noise is depending on the visual attractiveness of the barriers.
An ugly barrier makes for a significantly greater perception of loudness. Other research has indicated that
while falling water
is often the best way to mask traffic noise, water falling on a metal grating often communicates not a spirit of calm but a reminder of drainage. To convey tranquillity, tests have shown, high-frequency water sounds are best. The most soothing of these are produced by water splashing over small, uneven boulders.

Projects taking advantage of such principles are often simple and worthy of support. But their very subtlety makes them unlikely candidates for the kinds of major metropolitan self-promotions I heard about at B&K. Noting the vulnerability of soundscaping to corporate interests with more tangible profits in mind, Dixon told me that “in the hands of people seeking a cheap ‘quick fix’ rather than going to the root of the problem, applied electroacoustics could become a nightmare.”

The nightmare need not be electroacoustic.
Honda recently paid
a large sum of money to soundscape a busy road in Lancaster, California. The project—versions of which have already been undertaken in several cities in Asia—involved cutting thousands of tiny grooves into the asphalt so that the road surface would “play” the
William Tell
overture as cars drove across it. (It played best for Honda Civics cruising along at fifty-five.) People living nearby were driven nuts by the endlessly repeated snatch of Rossini and, as the road surface corroded with use, the music became equally degraded.

The reality today is that traffic has washed over the palette of other noises across the world. The exorbitant cost of creating quiet in the
world’s major cities opens up some awfully big marketing opportunities for the plugged-in vendor with some catchy noise to pedal.

After lunch, I was given a tour of B&K. We milled by endless arrays of microphones of every conceivable dimension, rocket shafts and foamy black eggs able to hear every pin drop; numberless black-and-silver sound-measurement devices that resembled large digital thermometers for taking temperatures of zoo animals; boxes lined with different materials into which objects could be put and shaken to see whether you could still hear them clatter; dummy heads with screws, clamps, and black spikes projecting from them, looking like over-edgy S&M gear, but ostensibly used to test telephone transmission frequencies. There were also many, many laptops showing off the bright color fields of modeling software for indoor acoustics and environmental noise management. These latter represented a core B&K contribution to the noise-mapping initiative.

I walked by an intricate scale model of an airport with a little plane zooming around on a wire, and a helicopter, and multiple tiny pen-cap microphones tracking different airplane noise types and air traffic densities. Most dramatic of all was a life-size car that looked like it had spun into a giant spiderweb—some kind of metal grid laced with dozens of little black bud microphones. This allowed the engineers to hear and predict every vibration in the engine and chassis and then prescribe minute adjustments to create the ideal sonic equilibrium.