EP 22: Urban Soundscapes and Active Listening
As America develops, how often do you pause to listen? To the places undergoing active change? Or those preserved in time? To the sounds that truly identify a location, whether natural or developed? On this episode -- headphones required this time! -- we talk about the connections and influences we can develop with specific places when we pause to take them for what they are in the moment, via active listening. Many have taken to field recording, to capture what's around them for analysis -- in some cases highly scientific, and influential of public policy. Listen in. Show notes: Anne Guthrie's Urban Omnibus piece with field recordings, "Tune In: Soundscapes of New York" - http://urbanomnibus.net/2015/05/tune-in-soundscapes-of-new-york/ Anne Guthrie, Arup - http://thoughts.arup.com/post/userposts/212 Donald Best, Raleigh Recording Co. field recordings - https://soundcloud.com/raleighrecordingco USDOT noise map - https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/press_releases/bts015_17 SONYC - https://wp.nyu.edu/sonyc/ New York Times, "To Create a Quieter City, They're Recording the Sounds of New York" - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/nyregion/to-create-a-quieter-city-theyre-recording-the-sounds-of-new-york.html?_r=2 Noisy ice-cream truck? - http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/3019/noise-from-ice-cream-truck
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation.
The sound echoed through the urban canyons along the roads and came to me in a very disorienting
and strange way, and so I'm following it trying to find it. I recently looked through, like, you know, one of those kind of old records, you know, like with the old tobacco buildings and stuff in the Right. Like eighteen something. The photos of, like, the historic hustle and bustle downtown area. What what how did it sound and how does it compare to where we are now? I feel like I know a little bit more about the inner life of an of a a neighborhood or an area because I witnessed something that is unique to that area and it will stick around in my memory. Listen and learn, kind of in a different way. And wear your headphones for this one. To really get this episode, you're gonna wanna break out the headphones. I promise. My name is Ben Brown and this is Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities.
Episode 22. Typically on the podcast, each episode, we zoom in on a topic that has something to do with life or governance in a municipality. Cities and towns and studying what makes them what they are. The challenges, the new technologies, shareable solutions, all in the context of changing times. We keep with that today, but this episode is gonna be more of a sensory experience. Listen. So what was that all about? Well, hopefully, you heeded my instructions at the top of the episode to wear headphones. You just heard a stereo recording that I captured with a special microphone that picks up sound in either direction and keeps that separation. So if we're doing this right, you heard something that reflected a realistic experience. Your left ear hearing stuff to your left, your right ear hearing stuff to your right. And if you close your eyes and listen, it's kinda like being in a place that you're presently not. Like standing under a shelter during a thunderstorm. And then waiting for traffic to clear so you can cross the rainy street to get to your car. And then sitting in your car, listening to the rain beat against the hood. Or to go somewhere completely different, lounging outside your house on a sunny day, or hovering your head over a babbling body of water. So there were details you surely noticed in each of these stereo recordings, sounds that you might hear all the time, but don't really tune into until you have a reason to do so, like this episode. And, well, okay. Let's tie it together. And we'll do that in a few different ways. I've been thinking about sound and noise from a local perspective for a while now. The sounds that are native to a specific area. As specific as your front yard or a street corner or the nearby Pond. And how those sounds are really passive to us until we stop to listen. And at that point, they're part of the identity. You know what I'm talking about. This isn't a very foreign concept. But exploring a time and a place through sound and how it changes over time is something that helps me connect with my locale and really helps me get to know the behavior and subtleties of a particular place in the world. If you'll recall episode four, my interview with Melody Warnecke about finding ways to love where you live and really appreciate your scene, and maybe even capture something extraordinary and rare from it, well, this is something I would add to that list, going from passive to active listening. And it's all the more fun if you have a way to record these characteristic sounds. But before I lose you with what you might rank as a hippie conceptual episode, and no, I'm not a hippie, let's transition into more of our stock and trade, and that's policy, science, personalities, governance. For example, there's a research group at New York University called SONYC, s o n y c, which stands for sounds of New York City. I first heard about them in a New York Times article about the work they're doing. They're basically trying to document sound in the urban area and understand what is making all of that noise. How many little things add up to the din that we complain about?
New Yorkers make more calls to the city's non emergency 311 line to complain about noise than they do for any other reason. It has been estimated that nine out of ten adults in New York City are exposed to excessive noise levels that is beyond the limit of what the US EPA considers harmful. Such levels of exposure have proven effects on health including acute effects, such as sleep disruption, increased stress, annoyance, and distraction, and long term effects, such as age. In addition, there is evidence of impact on educational performance, with numerous studies showing that noise pollution produces learning and cognitive impairment in children resulting in decreased memory, reading skills, and lower test scores. The economic impact of noise related health effects is also huge. Early studies in The US demonstrated the effect of environmental noise on real estate markets, with housing prices falling as much as 2% per decibel of noise increase.
Recent studies in Europe are That was from Sonix's website. I'll have a link to that in the show notes. The New York Times article talks about how they've been recording these sounds in different parts of New York City to analyze with computers and create a quote, aural map. And this map might help city agencies better understand noise pollution, what the sources are, and be able to enforce ordinances related to it. It's a five year program funded mostly by a National Science Foundation grant. So we've got some contrast going on. I played you sounds earlier that might be interpreted as pleasant or relaxing.
And then we pivoted to urban noise that might even cause adverse effects on our being. And we're looking at the policies designed to help us. We have a lot of ice cream trucks and there's actually a very specific stipulation in the New York City noise code that ice cream trucks are not allowed to play, music while stationary because a lot of the complaints that the DP gets are there's an ice cream truck outside my window and it's been playing the same thing for, you know, an hour. That's right. There's even a place on the city of New York's website, the local government website, where you can report the sounds of ice cream trucks in violation of city noise rules. That voice you just heard is Anne Guthrie. I live in Brooklyn, New York. I am a musician and an acoustic consultant.
I found Guthrie by way of a piece she wrote in Urban Omnibus. That's an online publication from the Architectural League of New York. And it was sort of about the conflict between the pleasant stimuli in cities and the sounds that we find frankly annoying. It impacts city policy, ordinances, noise abatement efforts, but is much really changing and keeping with our theme of changing times in development, what new sounds are joining in? What sounds are going away? The questions of sound, noise, and their effects on health, both physical and mental, and the impacts on the environment in which we live, drew Guthrie into something worthy of study, something to break down and dissect. And it is a full fledged field of study and purpose. Matter of fact, she pointed out to me that the US Department of Transportation just released a report last month about transportation and noise. I'll get back to that. What I didn't know about Guthrie is that she also works with a planning, engineering, and design group called ARUP, ARUP, where she ties in her expertise in the dynamics and manipulation of sound. By the way, here's one of my favorites that Guthrie recorded. It's the overpass at the Third Street 7 Train subway station in Queens, where you'll hear a really strange natural echo effect when you clap or stomp your feet. She called it a legendary place for enthusiasts of sound. I'd love to know how you got into it. And one one of the questions I had was this conflict between the quiet space and the loud space, and that it seems like our our daily living demands necessitate things like the things that make noise, but, you know, living in an urban environment, for instance. But we also need that break, you know, that break to quietude for our own sanity, and and that's a break that seems like it might even be considered an amenity in an urban area, that quietude. But what got you into, I guess, the the field of acoustics to begin with in documenting sound? Sure. Well, it's interesting because, actually, my first
foray into this area came from the performing arts, because I studied music in undergrad, and I worked for an orchestra in Brooklyn called the SEM Ensemble. And, we spent a lot of time playing the same program in a number of different venues, and I started to hear the differences, and think about the building and the impact of the acoustics on that. And so then I, went back to school to study acoustics. And around the same time, I was getting interested in more work with field recordings in my musical career. I actually spent a semester at Goldsmiths in London, which is kinda where I first got introduced to this idea. One of the professors there was very into it. It was, pretty trendy at the moment, to respect the purity of the field recording and really focus on it. And when that kind of got me to start thinking about really listening, I guess we listened to a lot of stuff by Hildegard Westerkamp, Brandon Labelle, a couple other people. And, eventually, those two interests kind of started to overlap and merge, especially when I started working at Arup, and some of the projects that I was doing. Mhmm. And so then yeah. I mean, we also spend a lot of time trying to control the sounds in the urban environment or trying to because we work with a built environment a lot, most of it is trying to mitigate it before it gets into the indoor space. Right. And thinking of indoor spaces kind of a sanctuary from the cloud voices outside, but we've also done many projects where we look at, creating sort of outdoor spaces like playgrounds or parks that have soundscaping elements or have certain amount of barriers to kind of protect them from the typical urban din.
So that part's really interesting. I mean, I I have a I have this question about, you know, the the most maligned noises that you find are associated with urban or developed environments. So what are you trying to to mitigate, and what are what are some of the ideas or efforts that go into dealing with noise in some way?
Sure. I think that, I can really only speak specifically to New York City. Although it has many of the same sounds as other urban areas, I think it has a greater density, of course. But, also, there are some unique ones to New York. So I'll probably cover those here. I think the main issue in most areas is transportation noise, and that has changed over time. Uh-huh. One really interesting thing about the history of noise in New York is that it's pretty well documented. And there's a book by Emily Thompson called The Soundscape of Modernity, which I, reference a lot. And she goes into the history of sounds of New York. And the first noise abatement commission that's led to the New York City noise code was actually in 1930.
Mhmm.
And they documented actually levels that are fairly similar to what we have now, but some of the things were very different, like, rolling of ash cans during the ash can collection. Mhmm. And then, the, subway stuff, obviously, is different now. But the fact that transportation has created noise has always been there. I mean, even when it was, horse and cart, it was the wheels rolling on cobblestones was incredibly loud and drove people insane in the eighteen hundreds. So, now it's helicopters, airplanes. I think a lot of things can get, tuned out if they have a wide broadband spectrum and they're continuous. Right. The ear has a tendency to be able to kind of turn those down, the psychoacoustic effect called the cocktail party effect, that allows us to kind of do our own cognitive filtering. The cocktail party effect. Yeah. It's like how when you're at a party and you even though there's a din of people talking all around you, you can somehow be able to focus on the person that you are list that you're talking to. But yeah. So so, the DOT actually just released a map of noise prediction for all of the transportation noise in in the entire country. And you can you can see it, and you can download GIS. It's really great that this has just been released. Transportation
noise map shows that more than 97% of The US population has the potential to be exposed to noise from aviation and interstate highways at levels below 50 decibels or roughly comparable to the noise level of a humming refrigerator. A much smaller segment of The US resident population has the potential to be exposed to high levels of aviation and interstate highway noise. Less than one tenth of a percent of the population could potentially experience noise levels of 80 decibels or more, equivalent to the noise level of a garbage disposal. The purpose of the noise map is to facilitate the tracking of trends and transportation
related noise. So it's really fascinating to look at that and see where all the real issues are. I mean, air airports are a major issue and whenever it's something that I always notice in Brooklyn is, like, they change the flight path every so often and it makes a big difference in our own neighborhood Yeah. Which which side of our apartment is louder because now all the planes are going over to the South Side. So it does have a pretty big impact. Mhmm. And, actually, my colleague, Chris Pollock, who works at Arup, has done a lot of work on sort of the mitigation stuff that you're talking about. And it all sometimes ends up being really small things. For example, the change from road material from cement to asphalt makes a difference in traffic noise. Some other small things that he worked on was kind of interesting that there was a there were big issues, complaints about during, like, garbage collection, like trash cans, wheels rolling, and so working on changing the material for the wheel to a rubber wheel mitigates a lot of noise. Sure. Things that are special to New York, I think, are, we have a lot of ice cream trucks, and there's actually a very specific stipulation in the New York City noise code that ice cream trucks are not allowed to play, music while stationary because Wow. A lot of the complaints that the DP gets are there's an ice cream truck outside my window, and it's been playing the same thing for, you know, an hour.
I I can sympathize or or empathize, but Yeah. I've never thought of that that, you know, that would be something that local government would get a string of complaints about enough to where an ordinance would have to be inked.
Yeah. It's actually really interesting. I don't know how many other states have this, but you can go on nyc.gov and you can see the log of noise complaints, and it's fascinating. And they do address them. I think one last thing to say about that too is that there's a book by Armory Shaffer called Tuning of the World. It's a classic book about, active listening soundscaping and it and urban noise, and it talks about the fact that some of the noise levels and and issues with malign noise could be generally created because people stop paying attention, and they stop listening. And and as a result, there's more space to create these sounds, and no one complains about them, and no one's paying attention to a point where they're creating positive sounds in the environment. So things like that are generally soothing, like natural sounds, like birds or water sounds.
You mentioned active listening. You know, you've written about the nuances of these environmental sounds of of urban sounds and, you know, what they inspire when you stop and listen in an active way. Could could you explain a little bit more what you mean by active listening and what that involves for you? Yeah.
Well, I I'm not necessarily the most regimented about this. I would say that it often comes to me in a kind of erratic way, but I sometimes will just be inspired to start listening because something happens. And then that like, an event a sonic event will happen, and I wasn't paying attention. And then as a result of that, I start paying more attention to the environment. I think that kind of happens to everyone. But I often am best at it when I'm recording. Mhmm. So I'm I'm have my equipment set up, and I'm either monitoring over the headphones or I'm just listening to see what is interesting to record. And then I start to really pick it apart. But I think if you follow sort of Schaeffer's idea of, like, he calls it ear cleaning Mhmm. You and it actually has a lot of similarities to something like mindfulness meditation. It's just sitting and first, you sort of just take in the entirety of the environment and then you start to break it down in your head while you're listening. Like, what are the different sources? Where are they spatially? What sounds have different contours? So are there sounds that are high treble? Are there sounds that are bassy or melodic? Or are there sounds that are just white noise? What would you consider to be the foreground and the background, like a painting, basically? How does the environment change over time is also a big one, and that's kind of hard to do because you're not gonna sit there for five straight days. But sometimes I I noticed that I when I'm walking the same route, like, from the train to work, I pay attention to how that changes
over time. So when a building goes up, that that alters the sonic dynamics of the area that you walk through?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's less about the, like, geometry of there being a building there because in New York, there's already buildings everywhere. But Yeah. It's more like so now there's construction happening here, which is loud and has a different sounds to it. Actually, for there was a pile driver have, somewhere down, that I couldn't see when I was walking to work, but the sound echoed through the urban canyons, along the roads and came to me in a very disorienting and strange way. And Okay. So I'm following it trying to find it because I wanted to record it with my because sometimes what I do when I don't have all my gear with me is I pull out my iPhone and get an iPhone memo. I would be surprised that, how much you can actually capture that way. Mhmm. But the source, I never found it. So it was just kind of interesting. That was gone the next day. Is that kind of a motivation for you too to to try and document a place and time as as something we might wanna preserve in sort of an archivist kind of way? Yeah. I think I've become more interested in that, especially since I've read the Schaeffer book because there's a lot of discussion about that, and especially since I started to learn more about the historical sounds of this city. You know, a lot of those aren't recorded, and it's kind of sad. And I WNYC has an archive of a lot of things that have been recorded, and, the work of Tony Schwartz is very valuable for that. Also, he was, one of the early field recordists in New York City. He did a lot of interviews with people who lived in New York, more almost more than just ambient recordings, but they're really great artifacts. And I don't know. I don't know if any of the stuff that I record is gonna be disappear or be valuable, but I and I I I'm not making a exhaustive effort of documenting everything. I I wish I wish I had the time and money for that, but, I definitely think a survey of the sound marks of any urban area is very valuable. You you know, it's like you would keep all of your all the literature in the world. You wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't want it to disappear, so you would scan it, etcetera. I think it should be the same with sounds.
So what what else have you found in your documentation? I mean, I I think you wrote you you you wrote something about feeling more connected to a specific area with active listening by appreciating and understanding the the source sounds and what they all add up to and and and feeling that connection.
Yeah. I definitely feel more connected to spaces. I think partly just because I've spent more time there, as a result of the activities. But I feel like I know a little bit more about the inner life of an of a neighborhood or an area because I witnessed something that is unique to that area, and it will stick around in my memory more. I think sometimes I find things when I listen to the recording also that I didn't experience when I was there. Oh, can I be there? Which is, of course, how our brains work in terms of listening. Sometimes you miss things.
By the way, any field recordings you heard during my talk with Guthrie were sounds that she recorded. So the sense that active listening can really help us connect to our locale really sticks with me. Those field recordings of mine that I played earlier were all done in an amateur hobbyist kind of way. I enjoy it. It's nice to document a realistic sound and mark the date and time and location like a like a photograph. Something to appreciate later even if it seems kind of insignificant. Well, the more I listen back, the more I connect with it. For example, I don't know anything about birds, but listening to some of my recordings, I've kind of developed a curiosity about the nature that's native to where I live, the species, what the bird calls mean. And that's scalable to pretty much anything. Capturing the signature sounds of your own environment to study and connect with. Maybe it's nature, maybe it's the sounds of the developed environment, Something to connect with. Otherwise, it's something that we maybe take so much for granted that we might miss the subtle changes in these sounds over time. And again, it's kind of a simple pleasure that has helped me relate to the town that I moved to a little bit less than a year ago. As I was planning this episode and just surfing around the web, I came across someone else in my area, my general area, who's documented distinct local sounds as a project, and he's had a lot of the same experiences. My name is Donald Bess, and I am a local audio producer and engineer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Bess also works in music and other production types, and he's opening up a new recording studio named after the city itself, Raleigh Recording Company. I found him by way of a SoundCloud page that he set up with field recordings of various spots in Raleigh. He titled the playlist record Raleigh, capturing Raleigh through sound. He gives the specific location, date, and time of day, like this one of a large fountain outside the Legislative Building on Joan Street, July 3036 at 06:56PM. And here's outside the downtown bus terminal a few hours earlier.
I mean, I guess my my real goal for this project was just to see what I could do with, like, a really cheap, field recorder Okay. And kinda seeing how much I could replicate, like, a real actual place. So almost like if you could almost envision, like, closing your eyes and then listening to this sound and picturing yourself there or something like that. Definitely. Really, I was trying to see how how easily I could do this. In in this case, I use, like, a little, like, under $200 field recorder if it's in your pocket. Mhmm. Put, like, a little, like, windscreen on there and went out and just, walked around and just when I noticed something interesting or different, I I kinda just pull it out, record it, and, like I said, it's kind of gearing up for, like, this other kind of future projects that I have in mind. But, it's funny that you stumbled on it because it's literally just a personal project that I decided to put on a page and Right. Honestly did not expect anyone at all to listen to this thing. Just it was really just for, like, a face for myself to really, like, look at and kind of
explore. So Yeah. And, you know, you say it was a a an expensive field recorder. I mean but it sounds high quality to me, and I'm obviously not the first person to think this, but, you know, I think these capturing the sounds of an environment or a time and a place are just as important to the to the historical archives as, you know, photographs and videos because just as you said, I I think even maybe more so than videos and photographs, they kinda hit a part of your brain and they really kind of, they draw you in and connect you with that environment in a way that, not much else can if we're talking about high quality stereo recordings. So, you know, it's a time and a place that's not just staged. It's reality. Right? And there may be a time when certain sounds disappear, so to speak, in terms of part of the environment has changed structurally, a factory closes down, or or, you know, something new shows up that changes the character of a place. And this stuff, I I think what you're doing anyway, even if it was just a fun experiment, ends up kinda having relevance, to to Raleigh Sure. To to the area. I mean, do you think about it in that way? Or or was the takeaway more just like, let's just see what I can capture? Right.
No. More than you know. So right. So the name, right, Raleigh recording company and, you know, Record Raleigh, that's it's not just coincidence. It's more of like it's like a personal goal that I have, you know, almost to change the way that we perceive, just memories or moments. I mean, just just to give you an idea, maybe roughly 25% of my friends are photographers. Mhmm. And, you know, you know, on Instagram, that's basically what it is. It's like a portal for people to to show their images, you know, via cell phone or whatever it is. I mean, where's where's the audio version of something like this? You know what I mean? Like, I what can I do to contribute to this, you know, beautiful sunrise? What does it sound like? You know? You can see it. Everyone can, you know, visualize these these images, but, like, what does it sound like? You know? Because you could have a very similar picture and totally different kind of sounds. And I thought that was pretty interesting, and that's similar. It's that was pretty much in a way what I was trying to explore with this project. Mhmm. Almost like envisioning myself as a photographer with audio. Sure. Yeah. We really I mean, the the real goal is almost just like just visualize it for yourself. Like, close your eyes, listen to it, and
and kind of kind of paint the picture yourself. How did you pick, pick your subjects or your locations?
So, my girlfriend and I typically, you know, like to kind of explore, walk around and stuff, and we were at the, the NCMA. NCMA, by the way, is the North Carolina Museum of Art. And that's the pond. That's where that was. We're walking around, and I think it was, like, maybe, like, the middle of summer or maybe, like, right at the end of summer or something like that. And we've been there countless times, but at this specific moment, I think it was, like, right when the sun was going down, I hear these frogs. So loud and it's almost like when how how have I never noticed this before, you know. And I thought that's it's kinda what kick started the the idea. It was like, you know, how many times have I come here? I've never, like, realized. Right. There's so much life in this little, like, kinda offshoot pollen by the parking lot of this art museum. Yeah? So, yeah, it was kinda the the first place I went. And then from there, I realized, you know, as as we're walking around and stuff, there's tons of different sounds throughout just the one little area. I mean, you're talking, like, just the field and the art museum, just little corners and spots. I mean, you have your different proximities from the highway, different I mean, it's it's possible that
I could move, you know, maybe, like, 20 feet away and it would sound totally different. I mean, like, right in the same place. And I think that's why it ends up being important to document, you know, what these things were like at a certain given time. I have no idea what Raleigh sounded like in 1850 Exactly. On Fayetteville Street. That's the sound. Sounds of horses. I I don't know what kind of sophisticated, you know,
equipment you could muster up at this time in 1850 that might be hard to come by. But I recently looked through, like, you know, one of those, like, kind of old records, the old, like, tobacco buildings and stuff in the area. Like Mhmm. What right. The photos of the historic Fayetteville Street and stuff, you know, hustle and bustle downtown here. What what it's what it sound like? Right. Awesome pictures, you know, we can see what they're wearing, like, I don't know. Whatever. I don't know. 18 something. But, like, what really, how how did it sound, and how does it compare to where we are now? Maybe, like, you know, ambient noise or maybe just it'd be so cool to be able to go back and see that. Maybe, like, in the next hundred years, you could go back to now what's what it did sound like from now.
And here's a last word from Anne Guthrie. So in this spread of sounds, this menu of sounds, and and especially these jarring sounds, are are there any that maybe from a a study or a musical standpoint that you've grown to appreciate that you didn't think you would otherwise?
Well, it's funny you're asking me this now. I mean, the one thing that I used to hate, now I love well, I don't love it, but I definitely am immediately responsive to is the sound of babies crying. But Congratulations. You. And just had a new baby, by the way. Yeah. I mean, I definitely like I mentioned earlier, the sort of tonal machine noise has become very fascinating to me, although I definitely get made fun of a lot at work because as soon as it happens when I'm trying to get work done, I'm like, what is this horrible noise and everyone laughs because it's something that I will go out and record for fun. I've come to appreciate the kind of intentional sounds and created by people in the city more, like people playing music on the subway platform or the kind of overheard snippets of things as you're walking by mostly because I'm looking for them now. I don't think that the answer is to get rid of things that make noise but to kind of create a varied dynamic environment where there are quiet spaces that are more for healing and actually my colleague Chris Pollock who I mentioned and also Terrence Calkins are working on some studies about, healing spaces right now and you know the fact that there are some spaces that are neutral or acoustically neutral are fine as long as we have spaces that you can go to.
Thanks for listening. I'll have links to more information related to Anne Guthrie and Donald Bust and every other bit of material we talked about in this episode in the show notes at soundcloud.com/municipalequation. And if you have any interesting audio to send me from your experiences, please send. I'm at bbrown@nclm.org. You can also reach me on Twitter through the handle at muni equation. That's at m u n I equation. If you enjoyed this episode or any others, please let me know why in a friendly review on iTunes. Love getting your email as well. This podcast is made possible by the North Carolina League of Municipalities online at nclm.0rg. This is Ben Brown. I'll talk to you again soon.
