Jonathan Cooper An Unseen Component

Without sound, visual perception is different: less contrastful, less attention-demanding, and less informative. – ­Michael Southworth Sound not only surrounds but can penetrate to the very core of the sentient.

– Douglas Pocock

Few places assault the senses like a casino. Built to dazzle, disorient, and overwhelm, the lights flash maniacally, the machines sing gleefully, and the din never stops. Sharp angles, jangling sounds, and textured chips send the message that risk is fun and that fun is everywhere. For contrast, compare this arrangement to a bank's. The exterior and interior of a bank could hardly send a more distinct message – banks look, sound, and feel entirely different. Colors and voices are muted, design is reassuring, and risk is neither celebrated nor acknowledged (until you get to the small print).

Lastly, consider an outdoor public place, such as a plaza or park. It is easy to imagine what we expect to see, but rarely can we imagine what we expect to hear. Without a positive or negative sonic point of attention, like a fountain or a jackhammer, we can recall relatively few sounds, no matter how enjoyable or unbearable the experience we have in mind. But since very few of the sounds we hear could be considered a sonic point of attention, those points of attention can't be the only things contributing to the quality of our sonic experience of a place. In asking some simple question about the nature of sonic components and their place in a public open space, we can get closer to understanding the nature and necessity of those elements in a designed landscape.

what are sonic components? All sonic components are sounds, defined here as the audible elements of a person’s experience. Whether recognizable or strange, distinct or jumbled, incidental or deliberate, brief or sustained, quiet or loud, they form a soundscape that is constantly shifting as sounds fade out, fade in, begin, and end. Sounds become sonic components when they fit into one of three groups: deliberate, intrusive, and incidental. Deliberate sounds are meant to attract our attention and interest. Intrusive sounds prevent a person from engaging in the act of listening, distracting us from our affairs and sometimes causing us to move elsewhere. Incidental sounds are audible, but do not hold our attention for any number of reasons. We may choose to focus on them, but without sustained conscious intervention

our interests wander. These are not necessarily the only groupings of sounds, but for a designer interested in accounting for the sonic experience of an outdoor public place, they form the primary colors of sound from which infinite experiences can be derived.

Deliberate sounds are a rather narrow group: musical performances and personal conversations clearly are deliberate sounds, and they usually require the limitation of other sounds in close proximity. Deliberate sounds dominate our attention in the present, and the term deliberate applies both to the origin of the sound and the audience for it: one is there to be heard, and the other is there to listen. Intrusive sounds are often called “noise,” but this is not always the case. Sounds with distinct meaning for people are not noise, no matter how unpleasant they may be. Some intrusive noises can be anticipated and countermanded, as we see in the many books available for people interested in noise: how to keep it out, its relationship to the built environment, ways to minimize it, ways to design around it, and even ways to rig photovoltaic panels to objects built to reduce it. The relationship between intrusive sounds and design is clear: intrusive sound is an adversary, detracting from the experience of place, and a good design will anticipate and limit it as best it can. A good design may, for instance, be able to keep the intrusive sound of the freeway out of the park, but it may not be able to do anything about the crying baby in the park on the bench next to you. The incidental group is the largest, the most varied, and the least thought of. In many places, the chips fall where they may, and certain areas have an irritating echo, a senseless proximity to an intake fan, or that “nothing special” that neither encourages nor rewards any interest in one’s sonic surroundings.

how to design with these components? An outdoor public park, a place which by nature will admit the outside world and it's aural variety, will not approach sound design in a traditional way. Designing for sound is considered a largely acoustic venture, concerned with three goals: the amplification and manipulation of a sonic origin (a stage with actors, politicians, musicians, et cetera), the even distribution of the desired sound/music throughout an enclosed space, and the reduction and neutralization of unwanted sounds, be they intrusive or deliberate. The Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius discusses the first aspect of sound design in the fifth book of The Ten Books of Architecture, stating that “[p]articular pains must be taken that the site [is] one through which the voice can range with the greatest clearness.” This perspective does not address the issue of sound as a design element; rather, it is a design goal (by no means a simple one).

Rather, the design of a park that is not principally used for performances needs to account for and employ the role of sound as means to an end, and that end is a successful landscape

design with a distinct and attractive site identity. This approach to sound design, by dint of its concern with overall function and not with a particular, deliberate sound, is more difficult to assess or determine objectively, but by no means should this be interpreted as an indication that our minds are not actively engaged in the experience of incidental sound. We all tend to relax in familiar places, and the blanket of incidental sound in those places helps us feel at home and comfortable. The nature of our sense of hearing may help to explain how.

The ability to hear is the first sense we acquire while in the womb. Before we are born we have been introduced to the rhythm of a heartbeat, the ebb and flow of respiration, and the sounds of voices, some of which are already familiar to us on the day we are born. Hearing is the first sense to engage in the morning and the last sense to disengage at night. Audition, along with olfaction, is tied to the limbic system, a non­verbal part of the brain that predates the cerebral cortex, and therefore our capacity for speech. The brain depends on the limbic system to process the world of secondary sounds, while the auditory cortex processes the primary sounds. The key to the role of incidental sounds (which fall into the category of "secondary"), is shown in the limbic system's handling of these secondary sounds. According to Dr. Natan Bauman of the Hearing, Balance + Speech Center of Hamden, Connecticut, "[w]hen the limbic system detects new and/or more relevant [auditory] information, it passes it on to the auditory cortex for processing. At the same time, a certain emotional association is assigned to it." This emotional association suggests that in addition to the more refined judgments of the auditory cortex, humans evaluate sounds (incidental sounds in particular) in a far more subjective way. Brian Eno's seminal recordings Discreet Music and Music for Airports were noteworthy attempts to create a kind of "audio wallpaper" that could take advantage of the emotional assessment of secondary, incidental sounds without disturbing the more detail-oriented aspects of audition. For the designer, then, incidental sounds can play a key role in creating a cohesive site identity without standing at the forefront of our sonic attention.

does sound inform a public place’s identity? In order to design with sound, and not merely for it, it is necessary to establish the positive contributions sound makes to our enjoyment of place. In his 1953 essay, Notes on City Satisfactions, Kevin Lynch discusses “the psychological and sensual effects of the physical form of the city” (135) and loosely identifies the positive “satisfactions” a city can bestow as Orientation, Warmth, Stimulus, Sensual Delight, and Interest. Lynch considers sound a contributor to both Orientation and Sensual Delight. In the former, it is “the sense of ‘city’ from bells, the urban hum, et cetera” (138), while in the case of the latter, sounds have pleasant connotations: “the natural ‘rhythmical’ ones (waves, leaves in the wind); those

indicative of not too intense human activity (voices, feet); and those musical in nature (bells, singing)” (148).

For the purpose of Orientation, Lynch refers to sound as an avenue towards “grasping a complex thing in its unity” (137), with respect to the physical totality of the city. Additionally, the lexicographer John Minsheu implies the use of sound as a benchmark for cultural orientation in the 1617 dictionary Ductor in Linguas when defining a cultural term that we still use today: “A Cockney or Cockny, applied only to one born within the sound of Bow bell, that is in the City of London.” That sound can locate the notion of here in both physical and cultural contexts can be of value to designers seeking to create a space that speaks fluently the language of the area, and reinforces a site identity that people value and easily recall.

As for the Lynch's satisfaction of Sensual Delight, sound is admitted in three forms: natural, human­nonmusical, and musical. In the latter we can expect a great deal more cultural signifiers: blues spilling out of the jook joints on Beale Street, or calls to prayer issuing from the minarets of Istanbul. These are deliberate elements that will stand on their own. But the sounds of natural forces and human activity – of raindrop, birdcall, engine, footstep, and laugh – these incidental sounds can be courted, and given a place to stand out or contribute quietly.

The sounds of human activity are powerful, and a parallel can be drawn to Lynch’s claim that “the sight of people and their activity is a fundamental impression” (142): it doesn’t seem unreasonable to extend that fundamental impression to the sounds of people and their activity. Our auditory attraction to the sounds of people helps to confirm the value of our own presence and to affirm our understanding of what goes on, where it goes on, and how it goes on. As people, we are as much a part of this aleatoric “pattern” as anyone: our shoes scrape the pavement, we hum a few bars, shift our weight in a chair, and fold back the newspaper page.

what is the appropriate sonic goal for an outdoor public place? If sound can inform a public place’s site identity, and incidental sound plays a role in our feeling of safety, security, belonging, and interest, we can make some attempts at determining ways to shape incidental sound. First and foremost, a public place’s identity is unlikely to be found in a book or writ large on a gate. It is a general agreement of the people who use and avoid a place, an unsophisticated consensus that speaks rather plainly of people’s impressions and experiences. Some public places are large enough to have separate places within the place, and each may be thought of differently. Therefore, a gentle touch is necessary when attempting to design with incidental sounds.

As stated above, the incidental sounds could be courted – a word less about imposition and more about encouragement. No one is in need of a new cacophony, or grand statement where there had been none. Rather, the goal as a designer is to find sounds that may or may not exist in the place, and bring them forward to inculcate that wonderful human act of noticing. Lynch mentions that the city satisfaction of Interest lies in “the intellectual pleasures of curiosity…the savoring of distinct character springing from concrete differences of background and function” (149). To notice is to discover, and the discovery of something new in a familiar place is invigorating to many. Where water drips onto a wooden beam, a metal or plastic plate can quietly bring a new layer to the texture. Where trains rush under grates, hollow rods beneath the grates can resonate with soft chords. The goal is never to grant center stage to anything but the people who use the place everyday. Instead, the goal is to provide those people with a backdrop that will make the place interesting and enjoyable for yet another reason. If attention effortlessly shifts from the book being read or the conversation being had to a new sound, that something familiar yet refreshing, and then back to the book or conversation just as easily, this is evidence of a job well done. As can be said for many worthwhile elements of a good design, the more things are done well, the less it seems like anything was done at all.