A Sound Reality : Sound as a System

The advantage of understanding acoustic communication as a system, instead of as isolated stimulus-response reactions, is that an intervention at any point in the system can cause cascaded effects throughout it, whether for its improvement or even its deterioration and destruction. The individual listener within a soundscape is not engaged in a passive type of energy reception, but rather is part of a dynamic system of information exchange.

As there is more noise and more people in smaller spaces, we all contribute to an increased difficulty in acoustic information exchange and perpetrate the failure of harmony in the acoustic environment.

An obvious example might be a social gathering where the guests have to raise their voices and even yell to understand each other. The guests are competing for aural space in which to hear each other and themselves. From this example we see that with the increase of sound sources, the sounds become more difficult to decipher.

ƒ aural competition