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Many environments today
are often hostile and contain many irrelevant sounds. A great mental
effort is required for listening and the result, accumulated over
thousands of daily routines, is both the fatiguing, physical stress
of noise, and the disinclination to listen attentively.
In specialized cases, such as theatre, there are standards to provide
for speech intelligibility and the quality of musical acoustics.
We lack an equivalent communicational model that suggests appropriate
goals for other environments.
If this is deemed important in theatre or performance instances,
is it not equally if not considerably more important in our daily
lives? Can we acoustically design the places where most
people live, in our cities?
Both the character of the soundscape and its functional ecology
is changing for the worse. There is no natural mechanism that can
restore the equilibrium, except through individual and collective
action to impose new constraints on the system. The “annoyance”
factor of noise acts as a catalyst for change and also produces
a lack of desire to listen. It provokes disengagement, withdrawal,
and denial.
For example, car alarms, they no longer serve any purpose because
no one responds to them. They no longer cause 'alarm'. We are so
used to them that we do our best to ignore them. No one runs to
a phone to call the police when they hear a car alarm. We have allowed
them to become a regular part of our sound environment.
How do we remind ourselves that our ability to listen is important?
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