Your research contrasts the sounds of the past — street peddlers and horse-drawn carriages — with the institutional sounds of modernity: quiet office spaces and elevator Muzak. But people don’t respond to these sounds in the same way. People get angry about loud sounds on the street, but office sounds don’t seem to bother them as much. Why?
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/125601019″ params=”color=ff6600″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
TRANSCRIPT: Well I think that the key to understanding a person’s reaction to any kind of sound and what makes it noise for them really is about control and how much control you have over your environment, the space in which you inhabit and hear these sounds.
So certainly when you are outside there is a sense that you as an individual in that physical space have very little control over the overall experience there. If you’re in an interior place, a place that you own or you rent or that you paid a ticket to enter, you know you feel more invested that this is your space and that you should are entitled to some kind of degree over what you hear. So in some ways that would be why a noise that you encounter outside on the street is perceived very differently when it’s coming through a closed window and you can still hear it within your bedroom or something like that.
Of course it depends on what you are trying to do at the time that you hear it as well. If you are trying to sleep, if you are trying to work, and the sound is preventing you from doing what you want to do, that is another kind of loss of control, whether it is loud or whether it’s soft.
