The Jawnt team recently went to Boston and participated in a soundwalk led by Dr. Daniel Steele. As a team, we spend a lot of time thinking about cities–read on to learn more from Dr. Steele about how sound, including sounds from transit and cars, can affect the experience of city dwellers.

Sound in the city is difficult to characterize as one single thing. For residents and visitors, sound can be the thing that keeps them awake at night, connects them to their family, friends, and community, signals danger, or lets them know where the party is. For the professionals of the built environment who make our cities, sound is part environmental problem (noise pollution), part legal obligation (noise regulations), part social problem (mandatory closing times for bars), and part design opportunity (a beautiful park). What brings all these considerations together? Not much. Sound has long been neglected, only dealt with once something goes wrong – we then call it “noise”. When we use the shorthand noise, we are talking about unwanted sound and we miss all of the opportunities to make places resonate with wanted sounds.  

How do we bridge this gap? We start by going outside and listening, with the help of a guide. I led our intrepid group of transportation professionals around Boston, encouraging them to ignore the Boston they already knew and to follow their ears. This practice is called soundwalking and it encourages us to be fascinated by the sensory experiences that our spaces enable. No sound level meters, no modeling software, just our ears. In a world obsessed with data, metrics, and machine learning, the collective experience of the soundwalk tells us what the numbers cannot: what Boston sounds like.

The soundwalk began at Boston Symphony Hall, a “temple of music” and the first building ever designed using modern acoustic modeling. We talked about what it means to have the hall so isolated from the outside “city noise” by its box-within-a-box protective architectural design. This is immediately contrasted with a downstairs trek to the Symphony MBTA station, where passing trains with door closing chimes, public announcements, and beeping machines accepting fare payments took us to a sound environment full of sounds giving us information, contrasting with the traffic noise above.  

We proceeded back outdoors, passing through the Christian Science Plaza, a Brutalist gallery full of opportunities as an acoustic playground. Semi-circular benches reflected all echoes at the exact same time, giving you the sense that you have a booming voice. A fountain at the end of the plaza served as an auditory landmark (a soundmark, if you will), where the splashing sounds of the water perfectly balanced users’ sense of vibrancy and privacy with the help of its masking noise.

Around the corner from the fountain, we audited a listening experience from the point of view of a pedestrian who experiences a beeping warning from a parking garage as a car is leaving and driving over the sidewalk. From a safety standpoint, it’s possible to imagine a scenario where a pedestrian should be alerted to the danger. But from a sensory standpoint, to be yelled at to move by a flashing sign sends the message that you are doing something wrong, should have a physiological response with stress hormones, and cede the way to the person who could hurt you. These “solutions” to our safety crisis are a mistake.

The walk also took us to a brand new high-rise residential building with an unfortunate HVAC, a charming residential street where you could hear the birds chirping and the sounds of your own footsteps, and an underappreciated passageway. When we arrived next at the heavily paved back alley was when the core message of this soundwalk came home: everything is related to everything else, sound is not a niche side consideration. The heat stored by the asphalt necessitated all the neighbors of the alley to use personal air conditioning units, which made the hot and noisy alley doubly uncomfortable to exist in.  

Escaping this urban environment, a visit to the Fens gave our soundwalkers a chance to rest their ears in a green space. We explored the difference between seeing, hearing, and smelling the boundaries between city and park. The tour ended on a high note with a visit to the musically and culturally important nightlife neighborhood next to the Fenway Park baseball stadium.

The dozen or so stopping points, visited over two hours, were chosen to reflect a diversity of morphologies (e.g. park, stadium, commercial area), encapsulate a variety of experiences (eventful-uneventful, pleasant-unpleasant, quiet-noisy), and highlight features of the built environment that are characteristic to Boston (e.g. construction sites). At each point, recent, relevant research and concepts hinted at potential interventions with sound implications e.g. how providing information about construction noise to residents reduces anxiety and, subsequently, complaints.

Boston, a historic global hub of acoustics research, has a rich variety of sound environments, just steps apart from each other. But as a capital-C “City”, it has not quite taken the step of putting sound on the agenda and preventing a city full of the type of noise that makes it difficult to enjoy the diversity of spaces and experiences. This reflective practice can help us imagine a way to advocate for sound environments we might want instead of waiting for feedback from complaints. These could be: sounds of the T inspired by our sonic history, parks where the wildlife is louder than the cars, and commercial areas that aren’t saturated with danger signals.

The soundwalk serves as a listening and sound awareness creating tool for urban professionals and is more broadly a call to action for including both the individual and shared listening experience as sources of data. When we think about sensory experience, we can use our imagination to think of a different transportation future: no flying cars, but electric vehicles that can be quiet if they have a predictable path, and an intelligible environment where it is safe to cross the street toward a place where it’s fun to sit, play, have a conversation, or do some shopping. Tell us about your ear-opening experiences.

Daniel Steele is an urban experience researcher and educator, and is a founding member of Sounds in the City, a Montreal-based living laboratory. With almost two decades of experience, he found his way into this research by way of his work on hearing aids. He is concerned with how people live, work, and play in cities and, equally importantly, how insights from research can be used in urban planning and decision making about the public realm. He currently works for the City of Boston as a Principal Research Advisor.

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Interested in how sound is shaped in your city? Further reading:  

What Should the City Sound Like?

Tuning In to Quality of Life

The sound of the future: listening as data and the politics of soundscape assessment

Noise and well-being in urban residential environments: The potential role of perceived availability to nearby green areas

Shaping city soundscapes: In situ comparison of four sound installations in an urban public space

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