Whether it’s cars passing nearby, a neighbour’s blaring music or the constant drone of a lawnmower, the trouble with sound is that – unlike light – it can be hard to block out completely.
The ‘right’ amount of noise is different for everyone. That might explain why some people perform best in noisy environments, while others prefer silence.
From bird songs to wind patterns, sound is a key but often underappreciated element of natural places. Learning how to listen to nature can alert us to changes in the environment before we see them.
In Sydney, families with children now account for one in four households living in apartments. The expectations and design of apartments have not kept up with this rapid demographic change.
Noise is common, but we don’t fully know what that means for our hearing. A recent study suggests how overstimulation of the auditory nerve may be too much for it to handle.
We tend to think of archaeological sites as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn’t how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them.
Unlike vision or touch, sound is much more difficult to control or avoid; music in particular spills across thresholds and intrudes into situations where it is unwelcome.
Shortly after Glen MacPherson started hearing strange humming noises, he created the World Hum and Database Project so people around the world could document their own experiences with the Hum.