To play legally, street musicians in Bangkok must be licensed. The licenses restrict when and where one can play – unlike some cities, the subway is not at all fair game – but they also protect musicians from getting hassled by the cops or anyone else.

The fellow we met was blind – music is a common vocation here for people with disabilities. Like many people from the rural Northeast, he came to Bangkok because he was no longer able to make a living in the provinces.

The field recording above has two parts. First, a song, and then (around 4:00) a short conversation, translated within the audio. The piece he’s playing is Northeastern string music, and he’s accompanied here by recorded drums from a tape deck. You see the instrument, the Phin, pretty often on the street, but the double-necked version is rare. Thanks to B for help with translation.

WV recently came across an impromptu bar set up on the sidewalk of a decently trafficked road in the middle of Bangkok. The proprietor, a 34-year old Bangkok man, has been running the place for about eight months. Against a corrugated metal fence that hides an empty field, he set up one big pink light and one big blue one, and in front of the fence an array of tables and chairs. A small shelving unit holds mixers and a selection of whiskeys and vodkas. He DJs from an ipod plugged into a small but pretty loud pair of speakers.

The bar exploits the same kind of free space as an average street stall – indeed, it might occupy the exact real estate of a daytime noodle stand – but its decor clearly hews to a “hi-so” (short for high society) aesthetic. The music, to a song, could be Hot 97, and there’s a kitschy, if never quite ironic vibe, in everything from the vintage furniture to the small plate of potato chips that comes with each drink.

One of the best things about this lounge is how unexpected it is. Without the festive lighting and pop music cranked up to fill the block, the corner would feel pretty dead, precisely as it had the last several nights when I walked by the exact same empty spot. This street has some foot traffic, but most of the restaurants are quiet, indoor-type spots, with little or no presence on the sidewalk. Cocktail’s Lounge stands out sharply.

As the owner explained to me in the recording above (right after you hear the music mixing with a sputtering tuk-tuk engine), he was able to set up shop without receiving zoning permission from the city because his brother is a police officer. He’s certainly lucky in this respect, as others in his situation would have to pay a bribe.

After closing up for the night, the owner said, he planned to join the evening’s rally.

Although the sheer variety of training routines is extraordinary and includes many very different kinds of practices, much of what occurs in this park is geared toward achieving unity and discipline. People of all ages and ethnicities work toward a kind of heightened togetherness; very few people do anything alone, and there are almost no competitive sports. Disciplining oneself to match the teacher or the group is the most typical goal for those who come to the park.

This video documents a half hour between 7:30 and 8:00 yesterday morning in Lumphini, from a singing class to an aerobics club. In between the action, everyone pauses for the public recitation of the national anthem, which happens twice a day, every day, at 8:00AM and 6:00PM. In fact, the anthem is broadcast over mounted loudspeakers in nearly every public place in the entire country at these times, as well as on television. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, you stop in your tracks and stand still for the song. In crowded or otherwise fast-moving places, this is quite a sight. The anthem, and the specific way that it gets recited, are deployed as regular reminders of state sovereignty, and of each individual’s place in a Thai nation that is supposed to stand as a single, unfractured entity. This video is thus a vignette about the pursuit of unity.

Snaking through Bangkok’s concrete tonnage are khlong, natural canals that feed into the Chao Phraya river. Many have been filled in to build roads, but there are still plenty within the city boundaries. They’re crucial for understanding Bangkok’s massive and sometimes inequitable 20th century spatial transformations.

Khlong Saen Saep, pictured above and below, is used mainly by commuters; longtail boats packed with people on their way to or from work pass by every couple minutes. The city operates the main line, although there are also private charters available. Khlong Saen Saep is the only canal commuter line in the city with 24-hour service. The only statistic I know of has 90,000 people a day passing through Saen Saep alone.

Other bodies of water, as well as the Chao Phraya river itself, serve many other vital purposes for Bangkokians (especially poorer ones), including washing clothes, bathing, and swimming.

The picture above gives some sense of the state of the khlong, as well as of the areas nearby. Long neglected by the city, Bangkok’s water canals have become icons of filth. Houses are not maintained, motor boats leak chemicals into the water, and piles of garbage accumulate on the banks. Once khlong became old-fashioned in the mid-20th century, once they stopped serving the everyday needs of the city’s elite and middle-class (other than as roads), what incentive was there to keep them clean? Without alternatives for water access, poorer residents thus became victims of a change in development that privileged transportation above all other potential uses of space.

This is what the khlong sound like:

The piece begins with water lapping at the rocks under the bridge, intensified as a boat pulls up. The sounds of rumbling and revving throughout are cars and trucks driving directly above. These cause very low echoes off of the concrete cove under the foot of the bridge, where someone had set up a prayer shrine. As the water reaches the rocks, and returns to the main stream, more splashes and flows are audible. The recording ends with a woman, clearly in a hurry, hopping off the boat and running in sandals along the path toward the street.

This picture shows the cove (the path and shrine are to the left of the rocks). The two seated figures are ticket sellers for the boat line. Riders board at the bottom of the steps to the right.

Saep Saen Khlong, under Witthayu Road. Image by author.

Ross King and Cuttaleeya Noparatnaraporn published an article in 2007 about Khlong as symbolic of a bygone Bangkok – one where interactions between neighbors were fluid, rather than segmented and atomized as they are today under capitalism. Through the canals as they used to be used, King and Cuttaleeya argue, people were joined together by the material they shared in a single channel. This is no longer the case. From the abstract to their paper: “The modernization of Thailand has seen an aquatic everyday world replaced by a terrestrial one, and a loose occupancy of land supplanted by Western notions of rigid ownership and title deeds. While the aquatic past passes into memory (to pose some threat, however, to the interests of Thai elites), a Thai episteme based in images and surfaces transforms that memory to less threatening nostalgia and ritual; and the previous fluidity of space likewise “survives” in surfaces.” For those who have read some sound studies work, you’ll recognize similar tropes of anti-modernity/anti-visualism/anti-segmentation used in the author’s discussion of water as we so often find with sound.

The notion of a lost fluidity might on a certain level be a tad nostalgic and rose-colored (might – I’m honestly not sure), but it’s certainly apt to mention given modern-day anxieties about Thais’ inability to unite under a single national banner. What sources of atomization might be at the root of these divisions? Certainly, the way we regard and utilize space is one such source.

NOISE Control, under that name, actually only lasted until 1961, after which it was succeeded by a nearly-identical periodical titled SOUND, Its Uses and Control. The name-change points to a realization by the editorial staff that noise control was ultimately too narrow, not to mention negative in focus – most articles were about the search for silence in an increasingly noisy world. Shifting to a focus on sound opened the journal to contributions like “Listening Through the Moth Ear,” “Supplementary Sound for Opera,” “Absolute Pitch Part I,” and “Sound in the Motion Picture Industry,” which were comparatively colorful and less burdened with acoustical jargon than earlier articles had been. However, for reasons unknown to me, SOUND, Its Uses and Control only lasted two years.

As a journal of applied acoustics, NOISE Control advocated technological solutions almost exclusively. It presented research about construction materials and architectural strategies that could contribute to a refined aural privacy – in the home, office, or factory. While complications related to frequency or other details beyond decibel were sometimes acknowledged, the search was on from Issue One for a universal ear, a quantifiable average of listening preferences. The search for standards was assumed to be a temporary problem whose solution was not too far over the horizon. According to an article in the first issue, “all of us can agree at once that a standard on what are ‘permissible, objectionable, and injurious noise levels’ would be a fine thing. But do we know enough yet to do the job of writing such a standard?”

The journal was also closely linked to the project of industrial efficiency. Its content dealt above all else with manufacturing contexts, including ventilating systems and aircraft engine test facilities. Articles often cited data about how noise affected productivity in factories and offices, and offered solutions that would keep things running more smoothly. Even NOISE Control’s editorial board was made up largely of corporate officers at companies like General Motors, Liberty Mutual, and Douglas Aircraft Co.

The notion of preference was mostly outside of the journal’s sphere, at times impatiently dismissed. Wrote one contributor: “Most people, except those who prefer the bawdy noise of the cocktail hour or night club, like things quiet. We like it quiet because it is peaceful and restful, and by nature we like to have a quiet atmosphere in which to live and work.”

There were a few exceptions to this kind of rhetoric, and not every writer was ignorant of the subjective qualities of listening. According to another piece, “there is no reason why engineers should feel that dealing with a subjective quantity such as annoyance is less important than making the more objective measurements of work output or energy consumption.” But even articles like this one eventually resorted to quantitative claims: “We know that … annoyance increases with frequency.” It was clearly difficult for the community of researchers to be comfortable with a plurality of listener types.

A letter to the editor entitled “Are Church Chimes Noise?” captures the essence of this difficulty:

For the sake of not repeating historical patterns of inquiry, especially the wild goose chase of expecting technological solutions to fix every noise problem, NOISE Control should be required reading for noise abatement specialists everywhere, not to mention Sound Studies scholars.

In many cases, reducing sound to a visual field is a bit awkward – do we really hear better while looking at a two-dimensional picture on a screen than we would if we were actually in the space being represented? Maybe not, but the general desire to control sound is very strong, and what better way to control something than to pinpoint it? In this way, for example, compositional maps bring the urban din into a realm of aesthetic order, policy maps subject it to regulation, archival maps protect it against decay, and application maps help us navigate it. There are obvious appeals (and complexities) in each.

Below is a typology of the most common kinds of sound maps, with examples. Many of these come from recent discussions on the Sound Studies listserv, and from an item on Wayneandwax. Have I missed any important categories? Do you know of other examples?

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Collaborative Documentary
This is probably the most straightforward category, and the most logical outgrowth of available technologies.

Open Sound New Orleans is a simple map of the city that allows users to upload self-recorded sounds in the categories of “voice,” “music,” and “ambient,” and to plot them where they were made. The site functions as a local forum, with an emphasis (based on the most frequently used tags) on post-Katrina revitalization, business, neighborhoods, and community. Many of the recordings are interviews. Like many sound maps in this category, Open Sound New Orleans uses sound (as opposed to text) to better emulate “being there.”

In a similar vein, SoundSeeker.org overlays user-submitted field recordings on a map of New York City.

A sound map of Montreal.

Soundwalks in San Francisco, Lisbon, Istanbul, Basel, and more.

Composition/Artwork
This is actually a very diverse category, and one that relies comparatively less often on mapping in the standard visual sense. For example, GPS Beatmap: Planet as Control Surface is a piece of software that uses GPS to assign musical snippets to small circles of land all over the planet. As users walk or drive around, they traverse different circles, creating a beat-matched mix as they move:

There is also a lot of politically oriented work in this category. Heidi Boisvert’s sonicWarfare hands listeners a map of midtown Manhattan, overlaid by a semi-transparent map of the section of Baghdad where U.S. troops invaded in 2002. You follow a route on the map while listening to a recording of an imaginary war – the intended effect is to make conflict seem real, even personal: “Protest in Vietnam was mobilized by images, but today images of war barbarity do not pose the same disgust, disquiet. We have become inured by the spectacle of violence paraded on TV and in movies. Why though when you see war reportage on the news are we not forced to endure the sounds of war? Is it harder to bear the pain of others through our ears … ? ”

Consumer Empowerment
There is something mildly unsettling to me about this category, even though I recognize its utility.

Soundaroundyou.com is a project under development at the Audio and Acoustic Engineering Research Centre at the University of Salford, for which people are asked to add their own recordings to a large data pool for professional analysis. Sounds are also tagged by users with their own qualitative opinions. According to the site, the project “could have far reaching implications for professions and social groups ranging from urban planners to house buyers.”

As you can see at the end of the clip below, sound clips are rated from 1 to 10 in several areas, such as tranquility, activity, soundscape quality, etc. It is implied that the research could ultimately identify areas of sonic pollution, allowing them to be cleaned up through various strategies. But a rating system like this invites much subjective disagreement, since sound is notoriously prone to differences of interpretation. And subjectivity, especially in metropolitan cities, is always bound up with issues like class and ethnicity. The (very difficult) question not asked here is how we can manage sound in a way that is also socially just?

Meanwhile, GeoGraffiti is a cell phone application that allows you to “tag” any place with a voice recording. You might leave a restaurant review, an event announcement, or a funny comment. Other GeoGraffiti users passing by that same spot could then call in and hear your message.

Preservation
This category essentially has two subsections: historical and natural sound. Both of these are animated by an impulse that ethnomusicology knows very well, that is, the need to save “endangered” sounds through archival preservation.

The most prominent historical effort is the BBC’s global Save Our Sounds audio map. Save Our Sounds is built on an engine much like the collaborative documentaries above; however, its purpose is explicitly ecological: “Precious sounds are dying while new ones enter our lives … So here at the BBC we want to build a sound map of the world – and save endangered sounds from extinction.”

Another site, Sydney Sidetracks, offers historical material, including sound and video, tagged to a map of Australia’s largest city. The site encourages you to “download a version to your mobile or load up your player and take the stories with you. When you next visit the city, you can listen to the crowds at Martin Place celebrating the end of WWII or watch George St., 1906, from a moving train.” Sydney Sidetracks combines documentary and artistic approaches to produce a heightened sense of verisimilitude about the past.

Preservation of natural sound has a slightly different flavor. This type of work often vilifies man-made noise, and calls for a greater appreciation of natural or environmental sound. Groups like the Right to Quiet Society call for outright abatement, while artist-researchers like Gordon Hempton (whose recordings are fantastic) pursue sonic purity and plot it geographically. Not silence, per se, but spaces where human sound is totally absent. Such a pursuit is, clearly, about more than volume. However, it is increasingly clear that the preservation of sonically “natural” space requires lots of work – campaigning for awareness, lobbying for changes in flight patterns, hiring park rangers to enforce sound restrictions in wooded areas – all of which, ironically, produces noise.

Policy Data
This is by necessity the most reductive category of sound mapping. Cities pursuing noise control need clear data that can be translated directly to enforcement. Unfortunately, this usually means maps not linked to actual sonic events, that estimate decibels based on things like infrastructure and traffic level.

San Francisco Department of Public Health, noise pollution map

Noise map of Central London

These maps are meant to help city planners be more aware of the impact of sound when making choices about zoning and construction, which is a good goal. However, acoustics (especially theoretical acoustics) can only predict so much about aural imposition.

Enjoy.

LEGISLATIVE

- The city of Clio, Michigan passed an ordinance regulating roof-mounted wind turbines which, although “green,” produce a loud, annoying hum.

- In Venice Beach, California, the city proposed a lottery to deal with a plethora of street performers on the boardwalk. Local residents claimed they had become “captive listen[ers],” forced to hear music in their homes.

- In December, the CALM Act, which seeks to cap the volume of TV commercials, advanced from the House to the Senate. CALM stands for “Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation.”

- A man in Mesa, Arizona wants to change local noise ordinances so that they apply to churches, which are currently exempt in all cases. According to the man, a local “Christian new-age church that plays rock music at weird hours” located 10 feet from his backyard not only disturbs him, but threatens to set a bad precedent for the entire city.

EXECUTIVE
- New York City police raided a West Village club in a residential neighborhood after numerous noise complaints. A Greenwich Village Block Association member recalled that neighbors had dealt with similar problems in the past by simply purchasing the offending establishment in order to ensure a more quiet operation.

- The city of Devens, Massachusetts debated whether to shut down or fine a manufacturer of solar panels that recently moved to the area. Neighbors are demanding that the plant shut down operations at night.

- The Brainerd, Tennessee District Attorney asked police to shut down Club Deep Blue after a series of noise complaints. One neighbor claimed to have called the police over 300 times, to no avail. After the D.A. filed a petition, reporters found a sign on the club’s door reading “‘Closed due to racial descrimination (sic) within the Chattanooga City Government.”

- Noise complaints are on the rise in Columbus, Ohio, but for some reason police citations are down. Officers are at a loss to explain the discrepancy.

JUDICIAL
- A bishop in Phoenix, Arizona was convicted of disturbing the peace because the bells atop his newly-built church rang too frequently and at too high a volume. An attorney for the bishop claimed the ruling was a First Amendment violation. “We were living in a bell tower,” said one resident.

- One of her neighbors on the Upper West Side of Manhattan sued Madonna. From the complaint: “Madonna and one or more of her guests repeatedly dance and/or train in Apartment 7-A to unreasonably high-decibel amplified music.”

- The Georgia Supreme Court denied a claim by two University of Georgia-Athens students that a local noise ordinance restricted their freedom of expression with regard to playing music at parties. According to an article, a lawyer for the students said that “Volume should be constitutionally protected because it is to the artistic quality of music as light and shade are to paintings.”

- The city of Virginia Beach has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court after the state court overturned its local noise ordinance. The ordinance, which relied on the concept of a “reasonable [listener],” was said to be too vague.

PEER PRESSURE
- Responding to resident complaints about last year’s concert, the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco placed “sound monitors” in nearby neighborhoods, who could in turn contact “sound consultants” to assess disruptive noise and fix it between days of the festival. A complaint hotline was also established.

- Guanabanas restaurant in Jupiter Inlet Village, Florida, has tried its damnedest to be sensitive to neighbors’ noise complaints. According to the owner, John Zimmerman, no one from Sunni Sands, across the street, has complained since a series of acoustic renovations three years ago. Zimmerman even consulted with the owner of nearby Castaways restaurant and the Barrons Landing motel, but some residents apparently remain unsatisfied.

- An Erie, Pennsylvania man threatened a hunger strike to protest the noise from a pet food maker called Dad’s Products Co. down the street from his home. Harry Davies, 62, who built a shed in which to carry out the strike, wrote in a letter that “I guess you could say it’s either the noise or me.”

- The author of a motorcycle column in the Philadelphia Examiner suggested that proposed regulations on motorcycle exhaust pipes in New York State are discriminatory.

- 2009 witnessed a spate of complaints about grunting in women’s tennis. Critics charge that the grunts are tantamount to cheating by distracting one’s opponent, while defenders say it helps establish rhythm.

- A weekly San Francisco drag party was canceled voluntarily after neighbors approached the local Entertainment Commission about its noise. The organizers claimed the pressure was homophobic: “”The Polk no longer welcomes gay businesses.”

- A Charlestown, Massachusetts resident wrote a letter to the Commander of the USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) complaining about the ship’s twice-daily cannon firing, a tradition that dates back to the 18th century. Most area residents seemed to feel that the firings should continue.

VIGILANTE JUSTICE
- An Arizona man was fatally shot after a confrontation with his neighbor over noise. “Now I have to take his body back and I had to tell his daughter that he’d never see his new grandchild,” said the slain man’s wife.

- Ashton Kutcher unleashed a viral video documenting his neighbor’s untimely construction work, which allegedly began some days as early as 7:00am. “I’m gonna lose it on this guy, I’m gonna lose it!,” said the star of What Happens in Vegas.

- A 46-year-old woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts spit on her upstairs neighbor while drunk, after the neighbor’s noise allegedly disturbed the woman’s parents on multiple occasions.

- A Tallahassee, Florida man was charged with assault after aiming a shotgun at two neighbors who had been doing construction work at odd hours. The suspect was specifically upset about their hammering.

- Several Durham, North Carolina residents posted signs on their street stating that speeding vehicles would be hit with paintball guns. As of August, no shots had been fired.

People kill other people distressingly often over noise.

Plenty of evidence implies that the planet is noisier than at any other time in human history. What now?

Before attempting to answer that practically – and we will, here, over time – we can begin by ruling out a few well-worn, fatally flawed approaches. Today’s approach is both the most common (by far) and one of the easiest to take down. It is the fantasy of silence.

The Times of London recently gave writer Helen Rumbelow one of those tedious assignments where the journalist is supposed to go out and search for an oasis of true quiet amidst the ubiquitous din of modern urbanity. Conventionally, the journalist either finds a single tranquil place or doesn’t; either way, the moral of the story is that we’ve forgotten the value of silence, and by extension neighborliness, peaceful contemplation, relaxation, and so forth.

In her piece, titled “Silent Night … Is There Peace Anywhere in Britain?,” Rumbelow takes the high road considering that her assignment was essentially a straw man. After moving through the usual tropes of noise control, she makes some great points.

To paraphrase the article, Britain is noisier. People have become exasperated. Noise-reduction experts agree that the problem stems in large part from overpopulation. But too much regulation on behavior (i.e., no peeing standing up in apartments after midnight) can be overkill. Besides, noise is also caused by more and louder technology – including things that can’t easily be limited, like motor vehicles. Such noise is not only annoying, it’s physically damaging to our bodies. Ultimately, since we can’t achieve total silence, perhaps we can overlay nicer sounds – like waterfalls. Finally, it is worth considering that people seem to tolerate mechanical noise better in developing countries. Is sensitivity to noise a disease of affluence?

Rumbelow offers, provocatively, that part of what makes certain sounds tolerable is not only, generically, that they’re subjectively pleasing, but that they signify things beyond human control. Some of the loudest sounds we hear – waves crashing, thunderstorms, forest animals – are usually pleasing in spite of their volume, and even their irregularity. Conversely, the animal sounds that do tend to bother urban-dwellers, like the aforementioned barking, are those that come from domesticated beasts, which people are ostensibly responsible for controlling.

On this, Rumbelow writes:

I have come to think that our relationship with noise is like our relationship with God, or with universal forces beyond our control. We crave natural sounds, such as that of the ocean, that are beyond our power. We long for the incorporeal, and our longing intensifies the more the noises of other people press in on us.

So, then, is sensitivity to noise actually a disease of the triumph of classical liberalism, in which people understand themselves as free actors with the right to control their environments? If we run with this thesis momentarily, we might conclude that nostalgia for silence is really a displaced lust for dominance – in particular, dominance over the actions of other people, which is one hell of a paradox for a philosophy of political freedom.

Whether or not this thesis is true, its mere possibility is one of many strikes against the open-ended idea of noise control animated by the fantasy of silence. This is because every time we choose a target for noise abatement, our choice is not only about volume, but about our own hearing. This doesn’t mean, at all, that the definition of noise is totally subjective and thus impossible to do anything about. It simply means that too few quests for greater quiet have considered the politics of listening in sufficient depth.

Next: The amazing noise map of the entire nation of England

The officer in the case, Ken Roth, was unable to make a reliable radar reading, but he claimed that he could tell simply by listening that Freitag’s vehicle was speeding.

According to the decision:

Ptl. Roth testified at trial that he was parked in his patrol car along the side of U.S. 42 at 9:16 p.m. on October 8, 2007, when he heard a vehicle he could not yet see. He testified that, based on the sound of the vehicle, he believed it was traveling in excess of the 35 m.p.h. posted speed limit. The officer testified that he “audibly heard the speeding, not the speed of the vehicle.” Ptl. Roth clarified: “As it approached I could hear the vehicle on the roadway which based on my training and experience it is consistent with a vehicle that was in excess of the posted speed limit.”

Fascinatingly, Roth distinguishes between the sound of speeding and the sound of moving at any specific speed. The sound of speeding is marked, presumably, by aggressive engine noise. We’ve all heard vehicles that sound like this. Often enough, it’s a jock move.

But, by hearing alone, what would distinguish a normal engine working hard enough to speed from an inefficient engine working just hard enough to drive the limit? Or an engine in a car with a broken muffler?

Nothing could distinguish them. Or, rather, doing so would require an ear trained to identify engine types, and to be able to hear precisely how these engines were operating. The officer’s claim, that he’d heard lots of speeding cars before, did not convince the judge that he was qualified to make such an assessment.

From her opinion:

It is simply incredible, in the absence of reliable scientific, technical, or other specialized information, to believe that one could hear an unidentified vehicle “speeding” without being able to determine the actual speed of the vehicle. The officer offered no testimony regarding how he might have been trained to audibly distinguish various speeds, let alone to distinguish the speeds of various makes and models of vehicles.

What’s intriguing about this ruling is that, thinking beyond conventional empirical evidence (namely, the radar gun), the judge alludes to the possibility of a hypothetical listener skilled enough to be able to do exactly what Officer Roth only imagined he could – to listen as well as the radar sees. This would, admittedly, be a type of listening disciplined by visualism inasmuch as it would be burdened with the task of identification, which is a visual metaphor. But it would still be an impressive technique.

The Rumbler is a response to new vehicle models with better aural insulation, louder car stereos, and the increased prevalence of iPod and cell phone use among drivers. In this environment, high-pitched sirens are decreasingly effective at alerting drivers to the presence of emergency vehicles. However the Rumbler, while no louder than a conventional siren, physically disturbs the interior space of cars in its path. With the move from treble to bass, drivers’ bodies vibrate, and their rear windows tremble.

Tom Morgan, vice president for sales and marketing for the company that makes the Rumbler, is quoted in the Washington Post:

Morgan said the Rumbler was developed after police departments complained that, increasingly, motorists weren’t responding to traditional lights and sirens.

“The basic idea is we become more insulated in our vehicles with stereos, iPods and telephones,” Morgan said. “We thought it would be helpful if there was something else along with the traditional siren that would reach a different level of awareness.”

Sonic technologies, again and again, are implicated in arms races. During arms races, as we learned during the Cold War, defensive maneuvers (like shields and headphones) only seem passive – in fact, they provide the impetus for more aggressive modes of penetration, extending a vicious cycle. Our reliance on simple technological solutions to complex problems like noise invites exactly this kind of frustration.

Thanks to Connor for the original link.