Try the following: Take a break from whatever you’re doing, and listen closely to the sounds around you for a few minutes. What do you hear? Are you surprised by anything you hear? If you get a chance, try the same exercise someplace else, perhaps in your backyard, kitchen or classroom, or on your fire escape or street corner.
What are the sounds that make up the background noise in your life?
In the Interactive “Dear Architects: Sound Matters” Michael Kimmelman writes:
We talk about how cities and buildings look. We call places landmarks or eyesores. But we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy.
The spaces we design and inhabit all have distinctive sounds. The reading rooms at the New York Public Library have an overlay of rich sound. Your office may be a big room in a glass building with rows of cubicles where people stare into computer screens.
It may be sealed off from the outside, and you may think it is quiet.
Is it?
Often the sound of a place is so pervasive that we stop noticing what we hear. Or we think the sound could not be otherwise — that is, until we, say, turn off the buzzing overhead lights.
He continues:
Sound may be invisible or only unconsciously perceived, but that doesn’t make it any less an architectural material than wood, glass, concrete, stone or light. It is shaped by design, albeit most architects rarely think much about it, except when their task is to come up with a pleasing concert hall or a raucous restaurant — and then acousticians are called in. That said, you don’t need to be a specialist to distinguish spaces according to the sounds they make.
Students: Read the entire essay, and if possible, use headphones to listen to the audio, then tell us …
— What are the sounds that make up the background noise in your life? How do the sounds change as you move from place to place in your daily life?
— Do the sounds you hear provide you with comfort? Do they feel familiar? Or, do you find them by and large annoying or unpleasant?
— If you did the listening activity suggested above, were you surprised by what you heard? Why?
— Do you ever play music or wear headphones to escape the background noise (or quiet) in your life?
— Do you agree with Mr. Kimmelman that sound is an important, if often overlooked, element that architects should consider when designing buildings? Why?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.