Have you thought much about how sounds make you feel? There are so many kinds of sounds around us, that maybe you don’t think much about them – until they are annoying you or interrupting your sleep or thoughts? Acoustic noise, as defined by the Oxford English dictionary is unwanted sound. In his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, pioneering acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer expands the idea of noise to include unmusical sound, any loud sound, or disturbance of any signaling system (like static). Noise has been understood as unwanted sound at least since the earliest reference in the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1200s. If noise is unwanted sound, then it seems to me that what I consider noise could be quite different to someone else. The idea of “unwanted sound” doesn’t necessarily imply that the sound is “disliked," but most noise is made up of sounds that fall into Schafer’s “loud sounds” category.
In this episode, I investigate the ways that human-dominated soundscapes impact health - from human health to ecosystem health. I was surprised at the many ways that soundscapes can impact our lives. Maybe you will be too?