Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams on a booming industry
As the din of London's mayoral hustings fades away, it seems strange that people with microphones may soon take to the streets once more, not in search of soundbites of voters' opinions, but in an effort to record all the other static of the city. There is already a noise map of Birmingham, the beginnings of a national initiative intended to curb growing noise pollution. One of the modest powers left to the mayor by the Greater London Authority Act is to cut noise levels, and preparations are under way for the generation of a similar map of the capital.
Noise must be abated, but sound may be designed. In the domestic landscape of the home and the desktop, the noises we hear are not the inevitable explosions of combustion engines and the percussion of human industry. They are, for the most part, deliberate interventions intended to warn or advise. The nature of these sounds has generally been determined by the most readily available technology - bells for telephones and clocks, a knock on the door, the whistle of the kettle. Each is distinctive, unambiguous and long understood.
Now, however, we possess so many devices that feel the urge to tell us how they are getting on with what they are doing, or that they have just done it, or that they have broken down while doing it, that new sounds are needed. A handful of psychologists and designers have begun looking at ways in which these sounds might be created. The impetus for this work came from industrial systems, where it has been realised that, for example, an alarm that comes on so loud or so abruptly that it scares a pilot or train driver can increase rather than limit the danger of a situation. Similar sounds, converted into digital form and gently remodelled by computer, may scare less and so warn more effectively.
Such sounds could be used in a wide range of circumstances, not only in urgent situations. After all, even when people's vision and tactile senses are occupied (for example, at a computer screen and keyboard), their ears are often left flapping - ask any office gossip. Auditory icons - "earcons" in the trade - could fill the gap by conveying useful information.
Technical people talk about sounds in terms of pitch and timbre. But what we hear are events - we hear "a car pulling up" or "a key in the lock". The hunt is on to find or invent sounds that communicate the sense of more contemporary events as clearly. Things are off to a poor start with the arbitrary custom effects available for computers, and those mangled classical themes that provide the most irritating ringing tones for mobile phones. And the future may not bear thinking about: there is already speculation as to how brands might develop the aural equivalent of logos and liveries, raising the prospect of jingles drawn out to Wagnerian complexity.
But there are moves to exert a civilising influence. In an experiment at the Xerox research centre in Cambridge, the arrival of e-mail on your computer is signalled not by an intrusive bugle call, but by the muffled shuffle of letters landing on the mat. "Dragging" a document to the wastebasket icon is accompanied by a dragging noise, so that you know you have grabbed it successfully without really looking at what you're doing on the screen. When it drops in the wastebasket, it makes a clunk. The larger the document, the weightier the clunk - a subtle way of warning you that you may be about to lose a more valuable document than you thought. When copying files from disk to disk, you want to know when the computer has finished so that you can get on with your work, but you don't necessarily want to stare at the screen while it makes the transfer. With audible feedback - in Xerox's case, a glug-glug sound that rises in pitch as the documents are decanted - the computer quietly lets you know how it is progressing. The challenge for the sound designer is to strike the right balance between the abstract and the figurative. The glugging may infuriate with repeated hearing; and indeed, these sounds, which were developed a decade ago, have not been adopted. But if the sound is too abstract, its meaning will not be clear.
In a brilliant New Yorker cartoon, Saul Steinberg once used ready-made printers' cliches and stencil patterns as visual symbols of the domestic sounds of lawnmowers and dishwashers. But designers have been dismayed to find that the sounds they seek cannot first be drawn and then converted into audio. They should perhaps hearken to the artists taking part in "Sonic Boom" at the Hayward Gallery in London. Brian Eno's concept of "quiet clubs" or Christina Kubisch's forest of cables transmitting the sounds of jungles and waterfalls, "the last acoustic paradises", may contain clues to the creation of sounds that resonate more deeply.
Some of the installations even provide a pre-emptive critique of the world that sound designers are creating. Chico MacMurtrie shows where it may all lead with a "tribe of distressed, post-apocalyptic robots" with nothing left to do but twitter their peculiar music at one another.
"Sonic Boom: the art of sound" is at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1, until 18 June (020-7928 3144)
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