Unseen Forces – Part 1 – Sound

‘Tis the season for invisible forces. With Midsummer’s eve and good weather sitings of all sorts of gnomes and fairies, the unseen can be top of mind.
In this issue we won’t talk about magic, but we will delve into sensory experiences that often seem unseen, starting with Sound.

Sound has the potential to influence at a greater distance than any other sense (an olfactory experience needs to be nearly debilitatingly overpowering to beat out an acoustic one for its ability to influence experience far from a source)—we can often, for example, smell odours from many yards away, but hear them for miles. Whether we can see something depends on our line-of-sight and that can be blocked much more readily than a sound wave.

As with other sensory experiences we can link pleasant memories and situations to particular sounds and those sounds can then put us in better moods. Neuroscience has identified patterns in how we respond to sounds, their work is particularly handy when you are soundscaping shared or public spaces.

Our responses to sounds are not always entirely objective. We are less annoyed by sounds when we feel they are justified and serving some purpose, for example, and our general opinions of the people making the noise. Also, our tolerance for sound depends on what we’re up to—if we’re having a rowdy FaceTime conversation with a friend sounds of a party next door are better received than if we’re trying to meditate.

The last point made bears repeating: What we’re doing does dramatically effect how we respond to sounds around us—as noted earlier—so any space needs to be able to “tune in” multiple different soundscapes.
Research also shows that we can be pretty suggestible in what we think is making a noise, and our beliefs about sources determine our responses. For example, in one study, people were told that a particular soundtrack was either machine noise or a waterfall. The people told it was a waterfall were refreshed by the sound, but that was not the case for the other test group. The moral of this story: when all else fails with sound management, it might sometimes be worthwhile to come up with some clever ways to discuss with your family/friends/colleagues what you are all hearing.

Studies do pretty predictably show that certain sounds are annoying. Top of the list are unpredictable sounds, like faucets that drip every so often. Predicting can lead to coping. Similarly, hearing half a conversation is much more annoying than hearing both people talking (which may be difficult for you to accept if you work somewhere where the area around you is filled with Chatty Cathys and Chads). All of which makes a good argument for sound insulation between you and your neighbours—you can fix your own leaky faucet so it doesn’t startle and annoy you, but you can’t control when the people in the next apartment choose to send something to print and activate the printer on the other side of your bedroom wall.
Another big stressor: echoes. You can counter echoes with soft surfaces like rugs and curtains, and even old-style wall hangings, if you’ve got ‘em.

And don’t think you can beef up your willpower and block out the sounds of people around you, particularly if they are talking. We are a social species and in our earliest days our survival depended upon our ability to coordinate with those around us—to find more berries, to kill the Woolly Mammoth—and our cognitive apparatus is still much the same as it was eons ago when we were hunting Woolly Mammoths, so we are literally, unable to ignore nearby conversations. (Think about that the next time you are pouring out all your life secrets to a dinner partner in a restaurant where the tables are jam packed next to each other.)

Another reason to try to give yourself ways to block out sound from outside your home—the noise of other people outside, such as traffic noise can be quite stressful and up your blood pressure—the effects of all that outside-the-home noise are particularly dire when they happen at night.

If you can manage to live or work in a place with windows that open, however, you have control of your soundscape, which is good for your mood and your mental performance—and particularly good if you live near some nature and even if sometime nature flies by your home.

Even if you don’t live near nature and if where you live is in a bird no fly zone you can download nature soundscapes and play them on your phone, etc.—doing so means you’ll be more comfortable, relaxed, your cognitive performance will improve, and healthier, all while your stress levels fall, because you’ll be biophilically designing. For best effects, play your nature sounds at low volumes, just audible.

When you’re online scouting out nature soundtracks, you’ll have options. The one that you pick should include the sorts of sounds you’d hear in a temperate zone meadow on a fine-weather Spring day—burbling brooks, gently rustling leaves and graces, peacefully singling songbirds . . .

If for some reason you are not big on nature—maybe a robin stole a lunch sandwich from you as you sat with your young classmates on a school patio—any you want to be less effected by the sounds of other people, perhaps people talking—download a white noise track. It is a good sound blocker, but the nature soundtrack has benefits beyond sound-smashing. Pink noise is likely to put you to sleep, so if you find it wherever you get your white noise, use it with discretion.

The research consistently shows that if you are doing some sort of mental work, your best bet is to listen to nature or white noise and not music, even if you select the music, if your goal is to do your best work.

If you’re doing physical work, shovelling snow, raking leaves, exercising, doing laundry, etc. you’ll want to carefully consider the pace of whatever you are listening to. In music this is the number of beats-per-minute. You’ll start to move at that pace. When beats-per-minute get to around 100 or so you’ll be folding clothes, chopping vegetables, walking along, whatever, at an energetic pace.

Finally, an answer to the classic question, “How loud is too loud”? The research says we start to get stressed when sound levels creep above 45 dB(A) which is pretty much the volume of normal at-home life for most folks. But in reality, louder is OK if we have positive associations to the sound, particularly if we’re extraverts (for more on designing for personality see this article), and if we don’t any perceptible volume is too much.
A too quiet space, one that seems to not have as much going on acoustically, will stress you out as much as one with too much going on, so don’t waste your time questing after a silent space (silence is not possible anyway, unless you happen to have access to a few government labs).

And if current soundscapes are just not your cup of tea, try to wait them out. Supported manmade soundscapes do go in and out of favour—the way your voice sounds in a Gothic cathedral is not just coincidentally different from the way is sounds in a new-built church.