介绍了声音在城市中带来的影响
对于污染来说，噪音污染也是一种污染。所以在环保的角度，可以学习某些观点的表达。
建议在学习前先做完听力题目哦。
听力原文：
This lecture will be about the science ofacoustics, the study of sound, in relation to urbanenvironments such as cities. As an acoustic engineer myself, I thinkthis is an area where we’re likely to see great changes. In the past,researching urban soundscapes was simple. We measured levels of sound indecibels, so I used to take my sound meter and I measured the noise somewhere,and then I might ask a sample of people to say at what level the sound becameannoying.
With data like this, acoustic engineershave been able to build up what we call noise maps, maps of the soundenvironment. But actually, these aren't a lot of use. What they do show is thatthe highest noise levels are generally on roads -well, that's not really very surprising. But there's quite a lot going on thatthese maps don't show, because they can't capture the complex way that soundvaries over time. So they ignore important issues such as the noise someonemight hear from the open windows or gardens of their neighbours, and this sortof noise can be quite significant in summer. We don't have any databases onthis sort of information. As well as that, these records of sound levels take no account of the fact that people vary in theirperceptions of noise - so someone like me withyears of working in acoustics might be very different from you in that regard.
But anyway, even though these noise mapsare fairly crude, they've been useful to providing information and raisingawareness that noise matters, we need to deal with it and so it's a politicalmatter. And that's important-we need rules and regulations because noise cancause all sorts of problems.
Those of you who are city-dwellers know that things go on 24 hours a day,so city-dwellers often suffer from interrupted sleep.Ifs also known that noise can lead to a rise in levelsof stress, due to physical changes in the body affecting the compositionof the blood. And there are other problems as well, for instance ifschoolchildren don't have a quiet place to study, their work will suffer.
Now. one problem with decibel measurementis that it doesn't differentiate betweendifferent types of noise. Some types of sounds that most people would probablythink of as nice and relaxing might well score quite highly in decibel levels -think of the sound made by a fountain in a town square. for example. That's notnecessarily something that we'd want to control or reduce. So maybe researchersshould consider these sorts of sounds in urban design. This is going to betricky because just measuring decibel levels isn't going to help us here.Instead, many researchers are using social science techniques, studying people's emotional response to sound by using questionnairesand so on.
So what exactly do people want to hear inan urban environment? Some recent interdisciplinary research has come out withresults that at first sight seem contradictory –a city needs to have a sense of activity, so itneeds to be lively, with sounds like the clack of highheels on a pavement or the hiss of a coffee machine, but these mustn'tbe too intrusive, because at the same time we need to be able torelax.
One of the major problems in achieving thiswill be getting architects and town planners to use the research. Apart fromstudying the basics of acoustics, these people receive very little training inthis area. But in fact, they should be regarding soundas an opportunity to add to the experience of urban living, whereas atpresent they tend to see it as something to be avoided or reduced as far aspossible, or something that's just a job for engineers like the street drainagesystem.
What's needed is for noise in cities to beregarded as an aesthetic quality, as something that has the qualities of an artform. If we acknowledge this, then we urgently need to know what governs it andhow designers can work with it. We need to develop a complex understanding ofmany factors. What is the relationship between sound and culture? What can welearn from disciplines such as psychology about the way that sound interacts with human development and socialrelationships, and the way that sound affectsour thought and feelings? Can we learn anything from physics about thenature of sound itself?
Today's powerful technologies can also helpus. To show us their ideas and help us to imagine the effect their buildingswill have, architects and town planners already use virtualreality - but these programs are silent. In the future such programscould use realistic sounds, meaning that soundscapes could be explored beforebeing built. So hopefully, using the best technology we can lay our hands on, the city of the future will be a pleasure to the ears as wellas the eyes.
更多学习资料
请关注公众号：我学习我骄傲
用户评论