Research: Designing Positive urban soundscapes

Sound in the City (5:30) University of Warwick Professor Paul Jennings is leading a team researching how sound affects the perception of environments, which people have generally seen as full of unwanted noise. Professor Jennings suggests that the right sound has many positive aspects and should be considered in the design of urban soundscapes and buildings such as hospitals.

Professor Jennings team is looking to quantify what people perceive as the 'right sound'. This will help town planners and facility designers build environments with sounds that engender positive responses in users, such as a lively city centre or a hospital ward that helps people feel less stressed and recover more quickly.

The University of Warwick positive soundscapes project explores a new approach to the relevance of positive soundscapes, by moving away from the focus on negative noise. This is about emphasizing the positive aspects of sound, and minimizing the negative aspects, which can help engineers, planners and architects to design spaces that will be perceived more positively by the people using them

Source: YouTube