The Rest Is Just Noise

Today we're bringing you right into the conversation with us by recording the episode on a binaural head. We're going to be speaking with a Professor in Psychology Mats Nilsson about his work on studying sound perception and psychoacoustics of blind and sighted people. Find Mats at the Stockholms universitet . Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/ Twitter: @JustNoisePod        ...

How much is a decibel worth? Can you put a price on sound quality? From house prices to heart attacks, from airplane noise to church bells, sound costs us money and years of our lives but can also bring value. How to quantify the value of that is difficult. Today we're speaking with Like Jiang, a Research Fellow at University of Leeds, about how we value soundscapes. We are getting deep in th...

The lockdowns due to COVID-19 had a huge impact on our urban environments and the sounds of our cities. In one of our recent publications we wanted to have a look at not just how much did those sound levels decrease but how would people have perceived this change in their urban soundscape. Come along with us as we take a little deviation into our own research and talk about the computer model that...

Notre-Dame de Paris is famous for its music - from the famous bells to its three pipe organs. But did you know the building itself has influenced how Western music developed? Today (actually nearly five months ago, but who's counting?) we're speaking with Sarabeth Mullins, a researcher at Sorbonne Université about her research into how the cathedral of Notre-Dame has shaped vocal music t...

In early December 2021 our host Andrew attended the Seattle meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and now walks us through the highlights of the conference. We talked about electric vehicles additive sounds, deep learning for audio classification, social isolation for older people with sensory loss during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and more! The proceedings of the ASA meeting can be found at t...

Throughout the last year, we've seen a whole bunch of articles, projects and research about how much urban noise was reduced due to COVID-19 lockdowns. This is our 2nd episode in a series looking at the impacts of those lockdowns worldwide on sound in cities. Today we're speaking for the 2nd time with Pamela Jordan, a researcher at University of Amsterdam, about her project looking, in a...

This week Andrew is at the Acoustical Society of America conference in Seattle. Throughout the week, our goal is to bring you some highlights about the talks he found most interesting. At the end of it we'll put together a full episode with that run down, but Andrew is also sitting down for some short mini-episodes with the acousticians, architects and researchers presenting to dig deeper int...

We've talked a lot about soundscapes: how we perceive them, how we measure them, how we can predict them... but all of these soundscapes existed. What about the ones that - like purgatory - are just somewhere in our minds or floating out there in space? These are historic soundscapes - ones which used to exist but no longer do. So the question is - how do we talk about those? How do we measur...

In our very first episode, we learned that not all natural sounds are equal, and not all of them are pleasant. In today's episode, we'll talk about how not all mechanical sounds are equal and not all of them are necessarily bad. As we move into the "age of the future" we expect to see drones flying around our cities, dropping off packages and making our skies look like those of...

This month we're kicking off a new series of episodes looking at how the COVID-19 lockdowns impacted urban soundscapes around the world! Throughout this past year, we've seen countless articles, podcasts, and twitter threads about how cities went quiet as people were forced to stay at home. We hope to bring you the in depth stories directly from the scientists who were conducting this re...

Number 9, number 9, number 9... As promised, today we're back where we left as we talk with  Associate Professor Gascia Ouzounian , joined by her colleague, a Bartlett alumna Dr Ruth Bernatek . They reflect on their ongoing ERC project Soncities at University of Oxford that brings together sound theorists, urban sociologists, architects, urban designers and sound artists to develop critical a...

Today we understand sound is inherently spatial. It interacts with and informs us about the space it - and we - exist in. But as recently as 1900, scientists held that sound itself could not relay "spatial attributes" and that the human ear had physiological limitations that prevented it from receiving spatial information. How did we go from there to our current understanding of spatial...

This month we return to one of our favourite topics - how do you actually measure perception? We trace the development of the circumplex model of affect from it's start in 1980, to it's first application in soundscape in 2010. Finally we speak with Simone Torresin, who has done the most recent expansion of this idea by deriving a soundscape circumplex model for indoor environments.  Are...

Happy May the Fourth!  In this episode, we're speaking with Linda O'Keeffe, a sound artist and head of the School of Art at Edinburgh College of Art. Her work on gender inclusion in the sonic arts has led to the development of the organisation Women In Sound, Women On Sound, whose goal is to make visible women who work in the multitudinous areas of sound - from music technology to sound...

This week marked the second Urban Sound Symposium , held virtually! Featuring keynotes with 30 speakers, panel discussions, and 27 posters, the Symposium brought together some of the leading researchers in urban sound and soundscape. In today's bonus episode, Andrew and Francesco discuss their personal favourite bits from the week as well as talking, once again, with Edda Bild about the exten...

Today we have a just-long-enough chat with Drs. Edda Bild and Dan Steele from McGill University about their various soundscape intervention projects. They'll take us through installing free-to-use speakers in a small park in Montreal to testing out different water feature installations, with many rambling rants in between! Papers discussed: Soundtracking the Public Space: Outcomes of the Musi...

In light of the UK's newly proposed policing bill which aims to impose noise limits and other new restrictions on protests, we bring you a special episode. Recorded a month before news of the bill came out, our host Andrew spoke with sociologist and soundscape researcher Edda Bild about 'sonic appropriation' - how people, particularly protesters and those in marginalised communities...

The International Year of Sound is a global initiative to highlight the importance of sound in all aspects of life and to promote an understanding of sound-related issues at the national and international level. 2020 was the International Year of Sound, but it may have been just a tad overshadowed by certain other events that year. Luckily, it carried on and adapted, and has been extended into 202...

How do we measure sound perception? How can scientists quantify something so subjective? Dr Sarah Payne walks us through how scales for soundscape are adapted from visual research. We'll discuss a whole range of scales and theories, like Attention Restoration Theory (ART), Perceived Restorative-ness Scale (PRS), Restorative Components Scale (RCS). But really, the highlight might just be her t...

Today we speak with Dr Ellie Ratcliffe, "Queen of the Birds"! Can bird sounds help us recover psychologically? What do we even mean by that? And what is it about specific sounds that we find pleasing? Ellie will walk us through all that and more as we discuss her paper Predicting the Perceived Restorative Potential of Bird Sounds Through Acoustics and Aesthetics. Find more from Ellie at...

Meet our hosts and our podcast! In this introductory episode we introduce Andrew, Francesco, and Tin and clue you in to what you can expect to hear about on The Rest Is Just Noise. You'll hear about how each of our hosts found their way from architecture, physics, and music into the world of sound and some of the interesting stories about sound that they have encountered along the way. Stay t...