The Rest Is Just Noise

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 research. Hopefully we'll be able to answer questions like 'What do our cities sound like when people aren't using them?' 'How did people's perceptions of urban sound change throughout this period?' and 'Just how quiet could our cities be, and would it actually make a difference?'
For the first of this series, we're speaking with Romain Rumpler, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, about the effects Romain and his team measured under Sweden's unique lockdown conditions. Make sure to subscribe to keep up with our future lockdown-focussed episodes!
Resources:
An observation of the impact of CoViD-19 recommendation measures monitored through urban noise levels in central Stockholm, Sweden - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210670720306892
Noise measurements as a proxy to evaluating the response to recommendations in times of crisis: An update analysis of the transition to the second wave of the CoViD-19 pandemic in Central Stockholm, Sweden - https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/10.0003778
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Twitter: @JustNoisePod

Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/
Twitter: @JustNoisePod

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 approaches to sonic urbanism. Their goal is to foster socially conscious approaches to sonic practice in forms of research, analysis and design.
Oh, and there's a chat about the unavoidable John Lennon, oops I meant Xenakis.
Shall we continue?
Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/
Twitter: @JustNoisePod

UK Acoustics Network
UKAN brings together the internationally leading, but disparate UK acoustics research community.

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 the weeds about how to quantify the cost of noise, what methods are used and why it matters anyway.
Find Like at the University of Leeds.
Find the latest Like's paper - Ten questions concerning soundscape valuation published in Building and Environment.
More details on transport noise valuation here.
Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/
Twitter: @JustNoisePod

Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/
Twitter: @JustNoisePod

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 we've built, based of the recordings made in London and Venice to predict how people probably would have perceived these soundscapes during the lockdown.
Read the papers we are talking about in JASA and in Noise Mapping.
Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/
Twitter: @JustNoisePod

Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/
Twitter: @JustNoisePod

Welcome to The Rest Is Just Noise, a monthly podcast about what do architects & acousticians, researchers & artists, engineers & academics have to say about the science and beauty of sounds in cities and landscapes. So, is there a better place to look for those answers than in the Laboratory of the Future, the 18th edition of the world-famous exhibition on architecture that’s being held every even year in Venice since the 1980, the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023?

For this episode, we have sent Tin to travel to the north of Adriatic to visit the Radio Utopia, a laboratory of sound that took place first week of August inside the French pavilion and this year’s project the Ball Theatre. There, we found Carlotta Darò and Nicolas Tixier, the curators of Radio Utopia, and talked beyond just the glamour of multimedia at world exhibitions, discussing the importance of architectural atmospheres.

Carlotta is a Lecturer at ENSA Paris Malaquais and a researcher at ETH Zürich, and Nicolas is the director of the CRESSON, Grenoble. So, in this episode, we are bringing you first a brief audio runthrough the program with Carlotta and finally the conversation with Carlotta and Nicolas, taking place within the soundscape of Les Nouvelles du Monde, News of the World, a collaboratory sound installation.
More info about Radio Utopia.
After Venice, Radio Utopia will be live in Paris in mid October.

Find our website: https://www.justnoisepod.com/
Twitter: @JustNoisePod