Auraldiversity and Urban Sound

For more than 80 years, acoustics has relied upon A-weighted decibels – after Fletcher and Munson’s equal loudness curves (1933) – to represent human hearing in acoustic design and noise control. Finessed over the years, the A-weighting curve still resides at the heart of key standards, and through practice is inscribed on multiple levels into the built environment. But this norm explicitly characterises the hearing of 18 to 25-year-olds with no hearing impairments (BS ISO 226:2003). The concept of auraldiversity was born out of a study into high-speed hand dryers in publicly accessible toilets (Drever 2017). The study found a wide range of users adversely impacted due to high, yet admissible, sound levels in this complex and sensitive space: breast-feeding mothers, infants and children, visually impaired, hearing aid users, Alzheimer’s disease, Ménière’s disease, PTSD, cerebral palsy and, most significantly, people with hyperacusis and tinnitus, and autistic people with hyperacute hearing. Using this study as a microcosm for environmental noise issues within the urban environment, this talk will challenge the assumption of whose auditory experience we are taking into account in urban sound design.