When you think about the urban environment and pollution, do you immediately think of the harm done by noise?
Most people, city planners among them, think of urban pollution as car exhaust, smog, stagnant muddy water, litter dropped anywhere, and heaps of plastic and other rubbish.
But science has shown that noise pollution is no minor threat. It has not been taken seriously so far, but the time has come to treat it as a major one, because noise can disturb sleep, cause heart disease, lower the quality of work, make learning harder for schoolchildren and even reduce hearing.
"One day man will have to fight noise as fiercely as cholera and pests," said the Nobel-winning physician Robert Koch, who received the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on tuberculosis.
Building cities that sound good
What would such a city be like, and can architecture lend a hand? Experts believe it can.
Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer at the University of Salford in England, has said that aural architecture is about what buildings are saying, what kinds of sounds are made inside them and how we respond to them, and about understanding the effect these buildings have on people and their health.
The latest sound technology and new kinds of building materials will not only help build better new cities but also improve the old ones.
Source: BBC Bangla. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.
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