The Sound We Stopped Hearing
Prepared by the ArchUp Research Team.
In the cover illustration, a ventilation grille hangs above a bed. Its shadow has become a waveform, an impossible trace that makes an ordinary relationship visible. Equipment belongs to the building, but its sound enters somebody's rest. The image is conceptual, not a photograph of a documented noise problem or a record of acoustic measurement. Its usefulness lies in the question it asks: what does architecture allow into a room after the camera has finished looking at it?
Stand beside a busy road and the question acquires a different scale. Engines, tyres, fans and intermittent signals overlap. Some sounds attract attention; others become the background against which attention operates. In sound studies, the idea of a keynote helps describe this relationship between a persistent acoustic setting and the events noticed within it. A familiar background is not necessarily a harmless one, but neither does familiarity establish a particular exposure or health outcome. Those require evidence. This essay considers the urban soundscape of energy infrastructure through that distinction.
This essay brings together scholarship on vehicle sound, energy infrastructure, environmental politics and the translation of vibration into audible form. We use petrophonics here as a working lens on the sounds associated with petroleum and its infrastructures, rather than as an exclusive explanation of every urban sound. The architectural argument is that energy has a spatial and acoustic presence as well as a carbon footprint. A plant can be outside the photograph and still enter a neighbourhood through sound.
The analysis draws on published abstracts, bibliographic records and accessible sections of the studies listed below. It does not claim independent full reading of every paper, a systematic review, or measurements at the location illustrated. Empirical findings are identified where used. The proposed design questions and illustrative scenarios are the team's interpretation, and examples from particular industries or environments are not assumed to describe every city.
The Keynote and the Architecture of Silence
The history of vehicle sound is also a history of competing expectations. A subdued cabin may communicate refinement, while an amplified engine note may communicate performance. Clendinning's study of electric vehicle sound design examines the interaction of safety, branding, cultural associations and expectations of futurity. It supports reading vehicle noise as a designed social signal as well as a mechanical consequence. It does not establish a single worldwide date on which noise stopped representing prestige and became a defect. [1]
For architecture, the significant issue is the spatial distribution of protection. A setback, a facade, the orientation of a bedroom and the position of a mechanical plant can alter the relationship between a source and a listener. Access to some forms of protection depends on ownership, investment and maintenance. Quiet can therefore become a purchased advantage. Whether this amounts to unequal exposure in a specific neighbourhood must be established through local evidence, rather than inferred from an attractive interior photograph alone.
This is the first lesson a sonic reading offers to architecture, that the distribution of quiet can become a distribution of privilege, and that the design decisions which seem purely technical, the placement of a highway, the acoustic specification of a facade, the zoning of a district, are in fact decisions about who will be made to live inside the keynote and who will be lifted out of it. Where one neighbourhood receives acoustic protection and another comparable neighbourhood does not, that difference deserves investigation as a possible infrastructure of unequal exposure, and the quiet interior that we prize and photograph and sell as a mark of good design is, read this way, a small privately purchased exemption from a public harm that someone else continues to absorb.
Electrification Makes the Ideology Audible
Electrification makes these choices newly visible because removing a combustion engine changes, rather than abolishes, the vehicle's acoustic presence. At low speeds, some electric and hybrid vehicles provide fewer familiar engine cues. Clendinning discusses the relationship between warning sounds and pedestrian safety alongside manufacturers' aesthetic decisions. This is a reason to take audibility seriously, not a sufficient basis for stating a universal collision rate or treating all electric vehicles as silent. [1]
Graakjær's 2025 analysis distinguishes overlapping tendencies in designed vehicle sounds, including references to combustion, imagined futuristic sounds and musical qualities. It also identifies an important ambiguity: descriptions do not always distinguish sounds heard inside the cabin from those broadcast outside. A sound intended to make the driver feel power is not automatically a pedestrian warning, and a required warning function does not justify every branding sound. [2]
This distinction changes the architectural question. A forecourt, a hotel entrance and a residential charging area receive the external sound, not the manufacturer's entire account of the driving experience. Designers need to ask what is emitted, where it travels and when people encounter it. The retained engine reference can be read as a cultural attachment, but that interpretation should not erase the independent safety purpose of an audible vehicle cue.
The lesson doubles back onto the built environment immediately, because the transition away from combustion does not automatically produce a quieter world, and an architecture that assumes it will is naive. Energy systems beyond combustion also contain moving equipment, fans and other acoustic sources, and the designed soundscape of the electric city may turn out to be not silence but a new layer of engineered sound. A genuinely critical reading therefore has to separate two things that are easily confused, decarbonisation and sonic sustainability, because a city can decarbonise its energy and still be acoustically hostile, and the quietness that electrification seems to promise is a design outcome that must be deliberately pursued, not a gift that arrives automatically with the battery. The sustainability of a soundscape is a separate project from the sustainability of an energy supply, and conflating them is a mistake the next decade of urban design cannot afford.
The Sound Beneath the Ground and at the Point of Production
Petroleum infrastructure is not only heard at street level. Acoustic methods are among the tools used in subsurface exploration, although they are not the whole technology of finding oil. Nowacek and colleagues' 2015 review describes marine seismic surveys as a source of intense sound impulses. It discusses risks including disrupted behaviour, masked communication and displacement, and argues for planning that recognises cumulative and transboundary effects. This is evidence about marine environments, not a basis for transferring underwater exposure values directly to a building or a street. [3]
The architectural relevance is an analogy about boundaries: a source can have consequences beyond its administrative site. That analogy does not make a bedroom equivalent to an ocean ecosystem. It asks whether an assessment boundary is wide enough to include the people or environments receiving an exposure.
Boschen and Mackinnon's work on anthropogenic earthquakes introduces another distinction. Sonification translates recorded seismic data into an audible experience. The resulting sound depends on decisions about scale, speed and presentation. It can support interpretation and attention, but it is not simply an unmediated recording of what a person standing on the ground would have heard. [4]
At the point of production, the source, the worker and the duration of exposure become central. Alzamzam and Alfaghi's study investigates noise in oil and gas workplaces through measurement and risk assessment. It is useful as a specific industrial example, rather than proof that every facility routinely exceeds the same limit or produces the same injury. Applicable limits, operating conditions and the basis of measurement must be stated before comparisons are made. [5]
For architectural practice, the consequence is to treat plant rooms, maintenance positions and service routes as occupied environments. A drawing may place equipment behind a wall while leaving the person who services it inside the exposure. Enclosure, access and operating procedure therefore belong in the same discussion. Nor should a control that protects an interior simply move the problem to the neighbouring property. These are design implications proposed here, not findings from a survey of all energy facilities.
Listening as a Design Discipline
What makes a sonic reading valuable rather than merely poetic is that listening can render perceptible exactly the processes that are hardest to see and therefore hardest to govern. Kanngieser proposes sound as a political medium, opening questions of inequality, perception and shared environments. [6] In that reading, sound can challenge the comfortable fiction of an undifferentiated humanity, because when we listen carefully to the energy system we hear not humankind in general but specific bodies in specific places bearing specific exposures, the marine animal, the worker and the community beside infrastructure, the possible distribution of exposure that a single dramatic image cannot establish but a combination of listening and measurement can investigate. For architectural practice, this suggests combining appropriate measurement with attention to how thresholds are chosen and how experience is represented. Sonification should be identified as interpretation. Participatory listening can include the knowledge of people who actually live and work beside infrastructure. Each approach answers different questions; none removes the need to explain what its evidence can establish.
For architecture and urban design specifically, this proposes a genuine discipline rather than a metaphor. It means treating the acoustic environment as a primary design material and a question of justice, asking of every intervention not only how it looks and what it emits but who it makes listen and who it allows to escape, and refusing the easy assumption that the quiet interior is a neutral good when it may be a privately purchased exemption from a collective harm. It means recognising that the most serious architectural research into the energy transition has to include its soundscape, because meeting a carbon target would not, by itself, demonstrate an equitable acoustic environment, the keynote merely changed from the combustion roar to the turbine whine and the mandated electric hum, still distributed unequally, still absorbed by those with the least power to refuse it. And it carries a warning against its own aestheticisation, because sound art and sonification can make harm vivid but they can also convert injury into atmosphere, turning the rumble of a fracking quake into an interesting texture rather than a reason to investigate and respond, and the real decision in the end is not aesthetic but regulatory, a threshold, an exposure limit, a cumulative cap, set with attention to applicable requirements, current evidence and the uncertainty of the particular assessment.
The Room Is Not a Measurement Boundary
Consider a hypothetical apartment above a service entrance. The room is quiet during an afternoon inspection. Before dawn, deliveries arrive and a door closes repeatedly. Later, the ventilation system changes operating mode. None of these observations supplies a measured exposure, and this is not a reported case study. The scenario demonstrates why one visit cannot establish how a room performs across its working day.
An acoustic brief should identify the activity to be supported, the people using the space and the operating conditions under which it must work. Rest, speech, concentration and orientation are different tasks. A requirement expressed only as a pleasing atmosphere gives the designer too little to test and the operator too little to maintain. Equally, a numerical target without a clear measurement method can leave different parties believing they have agreed to different things.
The proposed response is a coordinated record of sources, routes and receivers. Locate equipment and recurring service activity. Identify openings, shared structures and adjacent uses that require specialist assessment. Record the period and condition of each observation. Ask who can change a setting or request a repair, and who has no such control. This is a framework for investigation, not a substitute for an acoustician's project specific analysis.
Maintenance Is Part of the Soundscape
A building's acoustic intention must survive operation. Equipment is replaced, tenants change hours and a quiet courtyard may acquire a delivery function. The useful question is not simply whether the initial specification was met, but whether the current system still supports the activities for which the space is occupied. Responsibility should be legible enough that a complaint can reach somebody able to investigate it.
Imagine two possible responses to a persistent hum. One begins with the source and checks whether an operating fault or a poorly considered location can be corrected. The other asks the resident to close the window permanently. Neither response can be judged without the actual building, but they distribute responsibility differently. The latter may also change ventilation, thermal comfort and the resident's relationship with outdoor space. Acoustic decisions should therefore be evaluated alongside these consequences rather than as isolated product selections.
Listening with occupants can reveal when a problem occurs and what activity it interrupts. It cannot, by itself, establish a legal exceedance or diagnose a medical condition. Instrumental measurement answers different questions and also requires an appropriate method. Combining the two respects experience without asking personal testimony to carry claims it cannot verify. It also avoids treating the absence of a formal complaint as evidence of universal satisfaction.
A Quieter City Must Be Designed
So the conclusion a sonic reading presses on the built environment is a reversal of the usual hierarchy of the senses. We design cities as visual objects, we photograph them empty and silent, we judge them by how they look in the image, and in doing so we edit out the one register in which the energy system is most honestly present, because a still image cannot establish the acoustic conditions of the space it represents. The news will keep covering the energy transition as a story of emissions and images, the gleaming turbine, the sleek silent car, and architectural presentation can reward a building photographed in a silence the image cannot prove, and the quieter and more uncomfortable truth will keep vibrating underneath, that urban sound reaches beyond the people choosing its sources, and that design, governance and access to protection shape who can escape it. The keynote is the sound we stopped hearing, and the first act of a more just urbanism may be the deliberate, disciplined decision to start hearing it again, to treat the roar we have trained ourselves to ignore as information rather than silence, and to design the city as something to be listened to as carefully as it is looked at.
Sources
- Clendinning, Elizabeth A. Driving future sounds: imagination, identity and safety in electric vehicle noise design. Sound Studies, 4(1), 2018, pp. 61–76.
- Graakjær, Nicolai Jørgensgaard. Sounding out the electric vehicle engine: sounds of sustainability? Continuum, 2025, pp. 719–730.
- Nowacek, Douglas P., et al. Marine seismic surveys and ocean noise: time for coordinated and prudent planning. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 13(7), 2015, pp. 378–386.
- Boschen, Marleen, and Sterling Mackinnon. Sonics of Rupture: A Methodology for Sounding Anthropogenic Earthquakes and Tuning into Ecological Trauma. GeoHumanities, published online 2024.
- Alzamzam, Wahid Salem, and Walid Bashir Alfaghi. Noise evaluation in oil and gas fields and associated risk assessment. Euro Mediterranean Journal for Environmental Integration, 2021.
- Kanngieser, Anja. Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Five Propositions for Sound. GeoHumanities, 1(1), 2015, pp. 80–85.
