A team of Boston University researchers recently stuck a loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe. They cranked it up loud. What did they hear? Nothing.

How was this possible? Did they block the other end of the pipe with noise canceling foams or a chunk of concrete? No, nothing of the sort. The pipe was actually left open save for a small, 3D-printed ring placed around the rim. That ring cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker, enough to make it inaudible to the human ear. — Fast Company

To live in New York means to get habituated to the noise of everyday life here...As a neighborhood becomes more homogenous, and its residents sync their noise patterns, noise complaints tend to go down. This may explain why, controlling for other factors, gentrifying areas of the city display higher levels of noise complaints. City residents stop consciously recognizing noise as novel, and it becomes background, even if their bodies don’t always recognize it as such. — Nautilus

Derek Sugden, the dean of acoustic engineers, who has died at the age of 91, remained perpetually surprised that architects could be so concerned with every aspect of the building they were designing ‘but not really with what it sounded like’. According to Sugden, ‘the sound is as important as the surface and the feel. It’s important because our ears define for me the nature of space.’ — London Review of Books

The primary strategy for blocking airborne sound is to add a layer of dense, flexible material to the problem surface...Stopping vibration-borne noise is usually trickier and more expensive. It requires suspending walls, ceilings or floors so that the vibrations aren’t conducted to a building’s framing, which can transmit sound throughout a building...A compounding issue is that it takes only a very small gap to let in a lot of sound. — NYT

we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy. [...]

Sound may be invisible or only unconsciously perceived, but that doesn’t make it any less an architectural material than wood, glass, concrete, stone or light. [...]

Acoustics can act in deep, visceral ways, not unlike music ... And while it’s sometimes hard to pin down exactly how, there is often a correlation between the function of a place or an object and the sound we expect it to make. — nytimes.com

LEGO Architecture is making its European debut on August 1 in the "Villa Pennisi in Musica" event at the 19th-century Pennisi Villa in Italy. The event is part of a program that brings an Italian architecture summer school and a classical music masterclass under the same roof. — bustler.net

"Our collaboration has been since 1989, and now it's long-term," Toyota says of Gehry. "With Frank, I learned many, many things."

Chief among them, he says: "Flexibility."

"His thinking is very free and without restrictions. His spirit and creative mind is [open]. And we were able to work together in this way," Toyota says.

During the construction of Disney Hall, Toyota, ... was inspired by Gehry's design and perfected what he sees as his personal style of acoustics. — latimes.com

Soundscrapers could soon turn urban noise pollution into usable energy to power cities.

An honourable mention-winning entry in the 2013 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, dubbed Soundscraper, looked into ways to convert the ambient noise in urban centres into a renewable energy form.

Noise pollution is currently a negative element of urban life but it could soon be valued and put to good use. — DesignBuild Source

Last week, Raj Patel, principal and acoustic consultant at Arup treated the crowd at Yale School of Architecture’s Sound of Architecture Symposium to a presentation on his company’s Sound Lab. The Sound Lab uses a battery of speakers arranged in a spherical configuration to mimic the acoustic properties of a digital architectural model. In real time, designers can change the shape of a hall, the material of the seats, the angle of the walls, and hear how it might affect the acoustics... — metropolismag.com

Victoria Newhouse - "aesthetically I think they are greatly improved from what we had before...they're smaller and more intimate...more inviting...they are acoustically improved...and many of them have the ability to be reconfigured...all of this leads to a very exciting scene" — Charlie Rose