Urban Noises Research Articles

Assessing the impact of engine and non-engine urban noises on the calls of urban frogs: a natural experiment

Urban noise can potentially disturb the acoustic signals of animals inhabiting urban areas. Although a wide variety of noises from different sources is common in cities, the impact of non-engine noise on animal calls is less studied. In a natural experiment, we evaluated the effect of different urban noises on the advertisement calls of urban frogs (Eleutherodactylus nitidus) in the metropolitan area of Puebla, Mexico. We recorded and analyzed 672 advertisement calls from 28 male frogs and the corresponding environmental noises from three distinct localities. Our analysis focused on four acoustic properties of the calls: inter-call interval, call duration, dominant frequency, and call amplitude. To standardize the amplitude measurements of sound pressure levels produced by noise and frog calls, we employed a practical approach using a reference signal for calibration. We treated the longitudinal data of different noises occurring before, during, and after advertisement calls as repeated measures within the urban locations. During our samplings, frogs called amidst spontaneous urban noises, including dog barking, fireworks, and vehicle engine sounds. Our results indicate that vehicle engine sounds and dog barking do not cause significant distortions in the calls of these urban frogs. However, we observed slight variations in the dominant frequency of calls, decreasing by 11 Hz, during and after fireworks. Given the observed plasticity of E. nitidus in response to noise, urban noises may not pose a severe problem for this urban frog.

Exploring the impact of impulsive urban sounds and noise on open sports training through real-time AI sound analysis

This study examines the impact of impulsive urban sounds and noise on athletes' performance during open sports training sessions. It specifically explores how various sports react to environmental noise disturbances. Impulsive urban sounds, defined as sudden, sharp noises that occur unpredictably in urban settings, were the focus of this study. Utilizing a sample of 160 sports students, divided into control and experimental groups, the study employed Independent Samples t-Tests and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). These tests were used to assess athletic performance variations between concentration-intensive sports (e.g., archery, golf) and non-concentration-intensive sports (e.g., football, basketball). The findings reveal that while impulsive urban noises do not uniformly affect overall athletic performance, athletes in concentration-intensive sports experience a significant decline in athletic performance metrics, indicating a heightened vulnerability to such disturbances. In contrast, athletes in non-concentration-intensive sports showed a negligible impact from similar noise conditions. These observations suggest a complex interaction between the specific demands of a sport and its noise sensitivity, challenging the traditional view that urban noise universally disrupts athletic activities. The study highlights the importance of considering a sport's cognitive demands when evaluating the effects of environmental factors on athletic performance. It recommends strategic planning in the design and timing of urban sports training to minimize the negative impacts of impulsive noise, especially for disciplines that require intense concentration and mental focus. Future research should investigate individual adaptive capacities and develop customized noise mitigation strategies for different sports contexts. Keywords: urban noise, athletic performance, impulsive sounds, concentration-intensive sports, environmental stressors, noise mitigation, sports training environments.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s acousmatic sound: Listening to urban noises and decadent music in Daughter of the Nile

This paper reconsiders the mediation of urban noises and decadent music in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long-overlooked film Daughter of the Nile (1987) under the contexts of noise control and popular entertainment in the late 1980s in Taiwan. It argues that the film embeds distinctive sounds in urban environments to create acousmatic soundscapes that are typically considered ambient noises in mainstream discourse. It further observes that the film provides a critical entry point to the historical debates over the definition and gov­ernance of noises at the time, complicating an overdetermined ­concept throughout the history of sonic perception. Offering a frame­work to understand the film’s mediation of Taipei’s urban soundscapes, the paper suggests that the film implies an ethic of listening that calls for a more careful attention to the multifarious sounds that reflect the power dynamics between the authority and the residents in the city.

Aircraft noise modifies acoustic signals and social interactions of a microendemic frog from Mexico City

Research on urban noises affecting acoustic communication of animals is a growing area of study and conservation concern. However, the consequences of aircraft noise on anuran acoustic communication have been explored on a restricted basis to date. In this study, we investigated the impact of aircraft overflights on the individual and chorus performance of acoustic signalling in the Pedregal frog (Eleutherodactylus grandis), a microendemic and threatened species from Mexico City. During the summer of 2021, we recorded acoustic signals from male individuals and conducted acoustic monitoring to analyse how chorus social interactions change due to aircraft overflights. For this purpose, we evaluated acoustic properties of the call, including call duration, dominant frequency, call amplitude, and call repetition rate. Additionally, we measured the amplitude of environmental noises and signals by means of two types of complementary methodological approaches. Our results show changes in the individual performance of acoustic signals with longer call duration, lower dominant frequency, and higher call amplitude due to aircraft overflights, while individual call repetition rate did not vary. Furthermore, a decrease in the number of calls within the chorus was observed during aircraft overflight. Overall, these results show that aircraft noise causes plastic changes in the acoustic signals of the Pedregal frog and that social interactions between conspecifics decrease, thus adding a new disturbance to this species that already suffers from other anthropogenic noises, and habitat fragmentation.

Urban Noise Analysis and Emergency Detection System using Lightweight End-to-End Convolutional Neural Network

In recent years, the application of deep learning to environmental sound classification (ESC) has received considerable attention owing to its powerful ability to recognize the context of urban sounds. In general, deep learning models with high accuracy require substantial computing and memory resources. Consequently, to apply complex deep learning models to ESC in the real world, model inference has been performed on cloud servers with powerful computing resources. However, heavy network traffic and security issues occur when inferences are performed on a cloud server. In addition, deploying a deep learning model trained on a single public ESC dataset may not be sufficient for classifying various classes of urban noise and emergency-related sounds. To address these problems, we propose an on-device, real-time urban sound monitoring system that can classify various urban sounds at low system construction costs. The proposed system consisted of an edge artificial intelligence (AI) node and a FIWARE-based server. To enable the real-time inference on a resource-constrained edge AI node, we developed a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) by adjusting the input and model configurations to achieve high accuracy with a low number of parameters. The model achieved 94.9% classification accuracy using only 331 K parameters on an integrated dataset that included 17 classes of urban noises and emergencies. Furthermore, a prototype of the proposed system was developed and evaluated to verify its feasibility. The prototype system was built at a cost of less than USD 50 and could perform the entire monitoring process every 3 s. We also visualized the sound monitoring data using Grafana on a FIWARE-based server.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s acousmatic sound: Listening to urban noises and decadent music in Daughter of the Nile

This article reconsiders the mediation of urban noises and decadent music in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long-overlooked film Daughter of the Nile (1987) under the dual contexts of noise control and popular entertainment in the late 1980s in Taiwan. It argues that the film embeds distinctive sounds in urban environments to create acousmatic soundscapes that are typically considered ambient noises in mainstream discourse. It further observes that the film provides a critical entry point to the historical debates over the definition and governance of noise at the time, complicating an overdetermined concept throughout the history of sonic perception. Offering a framework to understand the film’s mediation of Taipei’s urban soundscapes, the article suggests that the film implies an ethics of listening that calls for a more careful attention to the multifarious sounds that reflect the power dynamics between the authority and the residents in the city.

Acoustic-Based Train Arrival Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks With Attention

In the places of railroad crossings, audible warning signals such as train whistles and railway alarms are utilized to warn the road users of paying attention and giving priority to the approaching train(s). However, road users may sometimes be unaware of warning signals due to various reasons, resulting in inappropriate cooperation or even traffic collision between railway vehicles and non-railway vehicles. This work studies deep learning-based approaches to develop systems for acoustic-based train arrival detection (A-TAD). Firstly, we develop a novel audio dataset of train horns, railway alarms, railway noise, and other urban noises to conduct A-TAD experiments. We then examine the efficiency of handcrafted acoustic features (i.e. MFCC and Mel-spectrogram) in building A-TAD’s audio classifier, the MSNet, which is based on two-dimensional convolutional neural networks (2D-CNN). Next, we propose to apply the attention mechanism and utilize MFCC and spectrogram simultaneously to enhance the classification accuracy, in which the combined use of acoustic features is considered at the input level (with InCom-TADNet), high-level feature level (with FCCom-TADNet), and decision level (with DLCom-TADNet). Our experiments have shown the efficiency of MSNet and attention mechanism as the MSNet trained with the single feature is more performant than the baseline models and applying attention modules results in better accuracies. Also, the combined use of MFCC and spectrogram significantly improve the system’s accuracy and robustness. A-TAD systems can be utilized to extend the safety function of the railway crossing systems, private cars, and self-driving cars, and particularly be useful for hearing-impaired road users.

Effects of urban noise variability on cognitive abilities in indoor spaces: Gender differences

Previous evidence has shown that exposure to urban noise negatively influences some cognitive abilities (i.e. verbal fluency and delayed recall of prose memory) of people in indoor spaces. However, long-standing literature in the cognitive domain has reported that men and women can show different performance on cognitive tasks. Here, we aimed to investigate if and how different patterns of perceived urban noises in indoor environments could affect male and female participants’ cognitive abilities. Ambisonic sound recordings representing scenarios with varying noise patterns (low, medium and high variability) were acquired with an open window at three dwellings in a southern Italian city. As a control condition, the recordings were caught inside a quiet room. While exposed to theses four auditory conditions, participants had to perform cognitive tasks assessing free verbal memory recall, auditory–verbal recognition and working memory. The results show that male and female participants have a different tolerance to noise patterns. Women overperform men on verbal tasks, while the contrary effect emerges with men outperforming women on visuospatial working memory tasks.

Functions of the audio background in the film version of L.N. Tolstoy’s novella “The Kreutzer Sonata” (director M. Schweitzer, composer S. Gubaidulina)

The author of the article analyzes the film “The Kreutzer Sonata” (director M. Schweitzer, composer S. Gubaidulina) and defines the role of audio background consisting of music and sound effects in the development of the concept of the film version of the same-name novella by L.N. Tolstoy. Based on the comparison of the piece of writing and its screen adaptation, the author describes the functions of the audio background and the role of music as a drama factor. The author emphasizes the importance of timbre and sound principles since the sound characteristics help to define the edges of the event line of the story (the past and the present), and the railway and urban noises become a marker outlining the key phrases of the dialogue of Pozdnyshev with his companion. For the film, the role of citations is important, which are used for describing the characters and interpreting them. Citations accompany the images of Liza (classic piano pieces, romance and French song), Pozdyshev (Strauss waltz, Offenbach’s cancan, and a prison song), and Trukhachevsky (P. Satasate’s gypsy songs). Three main characters are united by L. Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata which creates the psychological subtext in representing the relations between Liza, Trukhachevsky and Pozdyshev.  S. Gubaidulina’s music, using the minimum primary musical expressive means, and mostly by timbers characterises the range of Pozdnyshev’s emotions from love to hate and comments the inner dialogue of the character. The audio background in the film fulfils the illustrative, characterizing, subtextual and drama functions. The specific peculiarity of introducing music into the synthetic text is a frequent usage of the intraframe principle determined by both Tolstoy’s prose and the very title of the novel. The author proves that Schweitzer’s “Kreutzer Sonata” is more authentic as compared with other screen versions since it preserves the dialogues and remarks of characters, the unanimity of real events and flashbacks corresponds with the primary source, and the drama of the film is equal to that of the literary text; at the same time, the expression of culmination points is supported by music and sound effects thus helping to understand the idea of the novella.   

Ensemble of handcrafted and deep features for urban sound classification

The urban sound classification has a strong relation with feature extraction. In this paper, we present a compact and effective representation capable of characterizing different urban sounds based on deep and handcrafted features combination. To this end, we propose a small parameter space CNN model to extract deep features that are combined with handcrafted features extracted from audio signals. Then, we apply a feature selection step to reduce feature dimensionality and to investigate handcrafted features that enrich deep features to better discriminate between urban sounds. The feature selection experiment results indicate that associating perceptual, static, and physical features with deep features improves the classification performance and allows a dimension reduction up to 62.32% for the combined descriptors. The proposed descriptors achieve a classification accuracy of 86.2% for the ESC (urban noises) dataset and 96.16% for the UrbanSound8K dataset, outperforming most of the state-of-the-art CNN models for urban sound classification.

A Novel Underground Pipeline Surveillance System Based on Hybrid Acoustic Features

Underground pipeline network suffers severe damages caused by construction machines used in the rapid urbanization development and construction, leading to profound impact to people’s life. An intelligent construction machinery classification (CMC) system thus becomes important to urban security and smart city engineering. Conventional methods are always problematic in one way or another. For instance, the one-dimensional speech features based recognition algorithms are usually less discriminative in the complex urban acoustic environment, and the two-dimensional spectrogram based convolution neural network (CNN) suffers a long model learning time and is less robust to the background noises. To address these deficiencies, a novel CMC system based on new hybrid acoustic features is presented. Two novel acoustic feature extraction methods are developed, where the first explores the concentrations of the Mel-frequency spectrogram (MFS) using the statistics of the binary MFS (SBMS) and the second characterizes the information entropy sequence feature of the binary MFS (IESF) based on the pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN) model. Then, the hybrid features of SBMS/IESF and the Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC)/Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are further studied. A database consisting of 84,900 acoustic samples from 6 typical construction machines, horns of vehicles and other urban noises is recorded for experiment and performance validation. The comparisons with many state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City by Lorraine Plourde

Reviewed by: Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City by Lorraine Plourde Po-Hsien Chu TOKYO LISTENING: SOUND AND SENSE IN A CONTEMPORARY CITY. By Lorraine Plourde. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 220 pp. Paperback, $25. In 1973, Canadian music composer and environmental activist Murray Schafer, in a groundbreaking project named The Vancouver Soundscape, employed the concept of soundscape as a theoretical lens to explore the critical role of auditory experience in the formation of an urban landscape. Schafer's experimental research has become a monumental work for academic scholars and sound designers enthralled by the [End Page 598] interplay between acoustic effect and city landscape. Lorraine Plourde's Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City provides new insights in this field as the author engages in an interdisciplinary study of Tokyo's urban landscape using ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural and performance studies. In the introductory chapter, Plourde succinctly posits that the aim of Tokyo Listening is to investigate "a range of distinct listening cultures that all reveal something about how listeners attune themselves to the sounds and noises of the city" (p. 2). Traditionally the study of sound is often understood as something highly abstract or theoretical; the essence of sound is materially intangible and visually unrecognizable. However, in the twenty-first century, most urban spaces where people work, live, or relax are all filled with different sonic elements designed to be part of the city atmospheres. Therefore, sound as a form of immaterial presence in urban space should not be overlooked as it engenders an embodied mode of sensory experience which constitutes the metropolitan residents' quotidian behaviors and "orients people's movements, affect, labor practices, and consumption" (p. 132). Framing her analysis of listening practices within the context of Tokyo's urban auditory cultures, Plourde meticulously examines four sites of semipublic and public space—experimental music venues, music cafés, white-collar offices, and commercial spaces like department stores and shopping centers—in which a set of orchestrated "music programming" (muzak in Japanese) informs the listeners of their embodied contact with the metropolitan center of Japan. Muzak, translated as "Background Music" (BGM) in English, is precisely the focal point of the author's analysis since it "bring[s] together two different types of listening spaces in the same frame of reference: spaces people go to specifically for the music, and places where the music comes to them" (p. 11, emphasis original). In the first chapter, Plourde discusses how the architectural design of an experimental music venue called Off Site creates a sensory fusion of live music and the quotidian sounds of Tokyo. Situated within a residential neighborhood, Off Site offers independent musicians and composers a space to experiment with sound. The experimental music genre, known as "onkyo" in Japanese refers to an improvised performance of electronic music emphasizing "sound texture, gaps, and silences rather than melody or rhythm" (p. 15). Experimenting with the rupture of music notes and the discontinuation of auditory harmony, the onkyo performance at Off Site constantly distracts the audience as unexpected moments of silence inside the performance venue paradoxically amplify the non-intentional urban sounds leaking into the enclosed space from the outside. The coexistence of instrumental sounds and urban noises (the BGM of [End Page 599] Tokyo) at Off Site blurs the boundary between intentional and non-intentional sounds. The second chapter contextualizes the city's café culture in light with the author's ethnographic research. Plourde conducted fieldwork by visiting various music café shops and interviewing the owners and patrons. Plourde claims the listening culture of Tokyo's music cafés remains understudied because the consumer population is relatively small compared to those who favor chain coffee shops (e.g., Starbucks). Grounded in a nostalgic atmosphere, Tokyo'smusic cafés establish an exquisite mode of listening culture by requiring their patrons to follow a set of rules. For instance, prohibiting a customer from conversing with other people inside the café explicitly constitutes a form of social etiquette governed by the restraint of acoustic volume. This measure of auditory control directs the patron's attention to the ubiquitous analog sounds, non-digital music players, and old-fashioned acoustic devices...

Hamsters in the city: A study on the behaviour of a population of common hamsters (Cricetus cricetus) in urban environment.

Animals in urban environments face challenging situations and have to cope with human activities. This study investigated the ecology and behaviour of a population of European hamsters (Cricetus cricetus) living in the city centre of Vienna (Austria). We recorded the surface activities of 35 hamsters in May 2015. Each focal animal was observed for 15 minutes, and a total of 66 focal samples were analysable. As a prey species in an environment teeming with human activities, we predicted a high level of vigilance by the hamsters. The results show that while animals dedicated a lot of time to vigilance, most of their time was spent foraging. The study also explores whether the frequency of vigilance behaviours differ between males and females. We found that vigilance behaviours were expressed in a different manner by males and females. Finally, we investigated the distribution of the burrows on green spaces depending on proximity to trees and on noise levels. We found a biased distribution of burrows, with a spatial preference for location protected by the vegetation and distant to noise sources. Although burrows were located preferentially under vegetation cover, levels of noise did not determine their positions. Moreover, this species does not respond to disturbances like daily urban noises, probably due to habituation. The common hamster is an endangered species; our results lead to a greater knowledge of its behaviour in a persistent urban population.

Effects of adding natural sounds to urban noises on the perceived loudness of noise and soundscape quality

Introducing pleasant natural sounds to mask urban noises is an important soundscape design strategy to improve acoustic comfort. This study investigates the effects of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between natural sounds (signal) and the target noises (noise) and their temporal characteristics on the perceived loudness of noise (PLN) and overall soundscape quality (OSQ) through a laboratory experiment. Two types of urban noise sources (hydraulic breaker and traffic noises) were set to A-weighted equivalent sound pressure levels (SPL) of 55, 65, and 75 dB and then augmented with two types of natural sounds (birdsong and stream), across a range of SNRs. Each acoustic stimulus was a combination of noise and natural sound at SNRs from −6 to 6 dB. Averaged across all cases, the subjective assessment of PLN showed that augmenting urban noise separately with the two natural sounds reduced the PLN by 17.9%, with no significant differences found between the birdsong and stream sounds. Adding natural sounds increased the OSQ by on average 18.3% across the cases, but their effects gradually decreased as the noise level increased. The OSQ of the birdsong and stream sounds were similar for traffic noise, whereas the stream sound was rated higher than the birdsong for the breaker noise. The results suggest that increasing the dissimilarity in temporal structure between the target noise and natural sounds could enhance the soundscape quality. Appropriate SNRs were explored considering both PLN and OSQ. The results showed that the SNR of −6 dB was desirable when the A-weighted SPL of the noise rose to 75 dB.

Urban noise recognition with convolutional neural network

Urban noise recognition play a vital role in city management and safety operation, especially in the recent smart city engineering. Exiting studies on urban noise recognition are mostly based on conventional acoustic features, such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC), and the shallow structure based classifiers, such as support vector machine (SVM). However, the urban acoustic environment is complicated and changeable. Conventional acoustic representation and recognition methods may be insufficient in characterizing urban noises, and generally suffer from a degraded performance. In this paper, we study the recent deep neural network based urban noise recognition. The log-Mel-spectrogram, namely, the FBank feature is first derived for acoustic representation. Then, the FBank spectrum constructed with a set of FBank feature vectors from multiple acoustic signal frames is fed to a convolutional neural network (CNN) for urban noise recognition. Comprehensive studies on the dimension of FBank spectrums and the parameters in CNN, including the size of learnable kernels, the dropout rate, and the activation function, etc., are presented in the paper. An acoustic database collected in real environment covering 11 most common urban noises with more than 56,000 samples is constructed for model verification and performance evaluation. In addition, the traditional LPCC and MFCC acoustic feature combining with two popular machine learning algorithms, extreme learning machine (ELM) and support vector machine (SVM), and the FBank image feature combining with extreme learning machine (ELM), hierarchical extreme learning machine (H-ELM) and multilayer extreme learning machine (ML-ELM), have also been presented for discussions. Experimental results show that the proposed method generally outperforms conventional shallow structure based classifiers.

Urban noises and earthquakes effects on dynamic slope stability – a case study: Arash-Esfandiar tunnel

Slope stability is one of the main concerns among geotechnical researchers. Many aspects have been studied to examine their effects on slope stability (e.g. soil and slope properties). Besides, the dynamic slope stability analysis has great importance due to the danger of destructive dynamic stresses such as earthquakes, storms. On the other hand, urban areas daily encounter numerous construction projects, which generate unlimited microseismic noises that are usually considered ineffective on the dynamic slope stability. In short-term periods of time, these noises are not able to make impacts on slope stability; however, the long-term effects of the noises have not been studied sufficiently. In this study, firstly, geological and geotechnical investigations were done to obtain the soil types, parameters and characterisations of an excavation located in Tehran. Then, using a microtremor, the noises of the area were recorded for 52 min. In addition, the seismogram records of six earthquakes which had occurred in Tehran were taken. These seven records (the noises and six earthquakes) were separately applied to the geotechnical model and the behaviour of the soil (caused displacements and changes in the factor of safety) was observed. Thereafter, the results were obtained and the effects of the noises were compared with the six earthquakes. Accordingly, the displacements of the noises were considerable in comparison with the earthquakes displacements and the noises would cause the collapse in the slope after about six years. The results confirmed the effectivity of the urban noises and showed the importance of urban noises.

A Detection Method of Earthquake Precursory Anomalies Using the Four-Component Borehole Strainmeter

Strainmeters have been used to detect earthquake precursory anomalies in many countries. An innovated four-component strainmeter with four sensing units set at 45 degrees intervals, named SKZ strainmeter, was developed and used in China. The design, with a few unique features, allows high-sensitivity monitoring of the regime of the crustal strain field, as well as the self-consistencies of the instrument. One of the most difficult problems in the earthquake precursory investigation is to efficiently detect anomalies from large amount of data. Pattern recognition of waveforms is widely used, but it is time-consuming and relies more or less investigator’s experience and decision. In this study, the consistency factors of the paired components were firstly shown to be utilized to detect anomalies possibly related with imminent earthquakes. Here, rather than using the consistency factors, the correlation coefficients of the two orthogonal strain data were used to detect. SKZ strainmeters have been installed at more than ten sites in China, exhibited high efficiency and reliability in precursory monitoring since. Anomalous variations from a few stations during two recent earthquakes in south China were analyzed. During normal stages, diurnal earth tides could be clearly observed with very little urban noises. Though the consistency factors may have near constant bias, their correlation coefficients remain near 1.0, greater than 0.99. During the imminent preparatory stage of earthquake occurrence, non-planar strain may appear and the correlation coefficients drop noticeably. The analysis showed that the correlation coefficient between the two orthogonal components is a useful parameter in post-processing of the strain data to detect precursory anomalies. The resultant resolving power is shown to be some one-order larger compared with previous methods.

Film Chronicle

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) The Dark Corner, directed by Henry Hathaway (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2005, and Netflix) Woman on the Run, directed by Norman Foster (Flicker Alley, 2016, and Amazon Video) Detour, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (Amazon Video) Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur (Warner Archive, 2014, and Amazon Video) The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by Tay Garnett (Warner Brothers, 2012, and Amazon Video) Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012, and Amazon Video) Criss Cross, directed by Robert Siodmak (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2004, and Amazon Video) L. A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson (New Regency, 2015, and Amazon Video) In The Dark Corner (1946), before the camera turns to the private eye and his secretary sharing a cozy table in the High Hat Club, it lingers on the image of a pianist tickling the jazz ivories onstage. Oddly, the image takes the form of a shadow cast against a blank wall. Why a shadow? It is hard to think of any reason for the shot except the director Henry Hathaway’s wish to demonstrate a familiarity with, supply a requisite icon of, the genre he is working in. You know a private eye by his fedora and gat and hard-guy talk; you know a film noir by its shadows, and The Dark Corner is absolutely a film noir. Hathaway’s movie nicely typifies the genre, coming as it does from noir’s richest period, the fifteen or so years after the close of World War II when Hollywood, seemingly anxious about the nuclear arms race, McCarthyism, big-city crime, or the unsettling prospect of new roles for women, translated those anxieties into hundreds of dark dramas. Often aided by émigré cinematographers and set designers who knew a thing or two about dark German Expressionism, the studios devised an instantly recognizable noir look, dramatically deep blacks and glaring whites, the twin effects of low-key, high-contrast lighting—“mystery lighting,” the great Hungarian-born cinematographer John Alton called it in his 1949 book Painting with Light. We also see strongly rhythmical line-ups of shadows, say those cast by the slats of Venetian blinds or the banisters of stairs in run-down boarding houses, and we see women’s hair and the curling smoke from cigarettes, both backlit, both alluring. Light in noir tends to come from sources within the mise-en-scène. These sources viewers in the 1940s quickly learned to read as emblems of a certain type of big-city life, simultaneously mysterious, violent, and cheaply glamorous. Neon signs for nightclubs blink on and off; streetlamps glare in reflection from [End Page 665] puddles on the wet asphalt; that kind of thing. If a door should suddenly open, it admits a stab of white into the blackness, and possibly the flash of gun muzzles, as in that most iconic and influential of noirs, the Hemingway adaptation The Killers, from 1946. To return to The Dark Corner, along with the noir look it features some quintessentially noir plot turns—a chase through busy streets and sudden outbreaks of violence, usually photographed in shadows so as not to offend the censor—and standard noir character types, like a pair of beautiful dames, one who can be trusted and one who can’t (the latter betrays her old husband sexually, then pulls out a gun). Along with these women, the story provides a tough thug, a tougher police lieutenant who drops by to give the private eye a hard time, and above all that private eye himself, Brad Galt, who like many male figures in film noir is damaged goods, having a guilty past to live down and depressive moments to get over. Galt dreads his “dark corner,” the sense that an unjust world is closing in, the better not to give a sucker like him an even break. This dark metaphorical space lends a real depth to all the literally shadowed doorways and nighttime streets we see. Partially countering the darkness, and making Hathaway’s film more varied and interesting, is its soundtrack, an unusually full repertoire of ordinary, undramatic urban noises, the shriek of a child’s...

Timbre analysis from monotone rearranging of the acoustic signal: Application to fountains

Public fountains are an example of a soundmark that is both non musical and pleasing to the ear due to their specific timbre. Standard audio descriptors designed for musical sounds are limited in describing such sounds. A new method is proposed for identifying and classifying fountains sounds as well as surrounding urban noises. The method consists in sorting discrete-time signal samples in a monotonically descending order. Features of the resulting curve are extracted in an attempt to define a timbral evaluation metric. Reference signals including natural water sounds and synthesized pink noise are also analyzed and the results are compared to those of fountain sounds. Outcomes are discussed in the framework of urban soundscape studies, in order to improve acoustical urban planning.

Structural equation modeling of partial and total annoyances due to urban road traffic and aircraft noises

Data of a French in situ socio-acoustic survey were used to model partial annoyance due to urban road traffic noise, partial annoyance due to aircraft noise and total annoyance due to these combined noises. Structural equation modeling carried out on the in situ data showed that long-term noise annoyance depends on noise exposure but also on noise disturbance, dwelling satisfaction, visibility of a main road from the dwelling and noise sensitivity. Both noise exposure and noise sensitivity were introduced as independent variables in structural equation modeling of partial and total noise annoyances. Their contributions to the models highlight the necessity to consider these two variables in annoyance model prediction. Finally, in total noise annoyance models, whereas partial annoyance due to aircraft noise contributes to total noise annoyance as much as partial road traffic annoyance, aircraft noise exposure contributes to total noise annoyance much more than road traffic noise. Several reasons may explai...