Designing with Sound

Chapter 2. Subtractive Sound Design for Products

VEHICLES, BLENDERS, AND HAIR dryers live alongside us in our environments, but they are not always quiet. It’s difficult to have a conversation over the sound of a food processor, and an early-morning blow-dry can wake up a housemate. A cheap air conditioning unit or washing machine can also interrupt sleep.

Quiet products have a distinct market advantage. They may be more expensive, and require more research to build, but they are a step forward to products that nonintrusively live alongside us.

This chapter covers how we can learn to make quieter mechanical products, including insights from the automotive industry, the business that has spent the most time and money on “calming down” sound design. Even if you aren’t in charge of building a mechanical product, this chapter can help widen your perspective on how much design goes into physical objects with moving parts.

In his 1977 book The Tuning of the World (McClelland and Stewart), musician and composer R. Murray Schafer uses the phrase “the flat line sound” to describe the sonic outcome of the Industrial Revolution. The machines that populate the industrialized world, he explains, produce low-information, high-redundancy sounds, and these have largely defined our sonic environment ever since the dawn of industrialization. “In all earlier societies the majority of sounds were discreet and interrupted,” he explains, “while today a large portion—perhaps the majority—are continuous.” ...