Stress reduction in noisy environments can be considered a key strategic point in re-qualifying and development of public spaces.
Our proprietary technology dedicated to environmental noise/sound masking, WhyNoise, is a real time generative-music application, controlled by a proprietary noise-masking algorithm and based on environmental spectral and acoustic analysis.
Starting up from a scientific knowledge of western music and the overall industrial music and sound editing culture and sociology,
we at MUSST are conscious that controlling and finally changing daily sound climates will be a real and profound improvement of people's life quality in urban spaces, indoor and outdoor.
In our current times ecology strategies, attention on sound pollution is far from being on. We talk about it with a generic and resigned attitude, though there are plenty of methodologies to describe and address the problem.
At the same time, there aren't standard definitions and practices able to help architects, urbanists, communities and individuals to clarify the issue. Consequently environmental sound and acoustics are themes that professionals and individuals have to manage by themselves, depending on their proper sensitivity.
It's clear enough that proposing a technology able to renew personal or community sound climates, would drastically transform the comprehension and the perception of the importance of sound and acoustic quality spaces in human habitats. At the same time, this enables us to define a new systematic necessity and address a concrete response.
On the sonic side, there are already existing industrial solutions tending to reduce the annoyance in indoor environments, especially in open plan work spaces; their re-action operates in accordance to the acoustic overall climate using counter noise – pink noise clusters - without any specific sound climate analysis and without taking into account the overall increased anthropic disturbance.
On the market side, the noise masking field started to be investigated since after the Second World War, mainly focusing on masking voice intelligibility in working spaces. The most known is built around the concept that generating "pink noise" at a certain level helps to reduce the direct perception of noisy environments and aims at covering disturbing sounds derived by specific sound sources; in the case of open plan offices for example, the existing solution improves the privacy between operators and office workers.
There are many theories on how to improve the effect of this approach on the acoustical side, and many companies focus their efforts to improve the sound coverage over the environment. There are some other approaches proposing the combination of pink noise generation and its adaptation to the overall noisescape SPL. But also in this case, even if it's a more performing solution, the result is poor in terms of sound climate for intellectual cognition and distraction and still has health implications to be monitored and scientifically evaluated.
There are other segments of the market covering the necessity to reduce sound pollution in urban areas which causes sleep difficulties. These kind of gadgets are small objects which work with a similar approach to traditional noise masking approaches. First of all these gadgets have a poor database of sounds and lack a real study on the musical relationship between noise and perception, between complex music and psychoacoustic dimensional features, as how the brain is attracted by certain information and consequently less distracted by the noise; they also lack the intelligence in sound diffusion and real time adaptive sound generation.
The amount of investigation fields to be activated has a direct correspondence with the cognitive and sociological pertinency we aim to achieve.