Supplemental Bird Noises

Why simulate the natural when the natural will do just fine?

(Note: we are testing a new, more regular posting schedule on Monday / Wednesday / Friday with more design critiques and design proposals. Philosophy and theology will still be present as before.)

The previous week, I was at an academic computer science conference in Australia. (Contrary to the past few weeks, travel to conferences are not a common occurence in my life.) The conference was hosted in a newly designed building on the university's campus.

Before I start to criticize part of its design, I want to mention a particularly neat thing about this building - the use of "mass timber." Instead of steel and concrete for the structural elements, there were massive beams of wood that had been glued together. This meant that the building's support structure could be visible without being entirely soulless and industrial. Neat!

There was another, smaller design element that stuck out to me and some others at the conference. At the top of the alcove where there was coffee and snacks, there was a speaker that played bird sounds on loop. A good and fitting link to the rest of the created world, right?

Not so much. The first indication that it wasn't a good design was that the sounds were distracting. It seems to me that natural sounds often have this quality that they are easy to tune out - they are on the periphery. This is one of the qualities Marc Weiser and coworkers noticed when they were describing calm computing. For the second day of the conference, the local professor requested the building staff to turn the audio off. I was honestly surprised this was possible! The building wasn't this faceless monolith - it was adaptable. The speaker ended up being the root of some comments and not much more.

However, the question remains why this design was proposed and approved. I wish I didn't have to speculate, but usually the reasons for design decisions like these are not easily available. The simplest explanation is that it was a simple oversight; this is possible but doesn't say much about design philosophy. Another simple explanation is that my colleagues and I don't represent the target audience - I could be more distractable than others, and on the whole, perhaps the sounds add to the ambience rather than detract. However, I have a hunch that there was a desire to make that design element noticable. How can you demonstrate to a unviersity donor that you're taking ecology seriously unless you have bird sounds pumped in in a way that you can't miss it?

It would have been better to have more subtle bird sounds, but even still, I can't think of a legitimate reason to have recorded bird sounds in a building. Is it supposed to make you feel closer to nature? If so, that design is self-contradictory - you’re only feeling closer to nature through its actual removal.

Perhaps I could stretch and suppose that the designer knows this, and is making some artistic statement about what the place sounded like before that building was put in or before that campus was built. Perhaps the argument is that the original “nature” should be maintained in some form. Even in this case, I can’t see the argument stand. If what we tore down needs a audio recording of what it was like previously in memoriam, we shouldn’t have torn it down at all. The only things worth building are things that glorify God; if the building does not glorify God as a place for learning, no amount of electronic birdsong can cover that fundamental mistake.

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