The translation was so bad you might even get completely reversed scores for some of these questions.
An interesting topic though.
I've discussed this with two groups of undergrad and masters students recently.
It is likely that legislation will quickly be needed to deal with customised car sounds, because human nature won't permit some people to have ordinary, quiet, functional ones. It will quickly become a race to have the most disturbing sound once there is a market for this technology.
As an environmental issue, noise pollution is the boisterous elephant in the street. Nobody wants to tackle it. Because sound is a secondary faculty it gets pushed under the carpet in discussions. For example new London buses with gas turbo engines cut CO2, but they also reduce the quality of life by keeping people awake at night with their much louder screaming engines.
Helath and safety measures have increased the power output (and perceived loudness by adding more noise and inharmonics) of sirens, so now the vehicles can speed even faster. While they may get there 20 seconds earlier and save a life, 10,000 other people along the route have their peace and concentration shattered. Cumulatively the adverse health issues (hearing damage, stress, sleeplessness) plus the loss of productivity may outweigh any benefits of louder sirens. Yes this is Schopenhauer for the 21st Century, but nothing has changed. You can pump 120 dB of doofcar noise into the street and nobody looks twice, but if you started pumping poisonous gas into the street you'll be thrown in jail. Only one kind of pollution is trendy to decry.
Meanwhile, car manufacturers build ever quieter interiors that are impervious to external noise. So there is a 'war' going on. Drivers want to be cocooned in a private world, while inflicting their 'personality' on the outside. This is a pathological stance.
New technologies might be optical, or radio, that allow emergency vehicles to signal ahead to roadside beacons or dasboard indicators in cars. Satnavs could be modified to prominently indicate nearby emergency vehicles.
Directional demodulation sound could be employed for sirens as only those in front of the vehicle need to hear it is coming.
On Thu, 8 Jul 2010 22:35:34 +0200 András Murányi muranyia@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 9:17 PM, hghoyer mail@hghoyer.de wrote:
Hi,
I would be glad if you participate in my brief survey. It is about sounds in computer games and electric cars ... http://research.hghoyer.de/index.php?sid=71581&lang=en
Sorry, my question has to do only indirectly related to PD. I am happy you are interested, include evaluation of the survey!
Thanks Hans
Interesting stuff. Please let me just drop my 2 cents in: (SPOILER ALERT!)
- Some of the (english language) questions were really hard for to
understand (maybe because i'm not native english either)
- Lot of talk about sound with no sounds! I would have been happy to listen
to different sounds and express my preferences, but deciding on _loose descriptions_ of sounds is much harder for me.
Andras