State of the art on the topic

Abstract

Everyone is plugged into an intangible world made of sounds, characterised by communicative and uncommunicative, pleasing and unpleasing, useful and sometimes useless sound stimuli, theorised in the 60s by the Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer as “soundscape”. The soundscape is composed of sounds with very different aims: feedback sounds, mechanical sounds, digital sounds, etc. The ever-increasing interest in the soundscape is proven by the latest studies on sounds and noise in different living contexts, carried out by international research groups all over the world: in workspaces, for example, environmental sounds, and especially continuous sounds, seem to affect employee cognitive performances, stress levels, results achieved and overall wellbeing. Nevertheless, despite the main focus having been on continuous sounds such as traffic noise, ventilation plant noise, chatting, etc., for several years, nowadays research is investigating the importance of discontinuous sounds, i.e. everyday object sounds. This introductory chapter intends to outline the state of the art on the most recent researches into sound in design, from national and international conferences to international research projects, to shows and exhibitions and to business. The opportunity of designing the sounds produced by everyday objects and generating a better soundscape in which we all live, will be the main goal analysed in this introductory chapter. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach of investigation into the new frontiers of sound in design is disclosed here.