We are drowning in a flood of sound engineered to make us want things.
I grew up in the country, in open fields where cicadas sang and the Australian air moved like a slow exhale, and those natural ambient sounds taught me what listening felt like.
Now, whenever the city frays my edges, I run to the country for that sonic medicine, because those fields are where my nervous system remembers how to unclench.
Sound as Infrastructure, Not Ornament
If you think this is a quaint spiritual thesis disconnected from design and technology, think again.
Sound shapes our physiology, our feelings and our social architecture. Sonic design is not ornamentation, it is infrastructure.
The choices we make about how places sound, from homes and parks to transit hubs and schools, will decide whether the future is human or inhabited by exhausted, overstimulated half people.
Living Inside Sound: A Neurodivergent Perspective
I live inside sound. Music is not merely my work, it is how I breathe.
I am the kind of person who dissolves and reforms inside a chord progression; I know how a single frequency can make a room surrender or revolt.
I am also someone who often gets overwhelmed by different senses, lights too bright, textures too loud, conversations layered like bad wallpaper.
I check almost every box on the autistic list, and I do not say that for drama, I say it to stake a claim.
My nervous system is an instrument tuned to environmental detail, and that wiring gives me a clearer map of why intentional sonic design is not a luxury but survival.
Sonic Design as Public Health and Moral Technology
Most people still think of audio as entertainment, the soundtrack to a streaming binge or background for a social feed. That view is charmingly limited.
Sonic design is a public health tool, a pedagogy and a moral technology that can either erode or cultivate inner life.
Consider the sound of a city. Picture two neighborhoods, one where traffic drones, sirens and perpetual construction make a hard jagged audio geometry, and another where thoughtful soundscapes, corridors of birdsong, soft water features and materials that absorb and diffuse noise create gradients of calm.
Which one supports sleep, lowers cortisol and fosters neighborly conversation?
Which one lets children learn to read aloud without their voices being smothered by HVAC hum?
When you live through the difference, it stops being theoretical and becomes urgent.
Designing for Attention, Not Extraction
We can design for attention not for extraction.
Sound can create thresholds, entryways that signal transition from public rush to private calm, plazas that invite strangers to sit and rest rather than sprint past, classrooms where acoustics are tuned so whispered curiosity becomes audible.
Imagine trains that arrive with a brief enveloping harmonic that signals a shift into slower time, or clinics whose waiting rooms use warm low frequencies to attenuate anxiety.
This is not mysticism, it is applied empathy. It is the same muscle we use when we dim a lamp for a loved one in pain or choose a gentle word instead of a razor reply.
Immersive Audio and the Architecture of Presence
If you care about the future of communal life you should be wildly into immersive audio.
I say that as someone who believes technology can either anaesthetize us or awaken us.
Sony 360 Reality Audio and other spatial platforms do not just place sound differently in your ears, they give us a new grammar for presence in a world split between rooms and screens.
Spatial audio lets sound behave like architecture. A choir can hover above you, a brook can meander between two benches, a marketplace can disperse separate conversations into distinct navigable layers.
That matters because our lives are hybrid, part lived in rooms and part lived inside mediated spaces.
Spatial audio brings mediation closer to human scale, it restores dimensional nuance and makes it possible for mediated experiences to feel embodied and to hold emotional subtleties without flattening them into a single attention hungry stream.
From Art Installations to Civic Infrastructure
But immersive audio potential is not merely for flashy art installations or boutique experiences, it is for therapy, public health, education and civic spaces.
Envision a hospital that uses spatialized sound to guide patients calmly through corridors aligning sonic cues with wayfinding and reducing stress.
Picture public parks where soundscapes shift with the time of day, energetic textures in the morning and subdued contemplative textures at dusk that invite conversation and reflection.
Think of classrooms where spatialized speech and localized sound sources reduce auditory clutter for children who otherwise drown in background noise.
Sony demos show what precision can do, and the ethical step is to democratize these tools so communities can tune their own soundscapes instead of having them tuned by market forces.
Advertising and the Weaponization of Sound
Let us be blunt. Advertising is the largest greediest sonic force on the planet. It wants attention and it will buy it literally.
Ads are designed to create emotional urgencies that did not exist before, they are the acoustical equivalent of a tap on the shoulder that never stops.
The result is a public realm saturated with pre manufactured desire. We must be skeptical of a future in which corporations own not only the billboards and feeds but the very frequencies that define our sense of place.
Imagine malls that curate sonic environments engineered to manipulate purchasing behavior, or transit systems that layer in subliminal cues to nudge riders toward certain apps.
This is not paranoia, it is capitalism doing what it does best, monetizing attention.
Quiet as a Political and Civic Act
This is where intentional design becomes a radical decentered act.
When community groups, urban planners and artists collaborate to create sound strategies for neighborhoods, they reclaim listening from market designs.
Quiet spaces are political. Intentionally designed acoustic sanctuaries, libraries, gardens and transit free corridors, are acts of resistance against commodified attention.
Quiet does not equal death. Silence is not the goal, listening is.
Quiet is the canvas upon which meaningful sonic experiences can be painted.
A quiet space is an intentional environment where sound is chosen rather than inflicted.
Ritual, Sound, and the Reweaving of Social Fabric
We are not merely building acoustic aesthetics, we are crafting rituals.
Rituals are sonic by nature, chants, calls to prayer and lullabies.
Modernity stripped many communities of shared rituals and replaced them with transactional sounds, payment confirmations and notification pings.
Reviving ritualistic sonic practice in public life, communal tones that mark transitions or moments of collective pause, can reweave social fabric.
Sensory Overload as Design Data
This is personal for me. When multiple senses assault me, fluorescent lights humming, a dozen conversations overlapping, a low mechanical thrum I cannot locate, I shut down.
My brain compresses into survival mode, focus narrows to a single point, memory becomes brittle and joy leaks out. This is not weakness, it is data.
Sensory Justice and Civil Dignity
If our public spaces can be designed so someone like me can exist without being taxed by basic existence, they will be better for everyone.
Honoring sensitivities in others is not coddling, it is justice.
Sensory friendly spaces allow children to learn, elders to rest and caregivers to breathe.
This is a matter of civil dignity as much as design.
Beauty as an Invitation to Care
Beauty matters because beauty invites care. Sonic aesthetics are not frivolous.
A beautifully crafted soundscape asks something subtle of its users, slow down.
When a space sounds cared for people treat it differently.
Sound design and environmental design are siblings not strangers.
Technology as Steward, Not Zookeeper
Technology must be a steward not a zookeeper. Tools like Sony 360 are gorgeous and powerful, but they must be wielded with ethics.
The question is not just whether we can render a cathedral choir with spatial fidelity but whether we should use that fidelity to replace a community choir.
Concrete, Human-Centered Design Actions
If you are waiting for a laundry list of techno utopian fixes here is a human set of concrete moves.
Start with listening tours, go into neighborhoods, sit in cafes, wait at bus stops and ask people what they need.
Sonic Design and Moral Imagination
There is a moral imagination embedded in sonic design.
To design well is to imagine people at their most ordinary, waking up, walking to work, sitting with grief, learning to read, falling in love and mourning.
Choosing Between Two Sonic Futures
The sonic futures on offer are stark. One future is a marketplace where attention is bought and sold.
The other future is a commons where sound is curated to sustain life.
I am irreverent because reverence for the status quo would be cowardice.
I want new gods, rituals of pause and presence, neighborhoods that sound and feel like care.
Sound, Dignity, and the Social Good
This is not merely about comfort, it is about dignity.
About reclaiming listening from advertising and turning it into civic accompaniment.
A Benediction for a Quieter Future
If we steward sound instead of letting it be weaponized the future will be quieter in the best possible way.
Quieter not as erasure but as space for the voices we actually want to hear.
Gem Auset
Grammy nominated music producer
www.gemauset.com
