It's time to start designing for our ears. Architects and designers tend to focus exclusively on these. They use these to design with and they design for them, which is why we end up sitting in restaurants that look like this — (loud crowd noise) — and sound like this, shouting from a foot away to try and be heard by our dinner companion, or why we get on airplanes -- (flight attendant announcements) -- which cost 200 million pounds, with somebody talking through an old-fashioned telephone handset on a cheap stereo system, making us jump out of our skins.
是时候为我们的听觉感官设计了。 建筑师和设计师常常只注重 某些方面(视觉效果)。 他们从视觉的角度来审视设计,以提升视觉感官作为设计目标。 这解释了为什麽餐厅看起来是这样, 但听起来却是这样 (嘈杂声); 我们需要大声说话 才能让共进晚餐的朋友听见。 也解释了我们坐在在造价2亿元的飞机上 (空服员广播声) 却要听到年久失修的传声筒中 发出廉价立体声系统的噪音。 这感觉绝不会是让人舒心的。
We're designing environments that make us crazy. (Laughter) And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.
正是我们自己设计的环境,在把我们自己逼疯(笑声)。 不只我们的生活素质受影响, 我们的健康, 社会行为, 以至生产力亦会下降。
How does this work? Well, two ways. First of all, ambience. I have a whole TEDTalk about this. Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviorally all the time. The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it. There's a second way though, as well. That's interference. Communication requires sending and receiving, and I have another whole TEDTalk about the importance of conscious listening, but I can send as well as I like, and you can be brilliant conscious listeners. If the space I'm sending it in is not effective, that communication can't happen.
这是怎么发生的? 有两个原因。 第一是周遭声音对我们的影响。我曾就此问题做过一个TED讲演。 声音无时无刻都在影响 我们的生理、心理、认知力和行为。 我们无时无刻不受四周声音的影响, 即便我们没有意识到它们的存在。 另一个原因是干扰。 沟通意味着发送和接收。 我有另一个完整的TED讲演介绍了 有意识地聆听的重要性。 可是,即便我能把讯息完整地发出, 你也是位卓越的有意识倾听者, 若我们身处的空间不理想 便无法成功沟通。
Spaces tend to include noise and acoustics. A room like this has acoustics, this one very good acoustics. Many rooms are not so good. Let me give you some examples from a couple of areas which I think we all care about: health and education. (Hospital noises) When I was visiting my terminally ill father in a hospital, I was asking myself, how does anybody get well in a place that sounds like this? Hospital sound is getting worse all the time. Noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years, and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there. I think we would like for dispensing errors to be zero, wouldn't we? And yet, as noise levels go up, so do the errors in dispensing made by the staff in hospitals. Most of all, though, it affects the patients, and that could be you, it could be me. Sleep is absolutely crucial for recovery. It's when we regenerate, when we rebuild ourselves, and with threatening noise like this going on, your body, even if you are able to sleep, your body is telling you, "I'm under threat. This is dangerous." And the quality of sleep is degraded, and so is our recovery. There are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care. This is an area I intend to take on this year.
空间包括噪音及传声效果。 像这样的房间有很好的传声效果, 很多的房间却没有这么好。 我来举两个领域的例子, 是两个大家都关注的领域: 健康和教育。 (医院的嘈音) 当我到医院探望我病危的父亲时, 我就在问自己一个问题: 谁能在这样的环境康复起来呢? 医院正在变得愈来愈嘈杂, 其噪音水平在过去数年翻番增长, 这不仅影响了病人, 也影响了在医院工作的人。 我们都希望把配方差错降至零, 对吧? 但随着噪音水平的上升, 医院员工的配方差错亦随之增长。 而这一切,都将首先影响到病人, 然后就可能是你,也可能是我。 睡眠质量对康复的过程有着重要的作用。 通过睡眠,我们的身体重建自身、得到康复。 然而,在不断的噪音威胁下, 即使你能入睡, 你的身体也会告诉你: 「我受到了威胁。这儿有危险。」 睡眠素质和康复速度都会因此下降。 针对听觉感官进行设计 会对我们的健康带来巨大的好处。 这是我今年打算研究的一个领域。
Education. When I see a classroom that looks like this, can you imagine how this sounds? I am forced to ask myself a question. ("Do architects have ears?") (Laughter) Now, that's a little unfair. Some of my best friends are architects. (Laughter) And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings. Here's a case in point. This is a 32-million-pound flagship academy school which was built quite recently in the U.K. and designed by one of Britain's top architects. Unfortunately, it was designed like a corporate headquarters, with a vast central atrium and classrooms leading off it with no back walls at all. The children couldn't hear their teachers. They had to go back in and spend 600,000 pounds putting the walls in. Let's stop this madness of open plan classrooms right now, please.
再看看教育。 当看到像这样的教室, 你认为上课听起来会怎样呢? 我忍不住问自己一个问题: 「建筑师有耳朵吗?」 (笑声) 当然,这有点不公平,我有一些挚友就是建筑师。 他们显然有耳朵, 但他们在设计时, 似乎忘记了用他们的耳朵。 这里有个更具体的例子。 这是耗资3200万镑的旗舰学校, 它刚在英国落成, 是由一位英国顶级建筑师来设计的。 不幸地是, 学校设计得像个企业总部, 有一个大型中庭, 所有的教室都背向中庭,而且没有背墙。 孩子们听不清老师讲课, 因此他们要另花60万镑建造背墙。 请停止建造开放式教室这种疯狂念头吧! 立刻!拜託!
It's not just these modern buildings which suffer. Old-fashioned classrooms suffer too. A study in Florida just a few years ago found that if you're sitting where this photograph was taken in the classroom, row four, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent. Children are losing one word in two. Now that doesn't mean they only get half their education, but it does mean they have to work very hard to join the dots and understand what's going on.
不只新派设计有这方面的问题, 旧式教室也不能幸免。 几年前在佛罗里达州的一项研究指出, 坐在图中教室的第四排, 语音清晰度只有 50%。 孩子每两个字就会漏听一个, 当然,这并不是说他们只接受了一半的教育, 但是,他们要更加努力地去听讲 才能明白内容。
This is affected massively by reverberation time, how reverberant a room is. In a classroom with a reverberation time of 1.2 seconds, which is pretty common, this is what it sounds like.
这种现象主要是受回音时间的影响, 即房间有多大的回音效果。 在一间回音时间长达1.2秒的教室, (这是很常见的),身处其中听起来是这样:
(Inaudible echoing voice)
(模煳的回音声)
Not so good, is it? If you take that 1.2 seconds down to 0.4 seconds by installing acoustic treatments, sound absorbing materials and so forth, this is what you get.
听不清,对吧? 通过添置一些声学处理设备和声音吸收材质, 我们就能将回音时长从1.2秒降至0.4秒, 而这时候的音响效果是这样的:
Voice: In language, infinitely many words can be written with a small set of letters. In arithmetic, infinitely many numbers can be composed from just a few digits with the help of the simple zero.
(背景声音)在语言里,一小组字母可以构造出 无穷多的单词。而在算术学中, 几个数字,再加上0, 也可以组合成无穷多的数。
Julian Treasure: What a difference. Now that education you would receive, and thanks to the British acoustician Adrian James for those simulations. The signal was the same, the background noise was the same. All that changed was the acoustics of the classroom in those two examples.
Julian Treasure:区别太大了! 这才是有质量的教育! 刚才的模拟实验是 由英国声学家Adrian James提供的。 两个试验中,信号和背景杂音都没变; 变化的只是 教室的传声效果。
If education can be likened to watering a garden, which is a fair metaphor, sadly, much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers, especially for some groups, for example, those with hearing impairment. Now that's not just deaf children. That could be any child who's got a cold, glue ear, an ear infection, even hay fever. On a given day, one in eight children fall into that group, on any given day. Then you have children for whom English is a second language, or whatever they're being taught in is a second language. In the U.K., that's more than 10 percent of the school population. And finally, after Susan Cain's wonderful TEDTalk in February, we know that introverts find it very difficult to relate when they're in a noisy environment doing group work. Add those up. That is a lot of children who are not receiving their education properly.
如把教育比喻为在花园浇水, 这是合理的比喻。遗憾地是, 大部分水在未落在花朵前已蒸发。 特别对某些组别来说, 例如: 听力受损的人 (这不只包括失聪者, 也包括那些患感冒、 胶耳、耳道感染, 甚至花粉热的孩子)。 每一天,八个孩子中便有一个 属于这个人群。 还有英语为第二语言的孩子, 或任何以第二语言学习的孩子。 在英国,他们占所有学生中的比例超过10%。 还有, 感谢Susan Cain在二月的TED讲演, 我们得以了解知道性格内向的人 在嘈杂环境下,很难做好团体工作。 这说明很多孩子 正在不理想的情况下接受教育。
It's not just the children who are affected, though. (Noisy conversation) This study in Germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels. I have to really raise my voice to talk over 65 decibels of sound, and teachers are not just raising their voices. This chart maps the teacher's heart rate against the noise level. Noise goes up, heart rate goes up. That is not good for you. In fact, 65 decibels is the very level at which this big survey of all the evidence on noise and health found that, that is the threshold for the danger of myocardial infarction. To you and me, that's a heart attack. It may not be pushing the boat out too far to suggest that many teachers are losing significant life expectancy by teaching in environments like that day after day.
然而受影响的不单是孩子。 (嘈杂声)德国的一项研究指出, 教室里的平均噪音水平是65分贝。 在这样的环境下,我需要要很大声才让你们听见我说话。 老师们不仅提高了音量。 这图表显示教师的心率 与噪音水平的关系。 随着噪音水平的上升,心率也随着上升。 这对身体不是好消息。 事实上,这项关于噪音与健康的调查显示 65分贝正是 可能引致心肌梗塞(即心脏病) 的分贝临界值。 教师每天在这种环境下授课, 寿命期望因而大大缩短, 这说法可没有夸张。
What does it cost to treat a classroom down to that 0.4-second reverberation time? Two and a half thousand pounds. And the Essex study which has just been done in the U.K., which incidentally showed that when you do this, you do not just make a room that's suitable for hearing-impaired children, you make a room where behavior improves, and results improve significantly, this found that sending a child out of area to a school that does have such a room, if you don't have one, costs 90,000 pounds a year. I think the economics are pretty clear on this.
把教室的回响时间降至0.4秒 成本是多少? 2,500镑。 刚在英国埃塞克斯完成的研究表明, 把回响时间降至0.4秒 不但让有听力障碍的孩子 听得清晰, 学童的行为和成绩亦明显进步。 如你的区域的学校没有这种教室, 孩子须跨区上学, 每年开支是90,000镑。 从经济角度看,潜在的收益是很明显的吧。
I'm glad that debate is happening on this. I just moderated a major conference in London a few weeks ago called Sound Education, which brought together top acousticians, government people, teachers, and so forth. We're at last starting to debate this issue, and the benefits that are available for designing for the ears in education, unbelievable. Out of that conference, incidentally, also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they're having to work at home, for example, in a noisy kitchen. And that's free out of that conference.
我很高兴这引起了广泛的关注和讨论。 数星期前我在伦敦主持了一个会议, 主题为「声音教育」。 会议集合顶尖的声学家、 政府人员和老师等等。 讨论终于开始触及在教学环境中 针对听觉进行设计, 它的益处是惊人的。 而在会议之外, 一款用以协助那些需要在家庭嘈杂环境中(例如厨房) 学习的孩子们的软件 也问世了。 这款软件是免费的。
Let's broaden the perspective a little bit and look at cities. We have urban planners. Where are the urban sound planners? I don't know of one in the world, and the opportunity is there to transform our experience in our cities. The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of Europe's population is having its sleep degraded by noise in cities. We can do better than that.
再看另一个领域: 城市。 我们有城市规划者。 那城市声音规划者呢? 我从未遇到过一个。 他们能让城市生活更美好。 世界卫生组织估计 城市噪音影响1/4欧洲人的睡眠质量。 而这一切都是可以改善的。
And in our offices, we spend a lot of time at work. Where are the office sound planners? People who say, don't sit that team next to this team, because they like noise and they need quiet. Or who say, don't spend all your budget on a huge screen in the conference room, and then place one tiny microphone in the middle of a table for 30 people. (Laughter) If you can hear me, you can understand me without seeing me. If you can see me without hearing me, that does not work. So office sound is a huge area, and incidentally, noise in offices has been shown to make people less helpful, less enjoy their teamwork, and less productive at work.
再谈办公室,我们花很多时间在工作上。 那办公室声音设计师呢? 有些人说,别把这两组人放在一起, 因为一组喧闹,一组爱静。 有人说,别花太多钱 在会议室的屏幕上, 然后在30人的大桌中央 放一个微型麦克风。(笑声) 如你听见我,不须看到我 也会明白我。如你只看到我却听不清我, 这是不奏效的。 所以办公室声效是个大领域, 而嘈杂的工作环境令人 变得冷漠和难以享受团队工作, 生产力也会随之下降。
Finally, we have homes. We use interior designers. Where are the interior sound designers? Hey, let's all be interior sound designers, take on listening to our rooms and designing sound that's effective and appropriate.
最后,再谈家居环境。我们有室内设计师, 那室内声音设计师呢? 我们全都可以做室内声音设计师呀! 开始听听我们的房间, 设计有效和适当的声响。
My friend Richard Mazuch, an architect in London, coined the phrase "invisible architecture." I love that phrase. It's about designing, not appearance, but experience, so that we have spaces that sound as good as they look, that are fit for purpose, that improve our quality of life, our health and well being, our social behavior and our productivity.
我的朋友Richard Mazuch,在伦敦当建筑师, 提出了一个名词叫做「看不到的建筑」。 我喜欢这词语。 意思是为感官设计,而非外表。 让我们的空间听起来跟看起来一样好, 以满足我们对于生活的需求,改善生活素质、 健康水平、社交行为, 以及生产力。
It's time to start designing for the ears. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
是时候为听觉感官而设计了! 多谢 (掌声) (掌声) 多谢 (掌声)