Myung-Bak. To flesh it out, water is pumped in seven miles from
another river and recirculated. Planted trees and flowering shrubs in
the stream’s canyon now attract insects and birds. The so-called
“daylighting” of canals is one way for cities to make some nature
visible again. In Seoul, though, one of its main purposes was to create
a new soundscape to compete with the existing one of heavy traffic in
the middle of the central business district.
At the entrance, a sleek waterfall drops down a generous story
from street level, creating a pleasant rushing sound. At the bottom, I
met Hong Jooyoung, a doctoral candidate in architectural acoustics
from Hanyang University who specializes in using water sounds to
obscure traffic noise. We walked along a good part of the three-mile-
long watercourse, dodging other walkers, joggers and picnickers.
Some young women were standing around looking at pigeons on the
bank. It was a good place to hang out. Among its many benefits, the
path here is six degrees cooler than the roadway above in the height of
summer. Only about 20 feet wide, the stream often flows over rocks
and through reeds. It literally burbles and whooshes, its soothing
sounds amplified by the stone walls lining the sunken ribbon of water
and path. Hong explained to me that with these new water features,
it’s the perception of traffic noise that changes. You can still hear the
noise, but you don’t notice it anymore. The traffic here is loud, above
65 decibels, but so is the water. “The creek design maximizes the
sound,” he said. “People don’t think of it as noisy because it’s a nice
noise. They rate this kind of water sound as most favorable.”
I was reminded of something the National Park Service’s Kurt
Fristrup had said, that unless we learn to make cities sound better, we
stand at risk of losing the range of this precious sense. He calls our
tendency to wear earbuds during all hours of the day “learned
deafness.” We are tuning out the real world in favor of our own
personal soundscapes. The cost is we forget how to listen. And we
lose an opportunity for true mental restoration.