12/03/2019 — Mock Review
Avery Hall is a world in and of itself, filled with a variety of environments that seek to help students to focus and learn. The collection of spaces that compose Avery Hall vary in many ways, including size, lighting, temperature, and sound. For this project, I have been studying how the presence of sound in a vacant space can effect an occupant’s comfort and perception of safety in that space.
Recent research by University of Michigan marketing professor Aradhna Krishna has shown that when ambient sound is played in vacant public space, individuals have an increased perception of safety.
“We provide some real-world evidence that appropriately chosen ambient sounds introduced in public spaces perceived to be dangerous can increase human comfort and feelings of safety,” Krishna said. “Bird songs and human vocal sounds give a sense of social presence and seem to be the most effective to use. They even lead to more positive consumer responses and overall higher satisfaction with these places.”
For an example of how sound can change the mood of a setting:
I decided to test how ambient sound may make students more likely to occupy space that would otherwise be vacant. For my test environments, I have chosen the basement of Avery Hall and Avery 505. Avery’s basement is filled with activity during the day when Brownie’s Cafe is open, but is often vacant late at night. Avery 505 serves as a classroom by day, but by night it turns into an auxiliary work space for Columbia students building models and preparing for group presentations. My goal was to play a variety of sounds and to see how each would effect students likelihood to occupy Avery’s Basement and Avery 505 at night.
In an earlier iteration of this project, I placed a D-Link DCS-8010LH camera in Avery’s Basement and utilized its motion detection capability to trigger an Amazon Echo Dot to play sound when no motion was detected for a period of 5 minutes.
The Amazon Alexa application is compatible with D-Link products and can be linked with a D-Link camera to perform “routines” when motion, or a lack thereof, is detected by the camera. I have set separate routines to test the reaction occupants may have to two separate types of sounds.
The first routine was set to trigger the Amazon Echo Dot to play white noise for 20 minutes if the D-Link camera went longer than 5 minutes without detecting motion. This time restriction was set to more accurately test if occupants are more prone to leave the room once the music stopped.
The second routine was essentially the same, but played classical music instead of white noise.
While I initially thought that measuring how playing these noises in these spaces would accurately tell me how they were effecting occupants’ experiences, I quickly found this to be a troublesome method of quantifying my installation’s success. The amount of traffic through the space didn’t really change, and measuring occupancy counts alone wasn’t enough to inform as to how users were perceiving their experience of this installation. In order to receive feedback from users, I placed surveys next to the installation. Unfortunately, few people filled out the surveys, so I worked to develop a system that would catch their attention.
In order to gain as many responses as possible to help improve my research data, I needed to create a better method for collecting post occupant surveys t For this purpose, I have created this new occupant survey box. This new survey box houses a Philips Hue motion activated light inside of it, creating a more intriguing installation that will hopefully draw in more users. It also houses the Amazon Echo Dot, a feature that will help deter theft of the device.
This new survey box has allowed me to receive significantly more data, and has thus helped me to better understand how occupants perceive different sounds that are playing in the space, thus helping me to ‘tune’ the soundscape for their experience.
Below is a diagram showing how a user now typically encounters my installation.
