"LA is loud. Cars roar, helicopters buzz, waves crash and (occasionally) subways rumble. Instead of muffling the noise out, Alex Braidwood decided to tune in.

Video by Mae Ryan
Music: Revolving Record Loop by Matthew Aguilez"

"Information is ineffectual; news of all sorts is noise. Focus, attention, discretion: these are radical."

John Holt: "Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. The include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about."<br />
<br />
…People ask me who inspires me…often stumps me because I have been inspired in my work by stuff that people make… [bunch of examples]…the people who make these things are my leaders. Most of the time I don’t know their names. Sometimes I’m lucky & do.<br />
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So, to hell with all that noise. It’s just a big mass of envy, chatter & FOMO. Let’s get excited & make things."

"What do lollipops have to do with keeping the peace? Surprisingly, more than a little. A recent initiative by a city council in the city of Victoria in British Columbia offered free lollipops to drunken revelers leaving bars to cut down on noise and violence after a night out. Councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe explained that the treats make it hard for inebriated partiers to be too loud, and that they minimize dialogue that could lead to brawls. More practically speaking, they also regulate blood sugar and, like pacifiers, have a calming effect.<br />
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While there’s no hard evidence that the lollipops worked, councillor Thornton-Joe says that it seemed to be so effective that the city is considering making it a permanent program. It’s a charming idea – that something so childlike and innocent could disarm a rowdy bunch. And it makes for a joyful image, to imagine adults appeased by candies on sticks…"

"TenderNoise (TN) is an applied acoustic ecology project that invites a large audience ranging from urban planners to government officials, from local residents to global design technologists to consider sound as a key proxy for urban activity, with all of its positive and negative ramifications.<br />
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TN collects, maps and layers noise data across Tenderloin, San Francisco, exploring the aural quality of streets via frequently-logged historical decibel (dBA) levels over a few days period.<br />
<br />
TN has been developed as part of the CityCentered Festival organized by GAFFTA in June 2010. The project is the outcome of many individuals who are employed at various organizations and who have collaborated on a pro-bono basis. Three key organizations involved are Stamen Design, Movity.com and Arup:"

"Years ago, when I was a teacher and coach, I’d often finish my early-morning workouts on the basketball court. It was a simple routine of taking a foul shot, running a sprint, taking another foul shot, and so on and so forth.<br />
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I made the kids do it because they were going to be tired when they shot their throws in a game. Good practice replicates game conditions.<br />
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But I did it in the mornings to fall into a nothingness, as pure and black as the pre-dawn fields I’d look out upon through the gym windows. In thinking of nothing I was open to taking in everything.<br />
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The day would progress with classes and meetings and practice and dorm duty and every “thing” would make a light mark on the darkness. I could reset in the morning.<br />
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We make too little of nothing. We fear it by filling our nothing with meaningless marks. We chip at it with noise and let our technology create an illusion of full.<br />
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I crave nothing."

"There’s a new kind of clutter littering Web pages...not just obnoxious “Refinance your mortgage” ads plastered atop & alongside articles. It’s also not just animated nonsense that floats by as you’re trying to read.<br />
<br />
It’s the article itself.<br />
<br />
In the never-ending quest to get page views, the choices writers & editors are making to attract eyeballs & drive traffic are creating a new breed of low-brow, gimmicky disposable content. At its best it adds little insight and at its worst amounts to a slimy bait-&-switch (catchy headline, nothing to say in the article).<br />
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It’s the new clutter. [examples]<br />
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So where’s the good writing on the Web? It’s everywhere else. The interesting new perspectives and provocative thinking isn’t coming from Gizmodo & Silicon Alley. It’s the blogger I’ve never heard of that is blowing me out of my chair these days. …<br />
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This type of clutter only goes away if business models change & the mechanisms for determining success change along w/ them."

"Our time, as the media never tires of telling us, is the information age, a time when each of us can count on being besieged and bombarded by more information in an average day than most premodern people encountered in their entire lives. Now it’s important to remember that this is true only when the term “information” is assumed to mean the sort of information that comes prepackaged and preprocessed in symbolic form; the average hunter-gatherer moving through a tropical rain forest picks up more information about the world of nature through his or her senses in the course of an average day than the average resident in an industrial city receives through that channel in the course of their lives."

"Thatcher’s study sug­gests a coun­ter­in­tu­itive notion: the more dis­or­ga­nized your brain is, the smarter you are...It’s coun­ter­in­tu­itive in part because we tend to attribute grow­ing intel­li­gence of tech­nol­ogy world w/ increas­ingly pre­cise electro­mechan­i­cal chore­og­ra­phy...

"Noise pollution is a serious problem in many cities. NoiseTube is a research project about a new participative approach for monitoring noise pollution involving the general public. Our goal is to extend the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling each citizen to measure his own exposure in his everyday environment. Furthermore each user could also participate to the creation of a collective map of noise pollution by sharing automatically his geolocalized measures with the community.

"Many people have used random number generators in their programs to create unpredictability, make the motion and behavior of objects appear more natural, or generate textures. Random number generators certainly have their uses, but at times their output can be too harsh to appear natural. This article will present a function which has a very wide range of uses, more than I can think of, but basically anywhere where you need something to look natural in origin. What's more it's output can easily be tailored to suit your needs."

"Kids in noisy environments hear enough words that they learn to communicate. But they miss out on the additional language necessary to master the more sophisticated nuances of phonics, vocabulary, and structure."

"A TV antenna is a sponge for radio energy, collecting lots more than just the desired signal. Snow is the result of the TV attempting to turn stray signals into an image, signals from radio stations, emissions from power lines, transformers or appliances, or even from the electrical noise of the circuits in the TV itself...result is the strangely-calming ant-dance of black on white that we call snow. But snow has another source, a source far from this planet in both time & space. Mixed in with the noise of Earthling civilization are radio echoes of the Big Bang, the moment of the Universe's creation 13 Billion years ago...universe started out very small & very hot & has been expanding and cooling ever since. As it cools, the Big Bang's fossil radiation sheds radio energy in the same way a cake on a cooling rack gives up heat. & when those indescribably ancient radio waves run down the rabbit ears and into your analog TV, the TV's circuitry interprets it as an image & voila! - Snow."

"A familiar sight and sound is disappearing as digital TV takes over from analog: television snow and the "white noise" that accompanies it."

"The opportunity to genuinely explore the sound of the city without this blanket of private cars is compelling, whether through sculpting sound through active intervention or simply through enjoying a level aural playing field for the everyday sounds that already conjure the city.

"WideNoise is the iPhone and iPod Touch application that samples decibel noise levels, and displays them on a worldwide interactive map" via: http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/widenoise_to_let_all_familiarize_with_the_concept_of_spimes_12460.asp see also: http://www.openspime.com/2009/01/25/widenoise-to-let-all-familiarize-with-the-concept-of-spimes/

"The more you can concentrate with background noise, the more it strengthens the brain. Isaac Asimov used to set his typewriter up in stores and other loud places to work. His claim was that you get really good at writing when you’re in a crowd. You want to be energized by that background noise, rather than distracted."

"Reach for the remote and hone your concentration skills: Lowering the TV volume a little more each day can teach you to filter out background noise and improve focus, says University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, PhD. Your training at home could even pay off at work by helping you block out the loudmouth in the next cubicle or fully concentrate on a meeting while ignoring noisy distractions outside."

"Social media noise is an essential part of learning and living on the web. Hear are some reasons why.: Unexpected opportunities, Future Needs, Maximizing Recall, General Knowledge, Personal Growth"

"Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation is a small electronic listening device built for eavesdropping on the inner acoustics of trees...placed on the trunk of a given tree, then connected to as many as ten sets of headphones, which hang down from the

"pink noise masks background noise to help you concentrate. Now with source code and white noise, for those less colorful. Drown out annoying roommates and co-workers today!"

"looking for shining example of truly 24 hour city, look no farther than postmodern spectacle known as a Casino...fortress defies all principles of rationality, reasonability...if that’s what Next American City would look like, I would have to politely

"This gimmick is used by salespeople and manufacturers to you feel as if your current camera is inadequate and needs to be replaced even if the new cameras each year are only slightly better."

"The best compromise for a compact camera is a sensor with 6 million pixels or better a sensor with a pixel size of >3µm."

"Hitting the right notes is more effective than noise reduction in making life less stressful"

"Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world. In the new context, some surprising behavi