Acoustic Cityscape Design
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Acoustic Cityscape Design

A system for designing whole urban acoustic environments -; stitching many sound sources into acoustic zones and path-based experiences, from a courtyard up to a park, with waterfront, mountain, and desert modules.

Archived Started: Summer 2025 Updated: Summer 2025
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Overview

The top layer of the Computational Acoustic Architecture stack. The fountain and wind tools design single sound-producing objects; this one composes many of them into a coherent place. Feed it a site and a program and it lays out acoustic zones, places structures, draws acoustic paths with sound landmarks, and simulates how sound actually propagates across the whole thing to check the design holds together.

Background

One singing tower is a sculpture; a city's worth of them is an environment, and environments need planning. The questions change scale: not "what note does this make?" but "where does the quiet contemplation zone sit relative to the energetic one, and what does a person hear walking between them?" This tool is the answer to designing for the ear at the scale of urban space.

How It Works

The designer works in a few passes:

  • Zones -; a library of acoustic zone types (quiet contemplation ~45 dB pink, social interaction ~55 dB white, energetic activity ~65 dB blue, transition buffers, performance amphitheaters), placed by Voronoi tessellation weighted by existing noise.
  • Structures -; wind towers, resonant pavilions, acoustic groves, water-sound gardens, echo walls and more, placed by a cost/benefit heuristic.
  • Paths -; designed journeys with sound landmarks between zones.
  • Simulation -; a 2D sound-propagation model validates SPL targets and the resulting noise-color map.

Propagation uses the standard outdoor sound-level model -; geometric spreading plus atmospheric, ground, and barrier attenuation:

Lp(r) = Lw − 20·log₁₀(r) − A_atm(f)·r − A_ground − A_barrier -; urban SPL propagation

The environmental modules layer in setting-specific physics -; waterfront structures (wave organs, tidal whistles) account for tidal frequency shift and reflective ground; mountain modules add altitude attenuation and echo zones; desert modules model extreme thermal refraction and low humidity. Output is a full set of visualizations: site plan, SPL heat map, noise-color distribution, path-quality map, and a performance dashboard.

Current Status

Archived. Zoning, placement, path design, and the 2D propagation simulation all run, with the three environmental modules in place. It's the integrative capstone of the CAA suite.

  • Five zone types, eight structure types, Voronoi-based zoning.
  • 2D propagation simulation with SPL and noise-color maps.
  • Waterfront, mountain, and desert environmental modules.