‘Lend me your ears’: social policy and the hearing body

Abstract

Recent developments in music regulation policy in some European countries show a recognition of changes in the built environment, contemporary demographics and the sonic profile of popular music. These initiatives have not been echoed in Australian music policy, where the primary focus is on the cultural and economic conditions of production and consumption, with little interest in the mechanics and biology of sound production and circulation, and their social welfare implications. Within the general category of noise pollution, it appears that the proliferation of low-frequency noise (LFN) is the fastest growing problem, in which contemporary popular music is increasingly implicated. This paper explores why LFN should suddenly become so pervasive that it has begun to attract specific social policy and legislative measures, its own scientific journals, and attempts to establish standards of its measurement specific to a profile that evades traditional sound pollution analysis.

Keywords:

• social policy
• noise
• music
• renewable energy technology

Acknowledgements

This paper draws together and extends strands from various publications that have been generated by over a decade of research in the field, as well as previous conference/symposium presentations, including at the Institute of Popular Music, Liverpool UK in 2007, for the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology at Koli in Finland, June 2010, and the ‘Policy Notes: Popular Music, Industry and the State’ conference in Melbourne, June 2012. I wish to express my thanks to colleagues at those events and in other discussions who have helped me to refine the thoughts underpinning this paper. The topic on this occasion, which focuses on music policy in Australia, generates some new material, with a new assemblage and emphasis.

Notes

1. Some useful figures for perspective: The average range of human hearing is generally taken to from 20 to 20,000 Hz. The lowest sound on the piano keyboard is 27.5 Hz, the highest is 4186. The usual range of the human voice is between 400 and 3000 Hz. LFN is usually defined as the range 20–200 Hz. Infrasound is taken to be below 20 Hz.