Earth mounds can refract and deaden street noise from quiet groves

Evidence

There is no place for the unbalanced sound ecology in the park. The task of the acoustic designer is to find reinforcements of natural sounds in the same way as the trellis reinforces the presence of the rose. One of his special problems will be to return an area of the park to the state of a quiet grove in the midst of active city life. This will not be easy. For frontage on busy streets giant mounds of earth may be the only answer, and these should not only be of sufficient height to hide the traffic from sight, but of such construction as to refract the sound away from the park and of such thickness as to deaden ground vibrations. Sunken gardens, grottoes and other types of acoustic baffles will also be of value here. — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 851

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter on hi-fi versus lo-fi soundscapes and the retreat of natural sound from cities. — connects to: Protecting one small quiet spot can preserve quiet across a much larger area — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 74
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 851