There are a lot of beautiful places on earth especially when you cut off the audible scenario bound to the place. On pictures the most noisiest place, for instance the precinct of Manhattan seems calm and quiet but in reality the acoustic scenario would overwhelm oneself.

At some places it is intended to have a calm and beautiful acoustic scenario that invites people to sit down and relax. For that reason the acoustic scenario is intended to be optimized which is often be done with noise protection walls or hedgerows.

In one of my projects I had the honor to be invited to Bitola in Macedonia to take an eye, or rather an ear, on the soundscape in front of the museum and NI Institute building. The plaza is currently under restoration and the authorities do not only want to improve the visual but also the audible experience on the plaza.

This is difficult since the plaza should invite people and the common way of building hedgerows or noise protection walls would lock away the place. For that reason I suggested to improve the acoustic scenario by amplifying pleasurable sounds to compete against traffic noise by carefully distributing microphones and loud speakers and connecting them to an intelligent audio processor to make the artificially improved acoustic scenario as natural sounding as possible.