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"Denmark is building new and improved super hospitals, based on a vision of improving overall quality by switching the focus from hospitals for treatment to hospitals for healing, guided by research in the field of evidence-based design and healing architecture. Users mention noise as one of the main stressors and research has discovered that noise levels in hospitals continue to rise. Noise has therefore become a central point of concern, recommending strategies to reduce measurable and perceived noise levels."

"The music of Prélude Au Sommeil was intended as sleep-inducing and tranquilizing for use in mental hospitals. It is unclear if the copies pressed actually had been distributed to mental hospitals or if the whole story was just a fantastical joke on the part of Mr. Perrey. This album is known as a precursor of what would later became known as "ambient music", 20 years before Brian Eno, the Kosmic Courier and the American minimalists."

"Years ago I unearthed a case full of cassettes in my parents closet. I'd been saving a certain one for the right time. A recorded letter, "To Ron" written on the label. It would have been sent to my father in Costa Rica from his family in Ohio. Upon pressing play I hear who I think is my grandmother as the initial hiss of the tape settles and soon the voice of my young uncle. My Mother and Father met while they were both serving as Mennonite missionaries in Costa Rica during the 1970s. He sang love songs outside her window. He rode an old Yamaha motorcycle up through Central America. He loved to tell those stories. While on my third stay in the psychiatric hospital I started sketching out a short piece. The new season of Twin Peaks was airing at the time and the adult unit I was housed in is known as "Lodge". It was during my fourth and most recent stay that my father fell ill and passed away. I experienced his last days through second-hand phone calls in my own hospital room miles apart. Such a physical disconnect and heightened reality complicates my ability to grieve. I returned home and had to finish the piece. The sample finally had a purpose."

"From the beep of cardiac monitors to the blare of alarms, hospitals are often jarring places to be from an auditory perspective. And for patients, the combined dissonant sounds can become overwhelming and even run antithetical to the healing process."

"This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum's Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski's sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people."

"Montefiore Hospital in the UK teamed up with ambient music artist Brian Eno in April 2013 to create a Quiet Room where patients can find relaxation and calm. Eno designed a light and sound installation for the room and for the reception area, including an original soundtrack of soothing instrumental tunes. Once the room has had a few inhabitants, there are plans to examine whether the patients who have sought solace there exhibit any beneficial physiological changes."

Eno uses visual art and music to make hospital stays more relaxing for patients. (Good history on this project.)

"The music on Quartz Locked, Deep City Wandering, was sourced from non-musical, professional electronic appliances recorded back in 1987 and preserved on a C-90 cassette until this day. The original sounds were mainly derived from two electronic devices: a hacked, roadside traffic signal data logger, on the one hand, and a physician's pager, on the other. Wires were soldered to various parts of the data logger's motherboard and connected to a tape recorder's audio inputs, emitting a rich assortment of glitch sounds, static noises and buzzing a-plenty. A physician's pager, smuggled from the local hospital, was similarly hacked and manipulated in order to produce high frequency buzzing noises with striking modulation/demodulation effects. Both devices were eventually plugged together to create additional random interference patterns, while occasional tape manipulation and varispeed effect were also applied during the recording process."

"Professor Paul Jennings is leading a team researching how sound affects the perception of environments including urban and hospital intensive care units. People have generally seen noise as being unwanted, but the right sound has many positive aspects."

"Eric Smouha, associate professor of otolaryngology and director of otology and neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, answers questions about the inevitable effect of noise over time -- hearing loss."

I see them in the streets and in the subway, at dollar stores, hospital rooms, and parties. I see them silently dangling from electrical cables and tethered to branches of trees. Balloons are ghost-like entities floating through the cracks of places and memories. They are part of our rituals of loss, celebration and apology. Yet, they are also part of larger systems, weather sciences, warfare and surveillance technologies, colonialist forces and the casual UFO conspiracy theory. For a child, the ephemeral life of the balloon contrasts with the joy of its bright colors and squeaky sounds. Psychologists encourage the use of the balloon as an analogy for death, while astronomers use it as a representation for the cosmological inflation of the universe. In between metaphors of beginning and end, the balloon enables dialogues about air, breath, levity, and vibration.

"Recomposing the soundscape of the intensive care unit"

"Recomposing the soundscape of the intensive care unit"

"Julian Treasure, chairman of The Sound Agency and author of the book 'Sound Business,' proposes we design health care facilities with acoustic healing in mind. "