Kurt Milligan is into puzzles. For him, a hard day's work is all about
putting the pieces together, and coming up with a working solution. Milligan
is an acoustical engineer.
Engineers simply love a good conundrum, says Milligan. His own favorite
task is problem solving. "I think that's common with any engineer-- a
desire to be a problem solver and work within a set of parameters and figure
out what the best options are."
An engineer, says Milligan, must learn to work within certain boundaries
and overcome limitations. "You'd like to do this," says Milligan hypothetically,
"but you're given these constraints. Hopefully, your engineering and
your practical experience have given you some idea of what you can and can't
do."
Trying to work beyond the limitations of a project could result in a million-dollar
mistake. Milligan says you need to be realistic in your plans. "Sometimes
it's unrealistic to do things. You can't put a diesel engine in
a room next to a recording studio and hope to provide enough sound isolation
to make it work. What's practical? What's realistic?"
A wild attempt at breaking the rules could have a high price. Milligan
says that a sound barrier along a roadside, for instance, could cost about
a million dollars per kilometer. "So it's important to have some sense
of what works and what doesn't," he says.
The rewards in this field, says Milligan, are great. But they don't
come quickly. It could take years before you see the fruits of your labor.
"I work with a lot of projects that are long....But it's not going to
be built for three years. There's no immediate satisfaction and that
can be very unfulfilling," he explains.
But the rewards that accompany the completion of a project are worth the
wait. "When you do get to see something that you worked on two years ago and
it's now built and it seems to be working in the fashion that you thought
it should, then it's very rewarding," says Milligan.
Dana Hougland is an acoustician who manages her own practice. New challenges,
she says, force her to learn something new every day. And that is what she
loves about her work. "I like the variety of the job. You're constantly
having to acquire new skills in order to tackle new projects," says Hougland.
Occasionally, Hougland's challenges are just plain bizarre. She remembers
having to come to the rescue of an entire community in New Mexico. The community
lived in fear of something they called "The Sound."
"I was involved in a little problem they called the Taos Hum. People claim
they were hearing this humming sound that permeated the whole valley around
Taos. I located what I think is the source of that sound. They thought it
was an underground civilization. I traced it to a bunch of rock crushers,"
says Hougland.
Like Milligan, Hougland is fascinated by acoustical dilemmas. "It becomes
kind of a little cat and mouse game," she explains. "It makes life a little
interesting. There's a lot of just the challenge of problem solving."
Barry Truax is an acoustician and a professor. He says that people need
to consider the impact of sound on our everyday lives. Sound is a part of
our environment, he says, just like air or water. However, we tend to pay
less attention to how it affects our quality of life.
"When a city is impacted by traffic and aircraft and industrial sound most
of the time, there's a tendency to desensitize yourself to listening,"
says Truax. He suggests that people need to give "ear-witness" accounts of
daily life, as well as they give eyewitness accounts.