The other day I was reading some interesting articles, however the most interesting that I found was about something called a Soundscraper. Now my first reaction on hearing this name, without actually reading the article, was that of a huge tall building built out of sound. My little imagination ran wild, and I imagined people building this tower by simply playing music at the site and the tower just getting bigger and bigger. Now obviously this not what the article was about, the idea in the article, although not a fun as my idea, was much more practical and infinitely more amazing!
Reading the article, I discovered that an entry into the 2013 eVola Skyscraper Competition (I am sure that you have all heard of this competition and talk about it constantly to your friends and family, or if you are like me, you have probably never heard of it), was to build a large tower that absorbs sound, and converts the sounds into electricity, which can then be connected to the grid to light people's homes and run their air conditioning. The size of these towers was not defined, but it was estimated that a single Soundscraper, ideally positioned near a noisy motorway or regular flight-path could power 10% of Los Angeles' lighting needs. Since these towers are only a theory at this stage, and no working prototype seems to have been created or being near creation, we can only look at the artists impressions of these towers. However the fact that people believe we have the technology available to construct such buildings, does highlight the potential for us to be pillaging less of our natural resources to power our electricity needs and instead actually take a pollutant, noise, and convert that into something useful.
To read more, and see an artist's impression of a Soundscraper, check out the Inhabitat website.
