The hospital soundscape

Sitting with my son who's now light of one leaking appendix, I'm in a dense environment of sounds. The vast majority of these sounds are artificial, created by the beeping, whirring, and squelching of the technology around us. The physical architecture of the hospital is only one component to the total 'design.'

But it seems like the soundscape could be endlessly improved ( as I lie awake at 3:00 in the morning listening to it all). Many of the sounds are informational cues for the attending staff- warning about low heart rates, empty IV bags, feeding times, etc, and across a ward of 20 rooms and 30 patients. The sounds are each distinctive enough, but it seems to me that with some coordination or even 'orchestration', they could work together so well that a nurse could be blind. You could listen to a ward the way a bird watchers hears a forest. You could tune the gaggle of technology to be distinctively different enough that a trained nurse would know what's happening without looking at a computer monitor.