Pulped Fiction

Today I came across a rather interesting piece of trivia. The surface the M6 toll road near Birmingham is made up of books.

2.5 million books were pulped and used to hold the tarmac in place. This prolongs the life of the road surface, but also helps to reduce road noise. The consistency of the book pulp helps to absorb a lot of the traffic noise of the vehicles passing over it. Since road noise is one of the most annoying noises, both for people in cars and those living near the roads, pulped paper has been used in many high speed roads since 2003.

This Blog

I’ve never written a blog before. OK, that’s not strictly true. I’ve written a guest blog post on The Sound Blog, but I’ve never written my own blog. And to be honest I hadn’t planned on starting until it was suggested I develop a ‘professional online presence’. So I guess I’ll start by telling you a bit about me and why I decided to do acoustics.

I’d always had a keen ear for music throughout my life, with a particular liking for close harmonies and a capella sounds. The other side of me was a scientist. A physicist. Always wondering how things worked, or why they behaved as they did. So when I heard about that there was an entire career where I could combine these two things, I thought it was a great idea. I’m currently in my second year of an Acoustic Engineering degree at Salford University.