There was a huge snowfall on Manchester on Monday evening and as you’d expect the whole city was at a complete standstill on Tuesday morning and probably will be most of the week.
Noticed an interesting acoustic phenomena on Tuesday morning when Helen and I rather optimistically went to see if the buses were running down Upper Chorlton Road. There was near silence and absence of background noise. We stopped and listened for a little while totally fascinated. We put this down to the absence of traffic on the road, there were only a couple of cars out driving very slowly rather than the constant flow of vehicles you normally see on this stretch of highway.
However, I this morning I came across an excellent acoustic explaination from Trevor Cox of Salford Uni for the presence of silence on snowy days. He points out that snow dulls the ground surface which is usually highly reflective to sound leading to a reduced general noise level. Read what he wrote in detail here.
The texture and light picture I took yesterday in Alexandria Park, Moss Side on my walk home.
David Birchall 