I watched this video with the typical ennui of your average internet user—expecting to hear nothing at all, really, before going back to other forms of online procrastination—but holy Hannah. This is a pretty loud building.
Although I would be making surreptitious ambient field recordings—and rhapsodizing to my sleepless friends about the unrealized acoustic dimensions of contemporary architecture—I have to say I’d be pretty unenthused to have this thing howling all day, everyday, in my neighborhood.
It’s Manchester’s Beetham Tower. It cost £150 million to build, and its accidental sounds are apparently now “the stuff of legend.”
(Spotted via Justin Davidson. This actually reminds me of when my housemate in college taught himself to play the saw and I had no idea what was happening).
Fortunately, it takes particularly high winds to get the tower to howl like that now. It used to be a lot worse before work was undertaken to try and minimise the noise.
To give a better idea of how loud the noise actually is, on the day that video was filmed my brother reported that he could hear it howling, and he lives two miles away from the tower.