On to the joys of AICAD in just a moment but Pauline Hanson's election coincides with the publication of a sumptuous new book of Australian postcards. One of the postcards, a 1907 Xmas Greetings White Australia, is just the kind of thing Ms Hanson's race-crazed One Nation members might like to send to one another. The verse explains that the white heather flowers "stand for Fair White Australia/While we both sing this Joyous Refrain/Hurrah for the Land of the Fair and the Free/Always White may it ever remain".

Jim Davidson's Moments in Time: A Book of Australian Postcards, weighs 857 grams and is handsomely published by the National Library of Australia.

Yes, AICAD 2016, an ANU-curated extravaganza held at the ANU's School of Music has bristled with some very fine minds and those minds' very fine ideas. This year's conference focused on something called "sonic information design" which "has the aspiration that artificial sounds may be designed to make the world a better place".

Wednesday's column http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/canberra-life/ganggang-beaniecounters-add-a-new-kind-of-beanie-20160705-gpynvo.html reported an AICAD workshop at which beanies and scarves were knitted using data gathered from monitoring the songs of Antarctic elephant seals.

In a week of depressing election results that was also the week of AICAD and of the brilliant success of NASA's attempt to put Juno into orbit around Jupiter, one was reminded of what a shame it is that a nation's best minds never ever go into parliamentary politics. That the USA and the UK (for the rocket engine that did the final deft frisbeeing of Juno in to Jupiter's embrace was built in Buckinghamshire) simultaneously produces scientific minds as good as these but politicians' minds as bad and reptilian as Donald Trump's and Tony Blair's is a matter of amazement and distress.

But back to AICAD and the question to you, my several million readers, of whether the "sonic environment" of your workplace is so deathly quiet that it spoils your ability to work well?

Toby Gifford of Griffith University and the Queensland Conservatorium of Music was scheduled to addressed these sorts of issues during Thursday's last-day AICAD sessions. He used his paper Tuning Into The Task: Sonic Environmental Clues and Mental Task Switching, for something he likes to call "active silence".

"Active-silence [unlike the old, discredited Muzak] is designed to be not heard - to only be perceptible when it ceases. Various types of active-silence are becoming increasingly popular. White noise generators for the bedroom can now be found on Amazon and eBay, and there is a proliferation of noise-streaming websites, offering a selection of noise colours (white, brown, pink) along with various other 'calming' soundscapes, typically recordings of rain or the ocean.

"For example, whilst writing this paper I have been listening to various soundscapes from soundrown (http://soundrown.com). Curiously, I have found that for me the 'cafe' setting seems most conducive to writing. Try it yourself and see what works best for you! It's interesting since the cafe setting is quite noisy.

"Since the 1970s there has been a commercial industry of active-silence generation for workplaces, often called sound masking. The idea of sound masking is to raise the noise floor with a relatively spectro-temporally homogeneous sound, such as white noise, so that other unwanted sounds are less noticeable."

Here the scholar got into a history of soundmasking, concluding that, "the post-modern vision of interior acoustic environmental design is yet to be realised," but having a play with the quite recent notion of the Mozart Effect. This is the claim, supported by some disputed research, that "playing Mozart in the background during study enhances learning outcomes".

"Controversy over the Mozart Effect has centred on its authors' claims that something about the genius of Mozart enhances cognitive ability whilst listening. But others argue that that there is nothing inherently superior about Mozart's music in producing this effect; rather it is simply the case that experiments showed people learn better when listening to music that they liked and are familiar with - the original researchers just happened to choose subjects who knew and liked Mozart."

Readers, how would you like to have Mozart playing in your office?

Some of us, especially fond of Mozart, fancy it would be a distraction because his is music to be tickled and thrilled by and is not something lulling (like, say, background recordings of rain lightly drumming on a tin roof). There are places (one of them is the railway station at Frankston, Melbourne and I have been there and heard this with my very own lugs) where amplified Mozart is used to stop the hooligan underclass from gathering. The loveliness of it drives the pigs away, clutching their piggy ears. This is a recognition by authorities that Mozart has some very active ingredients, unlike Australian country music, which is all tofu.

Those of us who live in supernaturally quiet suburbs (in my suburb of Garran we are always pinching ourselves to check that we haven't died) will wonder if there might be a case for introductions of forms of active silence to whole neighbourhoods. Or, for all of us living in landlocked Canberra, how lulling (and how bizarre and amusing) it might be for a suburb to be lulled by the soundscape of a gentle ocean's waves beating rhythmically on a shore.