R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) and the World Soundscape Project

This in memoriam tribute for Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer focuses on his seminal work in establishing soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project. It discusses his intellectual legacy in terms of emphasising a perceptually based approach and the importance of soundscape design, along with critical responses to his ideas.

A Review of the Use of Psychoacoustic Indicators on Soundscape Studies

This work reviews the literature of 46 peer-reviewed papers and presents the current status on the use of psychoacoustic indicators in soundscape studies. The selection of papers for a systematic review followed the PRISMA method. Afterwards, descriptive analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) were realised. For the PCA, the following parameters extracted from the papers were analysed: psychoacoustic indicator, hypothesis, statistical units, data collection method and major findings for each investigated psychoacoustic indicator. The results show an overview of the use of psychoacoustic indicators, through main hypothesis and findings for each psychoacoustic indicator i.e. the importance of statistical units, such as percentiles, to investigate the hypothesis related to the description of auditory descriptors and perceptual attributes. Another important finding is that many papers lack the specification of computation methods limiting the comparability of study results and impeding the meta-analyses.

Musica di paesaggi sonori. Enunciazione, risignificazione, comunicazione

The paper – rapidly retracing some fundamental stages in the history of sound studies – questions the relationship between soundscape and music language and proposes a reflection on the resulting ontologies of sound. In the traditional conception of soundscape studies, musical language should contribute to a re-orchestration of environmental sound and should promote awareness and active listening of extra-musical sounds. However, every music composition or performance that draws on this kind of acoustic material, inevitably transforms its fruition. Immediacy is in fact impossible and each perception produces a new meaning. The article highlights the value of subjective perception and creative processes in the multidisciplinary discussion about soundscape.

Which aspects of soundscape can the soundscape attributes measure?

The eight perceptual attributes for soundscape assessment provided in ISO/TS 12913-2: 2018 are widely used in recent soundscape studies. Several studies across the language showed that the basic structure of the soundscape appraisal two-dimension space obtained from the attributes are robust. However, this robustness of the basic structure only means the robustness of the linguistic structure of the eight perceptual attributes, and never means those attributes cover the whole human perception of the soundscapes. Some studies suggest there are some appraisal scales which cannot be expressed in the two-dimensional appraisal space. This study discusses which aspects of soundscape can the soundscape attributes measure.

Soundscapes of Resistance: Amplifying social justice activism and aural counterpublics through field recording-based sound practices

This article examines creative sound practitioners who audibly convey social justice commentary through their use of environmental soundscapes as source material. I discuss how micro-watt radio pioneer Mbanna Kantako, electronic music artist Muqata’a and audio activist Christopher DeLaurenti work with field recordings to produce subversive counter-narratives against news media and state discourses. I outline three specific sound projects as case studies: Kantako’s aural counter-surveillance of police encounters within the predominantly poor and Black neighbourhood of Springfield, Illinois; Muqata’a’s album Inkanakuntu (2018) composed using field recordings of Ramallah, West Bank; and DeLaurenti’s radio piece Fit the Description (2015) that incorporates field recordings of the protests following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I argue that composing with soundscapes of contested urban spaces can function as sonic activism that confronts the oppressive soundscapes of systemic racism. The case studies are examined through the following common themes: 1) the use of what I term aural counterpublics to amplify marginalised voices and soundscapes of resistance, and 2) the radical re-appropriation of microphones and oppressive police and military audio technologies as a means of ‘speaking back’ to systems of power. Finally, I suggest how these case studies convey the need for intersectional and decolonised approaches to soundscape studies.

Relational analysis in soundscape preservation

Given the musical origins of soundscape studies, soundscape preservation might suggest the need to protect specific features-such as prominent soundmarks or long-standing natural sounds-to maintain a sonic environment's composition. However, the identification of a soundscape primarily by its discrete elements misses the importance of relational longevity. A relational lens of identification can distinguish a soundscape's effects on visitors rather than simply the presence of specific components, placing human perception candidly at the center of consideration. For instance, an urban courtyard might no longer echo with hand-drawn carts from the street, yet visitors continue to experience a distanced connection with evolving traffic sounds - here the sonic-spatial relationship persists rather than sonic elements being frozen in time. This paper will discuss longevity in the relationships connecting use, architectural space, and sonic character. The discussion draws from architectural analysis, soundwalking, and psychoacoustic research in exploring soundscape preservation within the orbit of heritage conservation more broadly. Case studies focus on a variety of historic contexts, including a military installation, medieval church, and factory landscape, highlighting the limitations of a compositional soundscape reading, the fundamental role of transit through a soundscape for visitors, and the potentials for relational analysis in soundscape preservation efforts.

Sonic Mapping and Critical Citizenship

This chapter explores the methodological and ideological challenges and opportunities faced in an urban soundscapes project based in the small, multicultural, and post-industrial city of Limerick, Ireland, which is currently undergoing a process of urban “regeneration” following decades of challenges (high unemployment rates, rapid demographic shifts brought about by global migration, social disenfranchisement in marginalized neighborhoods, gangland criminality, and considerable stigmatization by the national media). Facilitated by an interdisciplinary team involving ethnomusicologists, urban sociologists, and information technology specialists, the project combines ethnographic approaches from urban ethnomusicology (Hemetek & Reyes 2007, Jurková 2012) with mapping practices from soundscape studies (Murray-Schafer 1977), through an evocation of “critical citizenship” (Nell et al. 2012), in order to generate a soundscapes model that has the individual as a networked, social being and creative critical citizen at its core. LimerickSoundscapes invites participants from a wide range of backgrounds, sourced through pre-existing routes and pathways (Finnegan 1989—including clubs, charities, educational organizations, and societies—to engage in basic sound recording training on small, handheld devices. These sonic flaneurs or “citizen collectors” make short recordings of the sounds of their city, which are shared on an interactive website. For the ethnomusicologists on the research team two tensions emerge. The first is around the research model, which makes collectors critical collaborators that has implications for the open, creative, and participatory process by having an underpinning social activist agenda. The second relates to stepping outside the bounds of musicking (Small 1998) and how that changes the more traditional role of the ethnomusicologist. The chapter teases out these challenges and performs a preliminary evaluation on the efficacy of the project.

Introducing a Method for Intervals Correction on Multiple Likert Scales: A Case Study on an Urban Soundscape Data Collection Instrument

Likert scales are useful for collecting data on attitudes and perceptions from large samples of people. In particular, they have become a well-established tool in soundscape studies for conducting in situ surveys to determine how people experience urban public spaces. However, it is still unclear whether the metrics of the scales are consistently interpreted during a typical assessment task. The current work aims at identifying some general trends in the interpretation of Likert scale metrics and introducing a procedure for the derivation of metric corrections by analyzing a case study dataset of 984 soundscape assessments across 11 urban locations in London. According to ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, soundscapes can be assessed through the scaling of 8 dimensions: pleasant, annoying, vibrant, monotonous, eventful, uneventful, calm, and chaotic. The hypothesis underlying this study is that a link exists between correlations across the percentage of assessments falling in each Likert scale category and a dilation/compression factor affecting the interpretation of the scales metric. The outcome of this metric correction value derivation is introduced for soundscape, and a new projection of the London soundscapes according to the corrected circumplex space is compared with the initial ISO circumplex space. The overall results show a general non-equidistant interpretation of the scales, particularly on the vibrant-monotonous direction. The implications of this correction have been demonstrated through a Linear Ridge Classifier task for predicting the London soundscape responses using objective acoustic parameters, which shows significant improvement when applied to the corrected data. The results suggest that the corrected values account for the non-equidistant interpretation of the Likert metrics, thereby allowing mathematical operations to be viable when applied to the data.

Audiovisual Bimodal and Interactive Effects for Soundscape Design of the Indoor Environments: A Systematic Review

A growing number of soundscape studies involving audiovisual factors have been conducted; however, their bimodal and interactive effects on indoor soundscape evaluations have not yet been thoroughly reviewed. The overarching goal of this systematic review was to develop the framework for designing sustainable indoor soundscapes by focusing on audiovisual factors and relations. A search for individual studies was conducted through three databases and search engines: Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed. Based on the qualitative reviews of the selected thirty papers, a framework of indoor soundscape evaluation concerning visual and audiovisual indicators was proposed. Overall, the greenery factor was the most important visual variable, followed by the water features and moderating noise annoyance perceived by occupants in given indoor environments. The presence of visual information and sound-source visibility would moderate perceived noise annoyance and influence other audio-related perceptions. Furthermore, sound sources would impact multiple perceptual responses (audio, visual, cognitive, and emotional perceptions) related to the overall soundscape experiences when certain visual factors are interactively involved. The proposed framework highlights the potential use of the bimodality and interactivity of the audiovisual factors for designing indoor sound environments in more effective ways.