Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida

These compositions reconstruct the sonic environment of the seventeenth-century Mission San Luis de Talimali. These “soundscapes” draw on musicology, geography, archaeological data, historical research, and field recordings to help Mission San Luis’s visitors and scholars better understand the lived, sensory experiences of the Apalachee and Spanish people at La Florida’s paramount mission community.

Illusions of Liveness: Producer as Composer

<p>The practise of creating music for the recorded medium has been a fluid and constantly changing enterprise since its inception. Emergences of new studio technologies over the last fifty years have spurred new cultures, philosophies and approaches to music production and composition, ultimately seeing a merging of the once disparate roles of producer and composer. It is this contemporary, technology-informed new role of producer-composer that brings with it discussion - for much of which there is no general consensus - over issues pertaining to perceived liveness, the producer-composer’s control over the resulting sound, and most contentiously the use of music technology itself: its transparency and its legitimacy as substitutions for real instruments. These are all fluid and complex issues and this paper does not attempt to provide answers for, nor take a definitive stance on them other than in the sharing of opinions formed from my own experiences in applying production as composition to the creative aspect of this project. In this paper I seek to share some of the current discussion regarding production-as-composition, in light of my own compositional experiment, which strives to create a simulation of real-performance via almost entirely artificial means within an idealised, hyper-musical sonic environment. By bringing together real musicians and virtual instruments within a recorded track and edited via music production technology, the experiment aimed to produce an illusion of liveness.</p>

Illusions of Liveness: Producer as Composer

<p>The practise of creating music for the recorded medium has been a fluid and constantly changing enterprise since its inception. Emergences of new studio technologies over the last fifty years have spurred new cultures, philosophies and approaches to music production and composition, ultimately seeing a merging of the once disparate roles of producer and composer. It is this contemporary, technology-informed new role of producer-composer that brings with it discussion - for much of which there is no general consensus - over issues pertaining to perceived liveness, the producer-composer’s control over the resulting sound, and most contentiously the use of music technology itself: its transparency and its legitimacy as substitutions for real instruments. These are all fluid and complex issues and this paper does not attempt to provide answers for, nor take a definitive stance on them other than in the sharing of opinions formed from my own experiences in applying production as composition to the creative aspect of this project. In this paper I seek to share some of the current discussion regarding production-as-composition, in light of my own compositional experiment, which strives to create a simulation of real-performance via almost entirely artificial means within an idealised, hyper-musical sonic environment. By bringing together real musicians and virtual instruments within a recorded track and edited via music production technology, the experiment aimed to produce an illusion of liveness.</p>

A Personal and Fragile Affair: The Sonic Environment and Its Place In My Compositions

<p>To begin with, I will briefly outline my compositional process. This will help to provide an understanding of my motivations. I will then pose some questions relating to the practice of field recording and the use of these materials in electroacoustic composition. Through a discussion of early electronic music, musique concrete, soundscape composition and the ideologies of composers associated with these movements, I will reveal the tensions surrounding the use of referential material in acousmatic music. Finally, I will show how I have attempted to address these tensions in my own work.</p>

A Personal and Fragile Affair: The Sonic Environment and Its Place In My Compositions

<p>To begin with, I will briefly outline my compositional process. This will help to provide an understanding of my motivations. I will then pose some questions relating to the practice of field recording and the use of these materials in electroacoustic composition. Through a discussion of early electronic music, musique concrete, soundscape composition and the ideologies of composers associated with these movements, I will reveal the tensions surrounding the use of referential material in acousmatic music. Finally, I will show how I have attempted to address these tensions in my own work.</p>

Characterisation of the soundscape of parks and green areas through the triangulation of methodologies proposed by ISO/TS 12913-2

The management of urban spaces and environmental health has been growing in recent years, and the sound aspects were highlighted during the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Locations that generally showed noises from vehicle traffic presented a diversity of sounds, generally not perceived in everyday situations before the pandemic. Awareness of the sound impacts generated before the pandemic has provided a broad discussion between the scientific community and managers regarding developing tools to improve urban planning and environmental health in cities. This study aims to characterise the soundscape of two parks in Curitiba by triangulating evaluation methodologies proposed in the ISO/TS 12913-2 (2018). Such triangulation included the descriptive analysis of objective and subjective sound data, analysis and elaboration of sound and perception maps, providing a systemic overview of the sonic environment of the investigated parks.

role of the musical-acoustic thesaurus in the process of orientation in a given space-time

Musically-acoustic thesaurus is a complex structure which composition of multiple parts is effectuated by multiple channels of receiving information from the outside and ways of manipulation with it. The manipulation is turning of separate facts into systematic knowledge stored in memory. Musically-acoustic thesaurus of collective and individual consists of two groups with duplex connection which are the knowledge of the world as a sonic phenomenon and of human auditory activity and the experience of absorbing the information received, principles of manipulation with it. They fulfill inherent inclination of individual towards usage of auditory images as a requirement for appearance of musical ones. All the sonorities are bracketed in two groups: extra-musical and musical itself. The latter group consists of musical units of acoustically-sonic environment, having utility, practical significance for a person, allowing orientation in given spacetime. At the same time, they are potentially opened to emotional experiences and aesthetic approach towards them. Acoustically-sonic environment possesses basic traits of organization, being reflected in mind by such characteristics as cyclicity, variability, combinationalism, montage structure, simultaneity, interdependency of shape and background.

Designing Cities Through Sound

Sound shapes space. However, the architectural training of designers usually prioritizes visual aspects of a building or urban space without considering the sonic environment and auditory responses of humans who may engage or occupy the built environment. The concept of the “soundscape” brings together the visual and sonic environments, allowing designers to develop more nuanced, responsive, and effective spaces (Southworth, 1967, pp. 6-8) Acousticians define soundscape as “a person’s perceptual construct of the acoustic environment of that place” (Kang & Schulte-Fortkamp, 2017, p. 5). People’s interpretation of auditory sensations can lead to either positive or negative feelings regarding that specific place. Because urban spaces include both a great number of sound sources and a high number of people occupying and moving through them, the sonic environments and urban soundscapes are complex, layered, and dense. This research evaluates the sonic qualities of urban spaces to provide designers with a means by which these complex environments can be better understood, analyzed, and created. It draws on an expanding body of research in architectural acoustics, and direct observation of cities in the United States and Italy conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than relying solely on numeric calculations, this work probes the notion of the “perceptual construct,” seeking to make visual these constructs. Drawings and photographs from different cities are used to study the form of the city through urban edges and the emerging concept of green acoustics. The work provides a way of creating a new architecture of public space through the lens of the sonic environment.

Methods for Noise Event Detection and Assessment of the Sonic Environment by the Harmonica Index

Noise annoyance depends not only on sound energy, but also on other features, such as those in its spectrum (e.g., low frequency and/or tonal components), and, over time, amplitude fluctuations, such as those observed in road, rail, or aircraft noise passages. The larger these fluctuations, the more annoying a sound is generally perceived. Many algorithms have been implemented to quantify these fluctuations and identify noise events, either by looking at transients in the sound level time history, such as exceedances above a fixed or time adaptive threshold, or focusing on the hearing perception process of such events. In this paper, four criteria to detect sound were applied to the acoustic monitoring data collected in two urban areas, namely Andorra la Vella, Principality of Andorra, and Milan, Italy. At each site, the 1 s A-weighted short LAeq,1s time history, 10 min long, was available for each hour from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. The resulting 92-time histories cover a reasonable range of urban environmental noise time patterns. The considered criteria to detect noise events are based on: (i) noise levels exceeding by +3 dB the continuous equivalent level LAeqT referred to the measurement time (T), criteria used in the definition of the Intermittency Ratio (IR) to detect noise events; (ii) noise levels exceeding by +3 dB the running continuous equivalent noise level; (iii) noise levels exceeding by +10 dB the 50th noise level percentile; (iv) progressive positive increments of noise levels greater than 10 dB from the event start time. Algorithms (iii) and (iv) appear suitable for notice-event detection; that is, those that (for their features) are clearly perceived and potentially annoy exposed people. The noise events detected by the above four algorithms were also evaluated by the available anomalous noise event detection (ANED) procedure to classify them as produced by road traffic noise or something else. Moreover, the assessment of the sonic environment by the Harmonica index was correlated with the single event level (SEL) of each event detected by the four algorithms. The threshold value of 8 for the Harmonica index, separating the “noisy” from the “very noisy” environments, corresponds to lower SEL levels for notice-events as identified by (iii) and (iv) algorithms (about 88–89 dB(A)) against those identified by (i) and (ii) criteria (92 dB(A)).

Musically-acoustic Thesaurus as Spatial Dimension of Cognitive Process

The article considers musically-acoustic thesaurus of collective and individual, a complex structure, which composition of multiple parts is effectuated by multiple channels of receiving information from the outside and ways of manipulation with it, that is turning of separate facts into systematic knowledge stored in memory. This structure consists of two groups with duplex connection. The first one is the knowledge of the world as a sonic phenomenon and of human auditory activity, as well as of the experience of absorbing the information received, principles of manipulation with it, overall – fulfills inherent inclination of individual towards usage of auditory images as a requirement for appearance of musical ones. All the sonorities are bracketed in two groups: extra-musical and musical itself. The latter group consists of musical units of acoustically-sonic environment, having utility, practical significance for a person, allowing orientation in given spacetime. At the same time, they are potentially opened to emotional experiences and aesthetic approach towards them. Acoustically-sonic environment possesses basic traits of organization, being reflected in mind by such characteristics as cyclicity, variability, combinationalism, montage structure, simultaneity, interdependency of “shape” and “background”. In a thesaurus of a collective and individual external environment is imprinted in two ways: as undifferentiated background noise and as separate units, creating relief. The memory contains them both, creating thus sonic image of the world. The knowledge, appearing thus, is stored in thesaurus in compressed type, acquiring its full and kinetic form in cases of contact with reality.