Sound is Not a Simulation - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 46

soundscape would also play a much stronger part
in the construction of music and sound art with
the introduction of audio recording devices.
However over time this modern soundscape
became less a usable musical landscape or instru-
ment and more like an environmental pollutant
(Bijsterveld 2008). Bijsterveld (2008) argued that
technology became a symbol of the loudness and
unhealthy character of the urban soundscape.
Schafer's examination of the soundscape in
the 1960s was guided by an awareness of the
increased levels of sound within urban centers as
well as (Cohen, 2005; Schafer, 1977). He argued
that the spread of industrialisation, polluted not
only such physical spaces as water and land but
the hearing space, leading to an alteration of the
perceived space for animals and humans. Sound,
or what was now being called noise, was increas-
ingly seen as a negative side effect of industry.
Schafer's research focused on a reification of
past soundscapes and the preservation of sound-
marks (similar to historic landmarks). The World
Soundscape Project, established by several people
including Murray Schafer, in the late 1960s, pro-
posed a practice of recording the landscapes of
different spaces around the world. They wanted
to record and archive certain landscapes they felt
were being transformed as a result of a noisier
soundscape. These recordings would then high-
light the effect that increased sound levels were
having on certain spaces.
Although Schafer brought the sound world into
the equation as a factor within industrial change,
very little focus has been on the positive aspects
of contemporary soundscapes or their social mean-
ing. Human activities produce sound, we are also
embedded in sound, space becomes revealed to us
through sound and, as spaces become more built
up or newly transformed our ability to see beyond
our immediate space becomes limited. Blesser
and Salter (2009) argue that sound allows us to
envision our space; a space becomes revealed to
us through its “aural architecture”. They examine
the ability of humans to restructure their sound

environment, to act back on loud sound spaces
and argue that because constructed spaces remain
static it is through social behaviour that we have
the ability to modify our sound arena.

the Designed space

De Certeau (1988) argues that the city is a rep-
resentation of political economy, historical nar-
rative and social forces of capitalism and while
architects and planners see the whole, the vista,
the individual who lives and works in the city
will never see it in totality. He suggests that we
walk the city blindly, reconstructing our own
narratives of space. De Certeau implicates sound
without referencing it as a way to see an invisible
whole. He argues against the rationalising of the
city or functionalist utopianisms, allowing for the
transformation of space by those that live within
it. Adams et al (2006) suggest that “a soundscape
is simultaneously a physical environment and a
way of perceiving that environment” (Adams et
al., 2006, p. 2). They see the soundscape as a con-
struct through which we will navigate. Adams et
al. and de Certeau understand that the construction
of space and our ability to navigate through it is
dependent on more information than the visible.
In recreating the soundscape in digital land-
scapes, the designer pays homage to the real world
she tries to replicate: she codes, intentionally or not,
the universalisms of design into the construction
of her virtual space. The space is built to replicate
the reflection of sound against object, as if this
is the only way sound moves through space or
equally the only way we perceive it. She is equally
guided by the epistemology of sight as the “the
epistemological status of hearing has come a poor
second to that of vision (Bull & Back, 2004, p. 1).
Like any other visual medium, the design makes
assumptions on how sound should be perceived
in any constructed space. This functional ap-
proach only measures our potential physiologi-
cal responses to sound. It does not explore the
individual or community experience of sound or