Soundscape and Landscape Ecology - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 3

Sonic is the adjective that refers to every physical or conceptual object created by
the sound (e.g., sonic environment, sonic ambience, sonic information, sonic
patterns).
Acoustic is the adjective that refers to the organismic perception, interpretation, and
reaction to a sound (e.g., acoustic adaptive hypothesis, acoustic alarm, acoustic
behavior).

1.3 The Definition of Soundscape

As for the landscape, there are many definitions of the soundscape. The soundscape
can be simply defined as an acoustical composition that results from the voluntary
or involuntary overlap of different sounds of physical or biological origin.
Payne et al. ( 2009 ) has defined the soundscape thus: “ Soundscapes are the
totality of all sounds within a location with an emphasis in the relationship between
individual's or society's perception of, understanding of and interaction with the
sonic environment. ”
The Oxford Dictionary defines the soundscape as “ the sounds heard in a
particular location, considered as a whole .” In this last definition we can distin-
guish two key words: sounds and location. Later, we will connect this “location”
with the landscape and related concepts. Another definition of soundscape, “ An
atmosphere or environment created by or with sound ,” attributes to sound the
important role of a specific dimension that embraces organisms. Not least,

soundscape can be defined as an emotive environment.
According to a more linguistically rigorous perspective, “sound” + “scape”
results a semantic paradox because sound can be heard but not seen. It would be
more correct to define the soundscape as the distribution of sounds across a
landscape when the landscape is considered a geographic entity and not a complex
cognitive agency (Farina 2006 ). But despite this semantic remark, in this topic we
use the term “soundscape” to indicate the geographic distribution of multisource
sound perceptions as usually considered in a broad scientific and educational
context.
The soundscape is the result of the overlapping of the sounds from geophonic
(wind, flowing water, sea waves, eruptions), biophonic (vocalizations, contact and
alarm calls, songs), and anthrophonic (industrial and urban activities; road, marine,
and air traffic) sources, that in turn are strictly related to the structure and function-
ing of the geographic landscapes (Pijanowski et al. 2011a ).
The soundscape is the result of sounds that are produced by abiotic or biotic
agents and that are first perceived and successively interpreted by organisms: this
means that a cognitive component must be added or at least considered in the
soundscape process.
Different terms are used to create a semantic regarding this complex subject.
In particular, different terms are used as synonym of soundscape:

1. The acoustic environment
2. The sonic environment