Soundscape and Landscape Ecology - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 4

3. The sound environment
4. The environment of sound
5. The aural space
6. The natural acoustic environmental sounds
7. The ambient conditions
8. Quiet areas (areas where environmental noise quality is good)
9. City soundscape
10. The total ambient acoustic environment
11. The total soundscape
12. The acoustic soundscape
And according to a human context, Jennings and Cain ( 2013 ) argue: “ The
perception of the soundscape is inherently personal and affected by what a listener,
each with unique set of experiences and preferences, brings to the listening situa-
tion. This framework is therefore underpinned by the proposition that a person's
perception of a soundscape depends most strongly on the activity they are doing at
the time, and consequently their corresponding state of listening. ”
Environmental sound often is considered simply a noise, but reducing the noise
levels often does not provide improvement of the negative sensations that such a
sound produces on the listeners. Noise mitigation in many cases is not sufficient to
create a pleasant sonic environment.
The soundscape approach can solve in part the difficulties connected with the
sonic environment evaluation and management.
According to an anthropogenic perspective, the term soundscape emphasizes the
way the acoustic environment is perceived, understood, and interpreted by different
human aggregations (individuals, groups, and society). The soundscape, in this
case, is a perceptual construct and a physical phenomenon too. When the
soundscape is considered the noise of a place, apparently a different approach is
requested to address the problem, but later it will be possible to see how the two
aspects are strictly connected.
The soundscape can be considered also as a type of language uttered by a
landscape, the emergent sonic information that creates a living context in which
sonic information and acoustic communication represents biosemiotics tools that
are used by vocal organisms in active and passive cognitive processes.
Interest in the soundscape, at its first beginning considered a peculiarity only of
musicians, pertains to many categories of scholars, practitioners, and decision
makers ranging from psychologists, engineers, physicians, architects, designers,
and sociologists to biologists and ecologists.
The soundscape is an acoustic context but also a cultural domain that greatly
contributes to defining the characteristics of a region, the culture of the people, and
more in general the cultural heritage (Scarre and Lawson 2006 ). The strict and
continuous contacts between sound and environment emphasizes the importance of
this sonic context in shaping use and traditions and reinforcing the sense of the
place and every other issue related to human culture and heritage.