Methods - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 252

In evaluating the sounds, uniform low-frequency sounds are considered more
as background noise than pitched discontinuous sounds that are much better
recognized.
The cognitive representation of a sound reflects more than the physical recogni-
tion of the sound the perceived soundscape. So, definitely, at least for human
subjects, there are specific eco-fields for every recognized category of sounds.
The urban soundscape reflects the life of people and other organisms, and people
require a diverse soundscape in a city. The apparent conflict between physical
versus psychological measurement and assessment of the sound in urban areas can
be easily overcome because the two components are strictly connected. Loud
sounds produce a more convergent attitude in their assessment using either a
psychological or a physical approach.
9.13 Method of Soundwalking
Soundwalks are direct experience of the sonic environment conducted in isolation
or in groups to collect, via recorders or via annotation, the sonic environment
encountered.
As reported in detail by Westerkamp [1974 ( 2007 )]:
A soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is
exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are. We may be at home,
we may be walking across a downtown street, through a park, along the beach; we may be
sitting in a doctor's office, in a hotel lobby, in a bank; we may be shopping in a supermarket,
a department store, or a Chinese grocery store; we may be standing at the airport, the train
station, the bus-stop. Wherever we go we will give our ears priority. They have been
neglected by us for a long time and, as a result, we have done little to develop an acoustic
environment of good quality.
Soundwalks collect the personal experience about the sonic environment, and
this experience can be conducted in every place you wish from the more neglected
periphery of a metropolitan area to a remote cloud forest of an equatorial mountain
range. The exercise to collect field information about the sonic environment is
called phonography .
A soundwalk is an educational tool to explore the sonic ambience, to appreciate
nature music, to reconstruct the confidence with nature lost after several years of
sedentary life and urbanization.
A soundwalk is an exercise for which you must be educated by steps.
Soundwalking could be introduced as an educational tool in the schools and
represents an important approach to consider the importance of the sonic environ-
ment for human well-being and for social aggregation also. Polli ( 2012 ) has
recently outlined the political and social dimension of soundscape composition
and of soundwalking and has addressed the different attitudes between music and
soundscape.