Soundscape and Landscape Ecology - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 15

Fig. 1.7 Combination of
foreground and background
sonic environment and
Hi-Fi and Lo-Fi categories
created further
subcategories of a sonic
context
In the second case, the noise produced by car traffic enters the urban park located
at the periphery of Girona (Catalogna, Spain) and interferes with the morning
biophonies produced by birds. Bird song is largely masked by such background
noise.
Foreground and background sonic environment and Hi-Fi and Lo-Fi are two
different perspectives with which we distinguish some important sonic patterns.
The combination of these two perspectives as illustrated in Fig. 1.7 produces
potential subcategories of sonic conditions.
1.9 Landscape: Emerging Patterns and Dynamics
1.9.1 Some Definitions and Relevant Patterns
To better understand the soundscape dynamics that emerge from landscape
structures, it is necessary to describe what is a landscape and what are the emerging
patterns that allow using this epistemological domain to explain the complexity of
our world.
Several definitions of landscape have been produced during the years since the
German geographer Carl Troll realized that the orthogonal vision of the Earth from
an airplane provided important information on the functioning of the landscapes.
Since that time in Europe and later in the United States, landscape ecology
flourished as an important ecological discipline from both theoretical and applied
aspects.
At least three main currents of thought were quickly established. The first
restricted the concepts to the description of a geographic landscape. A second
line of thought takes into consideration the ecological valence of the landscape
interpreted as a spatial arrangement of ecosystems. Finally, a third line considered
the landscape as a cognitive object that is first created in the mind of the
observer. In a retrospective analysis, all these components are parts of a unified
conceptualization of the landscape. In conclusion, each perspective is indispensable
to develop or to integrate the two others.