Cover not available
Part of
Sensory Experiences: Exploring meaning and the senses
Danièle Dubois, Caroline Cance, Matt Coler, Arthur Paté and Catherine Guastavino
[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 24] 2021
► pp. 139–167

Chapter 4
Exploring soundscapes

ORCID logo | McGill University
Article outline
  • 4.1Background
    • 4.1.1Historical overview and emergence of a scientific community
    • 4.1.2Names, categories and concepts
      • 4.1.2.1Lexical categories of soundscape
      • 4.1.2.2Naming soundscapes in different languages
    • 4.1.3From naming to meaning in discourse
    • 4.1.4Conclusion on different conceptualizations of soundscapes
  • 4.2How do people make sense of sounds around them
    • 4.2.1Categories of isolated everyday sounds
    • 4.2.2Soundscapes in individual memory
    • 4.2.3Exploring soundscapes in the wild
    • 4.2.4Exploring soundscape in the lab
      • 4.2.4.1Ecological validity of experimental settings
  • 4.3Soundscape as a hybrid concept
    • 4.3.1Theories of categorization
    • 4.3.2From sounds to sources and activities
    • 4.3.3The challenge of working across disciplines
  • 4.4Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Additional readings on soundscape research
Published online: 1 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.24.04gua
References
Acoustics – Soundscape – Part I: Definition and conceptual framework (Standard No. 12913:2014) (Standard)
(2014) Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Standardization.Google Scholar
Adams, M. D., Bruce, N. S., Davies, W. J., Cain, R., Jennings, P., Carlyle, A., … Plack, C.
(2008) Soundwalking as a methodology for understanding soundscapes. In Institute of Acoustics Spring Conference. Reading, UK.Google Scholar
Augoyard, J.-F., & Torgue, H.
(1995) Répertoire des effets sonores, à l’écoute de l’environnement. Marseille, France: Parenthèses.Google Scholar
Barnes, J.
(Ed.) (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation (Vol. 1). Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bild, E., Steele, D., Pfeffer, K., Bertolini, L., & Guastavino, C.
(2018) Activity as a mediator between users of public spaces and their interpretation of the auditory environment. Lessons from the Musikiosk soundscape intervention. In F. Aletta & J. Xiao (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Perception-driven approaches to urban assessment and design (pp. 100–125). Hershey, PA, USA: IGI Global. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Botteldooren, D., Andringa, T., Aspuru, I., Brown, L., Dubois, D., Guastavino, C., … Schulte-Forkamp, B.
(2015) From sonic environment to soundscape. In J. Kang & B. Schulte-Forkamp (Eds.), Soundscape and the built environment (pp. 17–42). CRC Press Taylor & Francis. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, A. L., Kang, J., & Gjestland, T.
(2011) Towards standardization in soundscape preference assessment. Applied Acoustics, 72(6), 387–392. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bruner, J.
(1990) Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University press.Google Scholar
David, S., Dubois, D., Rouby, C., & Schaal, B.
(1997) L’expression des odeurs en français: analyse lexicale et représentation cognitive. Intellectica, 1 (24), 51–83.. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dubois, D.
(2000) Categories as acts of meaning: The case of categories in olfaction and audition. Cognitive Science Quarterly, 1, 35–68.Google Scholar
(2012) Dénommer, définir, identifier, décrire une ambiance — A semantic analysis of the word “soundscape”. In Ambiances in action. Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress on Ambiances / Ambiances en acte(s). Actes du 2nd Congrès International sur les Ambiances (pp. 683–688). Montréal, Canada: International Ambiances Network.Google Scholar
Dubois, D., Guastavino, C., & Raimbault, M.
(2006) A cognitive approach to urban sound-scapes: Using verbal data to access everyday life auditory categories. Acta Acustica United with Acustica, 92(6), 865–874.Google Scholar
Dubois, D., & Schulte-Fortkamp, B.
(Eds.) (2006) Acta Acustica united with Acustica, Special Issue on Soundscapes (Vol. 92 (6)).Google Scholar
Féraud, O.
(2010) Public voices. Sonic environments, inhabitant representations and uses in a Neapolitan popular area (PhD Thesis). École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
Gaver, W.
(1993) What in the world do we hear? An ecological approach to auditory event perception. Ecological Psychology, 5(1), 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibson, J. J.
(1979) The ecological Approach to visual Perception. Boston, MA, USA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Gidlöf-Gunnarsson, A., & Öhrström, E.
(2007) Noise and well-being in urban residential environments: The potential role of perceived availability to nearby green areas. Landscape and Urban Planning, 83(2–3), 115–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guastavino, C.
(2006) The ideal urban soundscape: Investigating the sound quality of French cities. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 92(6), 945–951.Google Scholar
(2007) Categorization of environmental sounds. Canadian journal of experimental psychology, 61 (1), 54–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2018) Everyday Sound Categorization. In T. Virtanen, M. D. Plumbley, & D. Ellis (Eds.), Computational Analysis of Sound Scenes and Events (pp. 183–213). Springer International Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guastavino, C., & Cheminée, P.
(2004) A psycholinguistic approach to the ecological validity of experimental settings. Food Quality and Preference, 15, 884–886.Google Scholar
(2006) Basses fréquences en milieu urbain : qu’en disent les citadins ? Acoustique et techniques, 44, 39–45.Google Scholar
Guastavino, C., Katz, B. F. G., Polack, J.-D., Levitin, D. J., & Dubois, D.
(2005) Ecological validity of soundscape reproduction. Acta Acustica United with Acustica, 50 (2), 333–341.Google Scholar
Guastavino, C., & Pijanowski, B. C.
(2011) Soundscape ecology: a worldwide network. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130 (4), 2531. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guyot, F., Castellengo, M., & Fabre, B.
(1997) Étude de la catégorisation d’un corpus de bruits domestiques. In D. Dubois (Ed.), Catégorisation et cognition : de la perception au discours (pp. 41–58). Paris: Kimé.Google Scholar
Kang, J., Chourmouziadou, K., Sakantamis, K., Wang, B., & Hao, Y.
(2013) Soundscape of European Cities and Landscape. Oxford, UK: Soundscape-COST.Google Scholar
Kang, J., & Schulte-Forkamp, B.
(2015) Soundscape and the built environment. Cambrigde, MA, USA: CRC Press Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Maffiolo, V.
(1999) Caractérisation sémantique et acoustique de la qualité sonore de l’environnement urbain (PhD Thesis). Université du Maine.
Maffiolo, V., David, S., Dubois, D., Vogel, C., Castellengo, M., & Polack, J.-D.
(1997) Sound characterization of urban environment. In Proceedings of Internoise. Budapest, Hungary.Google Scholar
Morel, J., Marquis-Favre, C., Dubois, D., & Pierrette, M.
(2012) Road traffic in urban areas: A perceptual and cognitive typology of pass-by noises. Acta acustica united with acustica, 98(1), 166–178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mzali, M., Dubois, D., Polack, J.-D., Létourneaux, F., & Poisson, F.
(2001) Mental representation of auditory comfort inside trains: Methodological and theoretical issues. In Proceedings of Internoise (pp. 1691–1696). The Hague, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
Neuhoff, J. G.
(2004) Introduction and history. In J. G. Neuhoff (Ed.), Ecological psychoacous-tics (pp. 1–13). Brill.Google Scholar
Niessen, M., Cance, C., & Dubois, D.
(2010) Categories for soundscape: Toward a hybrid classification. In Proceedings of Internoise 2010.Google Scholar
Niessen, M., Van de Cruys, T., Cance, C., & Dubois, D.
(2013) Sound and Noise in Sonic Environmental Studies: Comparing Word Meaning in Discourses of Community Noise and Soundscape Research. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 99 (6), 853–862. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pickard, A.
(2013) Research Methods in Information. Facet publishing.Google Scholar
Pijanowski, B. C., Farina, A., Gage, S. H., Dumyahn, S. L., & Krause, B. L.
(2011) What is soundscape ecology? An introduction and overview of an emerging new science. Landscape Ecology, 26(9), 1213–1232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Radicchi, A.
(2018) The notion of soundscape in the realm of sensuous urbanism. A historical perspective. In A. Wilson (Ed.), Listen! (pp. 99–125). Cambridge Scholars Publisher.Google Scholar
Raimbault, M.
(2006) Qualitative judgments of urban soundscapes : Questionning questionnaires and semantic scales. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 92(6), 929–937.Google Scholar
Rosch, E.
(1975) Cognitive Representation of Semantic Categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104 (3), 192–233. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosch, E., & Lloyd, B. B.
(1978) Cognition and categorization.Google Scholar
Russolo, L.
(1913) L’Art des Bruits. Paris, France: Allia.Google Scholar
Schafer, R. M.
(1977) The Tuning of the World. Knopf.Google Scholar
Schubert, E. D.
(1975) The role of auditory perception in language processing. In D. D. Duane & M. B. Rawson (Eds.), Reading, Perception, and Language (pp. 97–130). Baltimore, MD, USA: York.Google Scholar
Southworth, M.
(1967) The Sonic Environment of Cities. Environment and Behavior, 1 (1), 49–70.Google Scholar
Steele, D., Bild, E., Tarlao, C., & Guastavino, C.
(2019) Soundtracking the public space: outcomes of the musikiosk soundscape intervention. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(10), 1865. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steele, D., Dumoulin, R., Voreux, L., Gautier, N., Glaus, M., Guastavino, C., & Voix, J.
(2015, July). Musikiosk: a soundscape intervention and evaluation in an urban park. In 59th International Conference of the Audio Engineering Society: Sound Reinforcement Engineering and Technology (pp. T–6). Montreal, QC, Canada.Google Scholar
Steele, D., Fraisse, V., Bild, E., & Guastavino, C.
(2021) Bringing music to the park: The effect of musikiosk on the quality of public experience. Applied Acoustics, 177, 107910.
Steffens, J., Steele, D., & Guastavino, C.
(2015) New insights into soundscape evaluations using the experience sampling method. In Proceedings of Euronoise 2015 (pp. 1495–1500).Google Scholar
(2017) Situational and person-related factors influencing momentary and retrospective soundscape evaluations in day-to-day life. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141 (3), 1414–1425. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
VanDerveer, N. J.
(1979) Ecological acoustics: human perception of environmental sounds (PhD Thesis). Cornell University.

Additional readings on soundscape research

Aletta, F., Lepore, F., Kostara-Konstantinou, E., Kang, J., & Astolfi, A.
(2016) An experimental study on the influence of soundscapes on people’s behaviour in an open public space. Applied Sciences, 6(10), 276.Google Scholar
Aspuru, I., Fernandez, M., García, I. & Herranz-Pascual, M. K.
(2013) Soundscape within the strategy of Bilbao city to improve Quality of Public Spaces, in Proceedings of the NAG-DAGA, Merano, Italy, pp. 18–21.
Aumond, P., Can, A., De Coensel, B., Botteldooren, D., Ribeiro, C. & Lavandier, C.
(2017) Modeling Soundscape Pleasantness Using perceptual Assessments and Acoustic Measurements Along Paths in Urban Context, Acta Acustica united with Acustica 103:430–443.Google Scholar
Axelsson, Ö., Guastavino, C., & Payne, S.
(2019) Editorial: Soundscape assessment. Frontiers in Psychology, section Environmental Psychology, 10, 2514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berglund, B. & Nilsson, M. E.
(2006) One tool for measuring soundscape quality in urban residental areas, Acta Acustica united with Acustica 92:938–944.Google Scholar
Bild, E., Steele, D., Pfeffer, K., Bertolini, L., & Guastavino, C.
(2018) Activity as a mediator between users of public spaces and their interpretation of the auditory environment. Lessons from the Musikiosk soundscape intervention. In F. Aletta, & J. Xiao (Eds)., Handbook of Research on Perception-driven approaches to urban assessment and design (pp. 100–125). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.Google Scholar
Botteldooren, D., Andringa, T., Aspuru, I., Brown, L., Dubois, D., Guastavino, C., Jian, K., Lavandier, C., Nilsson, M., Preis, A., & Schulte-Forkamp, B.
(2015) From sonic environment to soundscape. In J. Kang, K. and B. Schulte-Forkamp (Eds). Soundscape and the built environment (pp. 17–42). Oxford, UK: CRC Press Taylor & Francis. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brambilla, G., De Gregorio, L., Lembo, P. & Maffei, L.
(2006) Laboratory evaluation of soundscape in quiet areas, in Proceedings of Euronoise, Tampare, Finland.
Brambilla, G. & Maffei, L.
(2006) Responses to Noise in Urban Parks and in Rural Quiet Areas, Acta Acustica United with Acustica 92:881–886.Google Scholar
Brambilla, G., Maffei, L. & Zambon, G.
(2006) Preserving natural quiet areas and urban parks, in Proceedings of Internoise, Honolulu, HI, USA.
Delaître, P., Lavandier, C., Dedieu, R. & Gey, N.
(2002) Meaning of quiet areas in urban context through people viewpoints, in Proceedings of Acoustics, Nantes, France.
Faburel, G., & Gourlot, N.
(2008) Référentiel national pour la définition et la création des zones calmes. Recherche sur l’espace, les transports, l’environnement et les institutions locales (CRETEIL) de l’Institut d’urbanisme de Paris. Université Paris-XII, pp. 1–6.Google Scholar
Farina, A. & Pieretti, N.
(2014) From umwelt to soundtope: an epistemological Essay on Cognitive Ecology, Biosemiotics 7:1–10.Google Scholar
Gillan, M.
(2017) Song monuments in Okinawa — Intersections of sound, place and memory. Shima 11:20–37.Google Scholar
Gomez, S., Dominguès, C., Aumond, P., Lavandier, C., Palka, G., & Serrhini, K.
(2017) Cartographic Representation of Soundscape: Proposals and Assessment. In Leitner, M. & Jokar Arsanjani, J. (Eds.), Citizen Empowered Mapping. Geotechnologies and the Environment, vol. 18. Springer.Google Scholar
Hiramatsu, K.
(1999) Activities and impacts of soundscape association of Japan, in Proceedings of Internoise and Noise-Con, pp. 1357–1362.
Hiramatsu, K., Torigoe, K., Dubois, D., & Schulte-Fortkamp, B.
(2009) The concepts of soundscape. Are there shallow soundscapes and deep soundscapes?, in Proceedings of Internoise and Noise-con, pp. 3469–3475).
Jeon, J. Y., Hong, J., Lavandier, C., Lafon, J., Axelsson, Ö. & Hurtig, M.
(2018) A cross-national comparison in assessment of urban park soundscapes in France, Korea, and Sweden through laboratory experiments. Applied Acoustics 133:107–117.Google Scholar
Kang, J.
(2006) Urban sound environment. CRC Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lavandier, C. & Delaître, P.
(2015) Individual and shared representations on “zones calmes” (“quiet areas”) among the French population in urban context, Applied Acoustics 99:135–144.Google Scholar
Lavia, L., Easteal, M., Close, D., Witchel, H., Axelsson, Ö., Ware, M., & Dixon, M.
(2012) Sounding Brighton: practical approaches towards better soundscapes. In Proceedings of Internoise 2012, New York City, NY, USA.
Lavia, L., Witchel, H. J., Kang, J., & Aletta, F.
(2016) A preliminary soundscape management model for added sound in public spaces to discourage anti-social and support pro-social effects on public behaviour. In Proceedings of the DAGA 2016 Conference.
Lercher, P. & Schulte-Fortkamp, B.
(2003) The relevance of soundscape research to the assessment of noise annoyance at the community level, in Proceedings of the 8th International Congress on Noise as a Public Health Problem, pp. 225–231.
Mydlarz, C., Sharma, M., Lockerman, Y., Steers, B., Silva, C., & Bello, J. P.
(2019) The Life of a New York City Noise Sensor Network. Sensors, 19, 1415. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nielbo, F. L., Steele, D., & Guastavino, C.
(2013) Investigating soundscape affordances through activity appropriateness, in Proceedings of International Congress on Acoustics, Montreal, Canada. DOI logo
Paté, A., Lavandier, C., Minard, A., & Le Griffon, I.
(2017) Perceived unpleasantness of aircraft flyover noise: influence of temporal parameters. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 103(1), 34–47.Google Scholar
Payne, S. R.
(2013) The production of a perceived restorativeness soundscape scale. Applied Acoustics, 74(2), 255–263.Google Scholar
Sayin, E., Krishna, A., Ardelet, C., Briand Decré, G., & Goudey, A.
(2015) “Sound and safe”: The effect of ambient sound on the perceived safety of public spaces. International Journal of Research in Marketing 32:343–353.Google Scholar
Schulte-Fortkamp, B., & Kang, J.
(2013) Introduction to the special issue on soundscapes, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134(1):765–766.Google Scholar
Steele, D., Kerrigan, C., & Guastavino, C.
(2020) Sounds in the City: bridging the gaps from research to practice through soundscape workshops. Journal of Urban Design, 1–19.Google Scholar
Tarlao, C., Steffens, J., & Guastavino, C.
(2021) Investigating contextual influences on urban soundscape evaluations with structural equation modeling. Building and Environment, 188–107490. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Renterghem, T., Vanhecke, K., Filipan, K., Sun, K., De Pessemier, T., De Coensel, B., … Botteldooren, D.
(2020) Interactive soundscape augmentation by natural sounds in a noise polluted urban park. Landscape and urban planning, 194.Google Scholar
Woodcock, J., Davies, W. & Cox, T.
(2017) A cognitive framework for the categorisation of auditory objects in urban soundscapes. Applied Acoustics 121:56–64.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Cambourian, Paul, Arthur Paté, Caroline Cance, Benoît Navarret & Jérôme Vasseur
2022. Vocabulary to speak about touch: analysis of the discourse of electric guitar players. Acta Acustica 6 ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
Hartman, Jenny & Carita Paradis
2023. The language of sound: events and meaning multitasking of words. Cognitive Linguistics 34:3-4 ► pp. 445 ff. DOI logo
Misdariis, N., E. Özcan, M. Grassi, S. Pauletto, S. Barrass, R. Bresin & P. Susini
2022. Sound experts’ perspectives on astronomy sonification projects. Nature Astronomy 6:11 ► pp. 1249 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.