The soundscape is the sonic environment of the world; it is any acoustic field of study. A soundscape can be defined as a musical composition, radio programs, a forest or a school or an isolated acoustic environment. The soundscape has changed over time; modern man exists in a sound environment much different than it was in past.
The sense of participation based on balance and consistency between human expression and natural sounds is completely altered by the emergence of a quantitatively immeasurable sound reality. In this situation, the individual becomes a simple passive receptor, a spectator of an uncontrollable reality. The soundscape necessarily implies a reference to a cultural, symbolic and social milieu. Using the study of acoustic phenomena and coding theory, it is possible to reflect on soundscapes in a meaningful way and thereby make it accessible to designers.
There are no differences between music and sound. Music is just a form of noise and people tend to call music the thing that is appealing to them, or what metaphorically represents beauty. The distinction is only a mathematical form not related to perception: music is ordered sound and noise is disordered sound. Music is an infinite and ordinate sum of sines and cosines multiplied by coefficients. Therefore, this is the mathematical representation of music:
The idea is to learn to isolate the sounds that are considered unsightly and to perceive them as a stimulus that can be part of something not necessarily unpleasant through interpretation and knowledge. From acoustics and psychoacoustics studies, we have learned to interpret sound physically and we have considered how it affects the brain. From arts and music, we know now how to create an ideal sound around us that allows us to reflect both creatively and psychologically. Using the framework put forth by Raymond Murray Schafer, composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist, this work shows that it is possible to perceive the world as a great macrocosmic musical composition.
The act of listening requires a skill more refined than the one of feeling. The French composer Pierre Schaffer notes that the act of listening is created in four actions for different intensity, interest and knowledge. The four actions are intrinsically related to the semantics of the musical structure and the basic grammar of the concept itself. They are: to listen, to hear, to understand and to comprehend. Listening is defined as having an interest related to sound and a tender ear to listen to it. For Schaffer, "to listen" is an immediate activation of a familiar figurative landscape. Listening means to return the sound to the mind that immediately activates stereotypes and visions related thereto.
According to Algirdas Greimas, "The listening allows immediate reconstruction of the frame figurative. There is, therefore, a cogency of listening that is derived from being willing act. The conceptualization of the vague moment in the complex process that transforms the subject in terms of the narrative dimension, except for those related to the size of the senses. This concept expresses that the semiotics of the image are related to the perception, which follows the phenomenological model of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
For the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, signs are inherent in all "being" but their development is only possible in a human context.20 And even for Schaeffer, "reduced listening" is the attitude of listening to the sound itself, as a sound object, abstracting from its origin, real or supposed.21 It has carried out a real removal of the sound source from the perception of the listener in order to perceive the sound object in its morphological structure. The act of leaving aside some of our listening habits is a voluntary act that allows us to explain many phenomena implicit in our perception. Since this type of listening is to strip the sound of all that is not really inherent in himself, paying attention only to the latter in its materiality, in its essence, in its size sensitive.
Through a sound recording we can create cuts and inversions, rings, transposition, sampling, compression, gels (freezing), reverberation, echoes, delays, filtering, mixing, and accumulation. Morphology identifies sounds and characteristic of sounds: pitch, intensity and timbre, and it is therefore the study of the sound object as a structure, or its context: looking inward that aims at a description of its physical properties. The qualification of the object, which is supposed to be described, has seven morphological criteria that are divided according to the axis of form/matter.
1. Basic knowledge of programming (e.g. Python, JavaScript)
2. Familiarity with music and audio processing concepts
3. A computer with a decent processor and memory
We hope this work can empower designers, researchers, urban planners or just anyone who wants to become more aware of their experience of sound, by offering them methodological tools to rethink the role of sound. Different urban scenarios were compared, aiming to understand the soundscape, exploring the connections between sounds and perception through the cultural aspects and the rules of physics contained. within sound.
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