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Soundscape

A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology to computer science. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources, natural and artificial, within a given area as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.(ISO 12913-1:2014) A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology to computer science. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources, natural and artificial, within a given area as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.(ISO 12913-1:2014) A soundscape is a sound or combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment. The study of soundscape is the subject of acoustic ecology or soundscape ecology. The idea of soundscape refers to both the natural acoustic environment, consisting of natural sounds, including animal vocalizations, the collective habitat expression of which is now referred to as the biophony, and, for instance, the sounds of weather and other natural elements, now referred to as the geophony; and environmental sounds created by humans, the anthropophony through a sub-set called controlled sound, such as musical composition, sound design, and language, work, and sounds of mechanical origin resulting from use of industrial technology. Crucially, the term soundscape also includes the listener's perception of sounds heard as an environment: 'how that environment is understood by those living within it' and therefore mediates their relations. The disruption of these acoustic environments results in noise pollution. The term 'soundscape' can also refer to an audio recording or performance of sounds that create the sensation of experiencing a particular acoustic environment, or compositions created using the found sounds of an acoustic environment, either exclusively or in conjunction with musical performances. Pauline Oliveros, composer of post-World War II electronic art music, defined the term 'soundscape' as 'All of the waveforms faithfully transmitted to our audio cortex by the ear and its mechanisms'. The origin of the term soundscape is somewhat ambiguous. It is often miscredited as having been coined by Canadian composer and naturalist, R. Murray Schafer, who indeed led much of the groundbreaking work on the subject from the 1960s and onwards. According to an interview with Schafer published in 2013 Schafer himself attributes the term to city planner Michael Southworth. Southworth, a former student of Kevin Lynch, led a project in Boston in the 1960s, and reported the findings in a paper entitled 'The Sonic Environment of Cities,' in 1969, where the term is used. To complicate matters, however, a search in Google NGram reveals that soundscape had been used in other publications prior to this. More research is needed to establish the historical background in detail. .Around the same time as Southworth's project in Boston, Schafer initiated the now famous World Soundscape project together with colleagues like Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp. Schafer subsequently collected the findings from the world soundscape project and fleshed out the soundscape concept in more detail in his seminal work about the sound environment, 'Tuning of the World.' Schafer has also used the concept in music education. In music, soundscape compositions are often a form of electronic music, or electroacoustic music. Composers who use soundscapes include real-time granular synthesis pioneer Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Luc Ferrari, whose Presque rien, numéro 1 (1970) is an early soundscape composition. Soundscape composer Petri Kuljuntausta has created soundscape compositions from the sounds of sky dome and Aurora Borealis and deep sea underwater recordings, and a work entitled 'Charm of Sound' to be performed at the extreme environment of Saturn's moon Titan. The work landed on the ground of Titan in 2005 after traveling inside the spacecraft Huygens over seven years and four billion kilometres through space. Irv Teibel's Environments series (1969–79) consisted of 30-minute, uninterrupted environmental soundscapes and synthesized or processed versions of natural sound. Music soundscapes can also be generated by automated software methods, such as the experimental TAPESTREA application, a framework for sound design and soundscape composition, and others.

[ "Acoustics", "Aesthetics", "Visual arts", "Sound (geography)", "Biophony", "Acoustic ecology", "Soundscape ecology" ]
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