No abstract

It is now about 15 years that Soundscape came into the field of community noise and sound quality. The Soundscape approach has provided essential knowledge for the demanding tasks which are required for the design and planning of sustainable environments to support to wellbeing, health, and quality of life, respectively. The multidimensional Soundscape approach puts emphasis on the way the acoustic environment is perceived, experienced and understood by the individual and by society (ISO/TC 43/SC 1/WG 54). Moreover, it accounts for people's concerns and integrates the exposed people as experts. The process of tuning of noise pollution or sound design with respect to the expertise of people's mind is related to the strategy of triangulation of interdisciplinary data. Moreover, the Soundscape approach provides the frame work to integrate contextual and subjective variables to improve the respective Soundscape with regard to people's expertise. This paper will highlight the process of Soundscape and its application with respect to ISO/TC43/SC 1/WG 54 and the COST network TD0804 on Soundscape and Landscape with regard to its implementation and dissemination in the diverse fields of acoustic environments and its definitive meaning concerning quality of life.

Experiences and expectations of listeners have a significant influence to ratings of soundscapes. Sounds do not only occur on a single level of perception to peoples' ears, they appear with a setting of information of the source(s) to the “listening background” of the individual at a certain location. Although these possible combinations seem to be infinite, common judgments are unfolded on appropriateness of sounds on places. For the evaluation of two public indoor and two public outdoor locations in the city of Berlin, the soundwalk has been used with students in a series of five consecutive years to investigate predominant aspects of rating soundscapes. This tool provides a substantial data acquisition of the environment with technical measurements and documentations as well as ratings and appraisals by the participants. The data-triangulation enables to detect contextual moderators of the participants' evaluation by adjusting situational focus and importance. In subsequent laboratory tests—with the recorded stimuli—this connotation of non-acoustical features is discovered, especially by their absence, also the underlying attitude towards sound sources is identified. Finally, a reflecting discourse with the attendees on their ratings shows the need of elucidation of the meaning of individual use of words and phrases.

In a current project on dynamics of urban safety and its arrangements funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany http://www.dynass-projekt.de/projekt-dynass/ Dynamische Arrangements städtischer Sicherheitskultur/, the Soundscape approach is one of diverse approaches to investigate areas of different cities with respect to the perception and production of safety in such environments. As to the perception of safety, areas as well as its production special attention will be given to the reconstruction of decisive factors. The current status of the international standardization process of the ISO/TC 43/SC 1/WG 54 and the contribution of the COST network are used here as the basis to improve procedures and measures in the applied Soundscape approach. Moreover, this paper will discuss the Soundscape research as an interdisciplinary approach and in an interdisciplinary approach with regard to investigations upon safety management in urban areas. First results give hints to the importance of the acoustic, visual, and social structures of an area in the face of the Soundscape procedure.

Current work takes a comparative view on the analysis of several soundwalks in urban areas, investigating the benefit of additional effort in enhancing the attendees' description-level for data triangulation. Soundwalk is a tool in the soundscape approach for an all-embracing analysis of the unique sonic environment. The triangulation of data has to combine acoustical measurements of the same procedures and perceptive appraisals differing in its quality of description. The focus of each research varies from perception of places to questions of the overall feeling of safety at the different locations. Local, acoustical and safety experts are involved. The qualitative analysis considers several variables like profession of soundwalkers, knowledge about places, kind of places, chosen or given locations, and the used native language of questioning. Different levels of description narrated by the participators will be identified, as well as its possible emphasis by discourse on attendees' scaled ratings and written notes. This analysis progress contributes to an appropriate assignment of subjective descriptions to values of psychoacoustical parameters and the elucidation of predominant aspects in the soundscape. Furthermore the soundwalk's contrasting capacity with regards to the content of previous interviews detected multiple layers on the issue of safety in municipal locations.