Sounds in the city: bridging the gaps from research to practice through soundscape workshops

Abstract

Sound has been relatively underrepresented in urban design considerations, especially the positive aspects of sound. Yet, a vast body of academic literature on urban soundscape could inform professionals. We report on workshops with iterative improvements, designed to bring soundscape research to practice. The two workshops were conducted as part of the Sounds in the City partnership, in collaboration with the City of Montreal. Different workshop formats are compared, and recommendations are furnished both in terms of promoting awareness of the role of urban sound and with the intent of informing similar knowledge mobilization activities for researchers in related environmental fields.

Let the Children Listen: A First Approximation to the Sound Environment Assessment of Children through a Soundwalk Approach

“…Originally, soundwalks had an educational purpose: they intended to encourage the practice of listening [44,45]. They were originally carried out mainly in rural areas [45], whereas today, soundwalks mostly take place in urban areas [36,[38][39][40][46][47][48][49]. The concept has been adapted to better understand people's perception of the urban sound environment [38].…”

“…The concept has been adapted to better understand people's perception of the urban sound environment [38]. Additionally, Steele et al summarized a series of positive aspects that a soundwalk has from the participants' point of view: the learning benefits of an immersive activity, the ability to raise awareness of diverse sound environments, active listening, and the demonstration of the reciprocal influences between the sound environment and the urban design [49].…”

“…Examples of this can be found in the soundwalks that are systematically carried out by the group "Sounds in the city" from Montreal, Canada (www.sounds-in-the-city.org), or the "urbanidentity" group in Zurich, Switzerland, which uses soundwalks and workshops to start discussions on urban (acoustic) qualities (more information can be found at www.urbanidentity.info). Furthermore, a vast number of scientific materials has been using soundwalks also for establishing methodologies, e.g., [38,39,46,47,49]. During the evaluation, participants are invited to listen actively to the environment, rating the sites mainly through questionnaires that gather respondents' impressions.…”

Musical Smart City: Perspectives on Ubiquitous Sonification

“…The work in DataScaping represents what would be considered a successful case of applying sonification in a specific sector of a smart city and the authors conclude by suggesting the need for assessment of this techniques in the case of multiple modalities of data. Finally, the work of Steele et al tackles awareness of the role of sound in urban settings [Steele et al 2019]. In Sounds In The City, the authors propose two workshops held in Montreal, the first focusing on using sounds to create audible experiences in pedestrian zones, and the second about the preservation of goodquality sound environments.…”

“…Thus, a combination of sonification and ubiquitous music techniques emerges as a possible solution towards the representation of data in the smart city context. It is worth clarifying that this work differs from environmental soundscape studies within the city [Steele et al 2019] and from urban sound monitoring [Bello et al 2018]. Indeed, we propose to generate new sound content based on urban related data, and do not focus on analyzing sounds from the city.…”