Search

George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique is notorious for its cacophonous sonorities, its industrial allusions, and its use of mechanical instruments, notably the player piano. Despite a successful première in Paris in 1926, the 1927 American reception of the piece was viscerally critical. Drawing upon contemporary documents, this article reconsiders the American reception of the ballet in light of the relationship between early twentieth-century American audiences and the mechanical. It suggests that through its use of mechanized instruments, specifically the player piano, Ballet Mécanique exacerbated anxiety and skepticism about the mechanical and mirrored a growing fear about the destructive consequences of a mechanized society., Le Ballet mécanique de George Antheil est célèbre pour ses sonorités cacophoniques, ses allusions industrielles et son utilisation d’instruments mécaniques, notamment le Pianola. Bien reçue à Paris en 1926, la pièce fut très mal accueillie aux États-Unis en 1927. En s’appuyant sur des sources de l’époque, cet article reconsidère la réception américaine du ballet à la lumière de la relation entre le public américain du début du XXe siècle et le machinisme. Il suggère qu’à travers son utilisation d’instruments mécaniques, en particulier le Pianola, le Ballet mécanique a exacerbé l’anxiété et le scepticisme à l’égard des machines en reflétant la peur croissante des conséquences destructrices d’une société mécanisée.

This article explores the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of understanding urban soundscapes as aural commons: as dynamic fields of action shaped together by various actors with heterogeneous valuations. Adopting the perspective of the commons implies that the management of soundscapes should not be framed in terms of isolated sound (re)sources but through the social, cultural, and political processes by which the actors inhabiting the shared acoustic environment seek to make sense of their inevitable coexistence. The notion of aural commons is illustrated with a particular noise dispute between a multi-story night spot and its neighbors in Helsinki, Finland, from a media ethnographic approach. The analysis shows that relevant arenas and practices through which differing sonic valuations could be mediated are lacking. Noise disputes in administrative processes and their media representations are translated into a technical discourse that fails to create common ground for appreciating the differences in living together in a city with sound. By focusing on the potential of commoning as a social process, the article proposes an alternative approach to understanding and improving the socio-cultural and socio-material dynamics of urban soundscapes.

A inicios de la Edad Moderna, la música se relacionaba con un alto estatus social e instituciones poderosas, puesto que estaba fuertemente asociada con la proyección de autoridad por parte de la iglesia y la corona. Los espacios urbanos eran lugares donde el poder se negociaba a través de rituales y eventos en que la música desempeñaba un importante papel solemnizador. Los conventos de monjas contribuían sonoramente a la vida política de la ciudad y su ceremonial, y este solapamiento de música, poder y vida religiosa formaba parte de las expectativas y percepciones del público. Este artículo evalúa la participación de los conventos en la vida política de las ciudades ibéricas a inicios de la Edad Moderna. Las actividades musicales organizadas dentro del convento adquirían un matiz político mediante la asistencia de autoridades civiles. Asimismo, la música podía interpretarse en espacios conventuales que permitían la proyección sonora hacia el mundo exterior, lo que permitía a las monjas participar en ceremonias urbanas. Menos frecuentemente la música se interpretaba fuera del espacio conventual. Este artículo se basa en la dicotomía dentro-fuera y ofrece ejemplos que ilustran las diferentes estrategias utilizadas por los conventos para alcanzar su entorno urbano a través del sonido., In the early modern period, music was related both to high status and institutions of power, since it was heavily associated with royal and ecclesiastical projections of authority. Urban spaces were places where power was negotiated through rituals and events in which music played an essential, solemnifying role. Female convents used sounds to contribute to the political life of a city and its ceremonial; this overlap of music, power, and religious life was thus embedded in the expectations and perceptions of the public. This article assesses the role of nunneries in the political life of early modern Iberian cities, considering their relationship to government institutions, royalty, the church hierarchy, and the nobility. The musical activities organised inside the cloister acquired a political tone by hosting civic dignitaries. Likewise, music might be performed around convent buildings in ways which actively sought to project sound towards the outside world, allowing nuns to participate in urban ceremonies. More rarely, music was performed directly outside the convent space. This article therefore focuses on this inside-outside dichotomy, offering examples to illustrate the different strategies used by nunneries in order to reach their urban surroundings through sounds.

This paper is an exploration into whether public space users performing different activities describe their auditory environments in noticeably different ways. Building on soundscape and psycholinguistic literature, a questionnaire study was conducted in a large park in Amsterdam (NL), where 92 park users described, in writing, their activities and auditory environments. Users' self-reported activities were categorized based on their level of social interaction (solitary vs. socially interactive), and using open coding, generating categories of activities grouped by semantic range. The written corpus on auditory environment descriptions was analysed through a proposed classificatory framework, coding descriptions at three semantic and one syntactic level. We preliminarily tested whether there are associations between various categories of activities and of auditory environment descriptions, categorized at different levels. Our results suggest that, while for detailed levels of activity categorization there were no non-distinct patterns, the level of social interaction of users' activities has an observable effect over users' descriptions of their auditory environments. This holds particularly in relation to types of sounds listed, as well as for differences in descriptions at a syntactic level. These findings point towards subtly diff erent auditory experiences in the same public space for users performing solitary or socially interactive activities.

International audience; “Can sound be defined as a factor in the social reproduction of space?” The research culminated in the production of a sound map based on soundwalk recordings, soundscape analysis, and surveys. To better understand the relation of sound, individual & environment in urban fields, we aim to collect crowdsourced data through the website. Soundwalks have been converted into flipbooks of sound postcards – embedded QR codes – allowing users access to the website. Here, users can create postcards (upload fieldrecords), participate in the survey, get to contribute to the body of sonic data pertaining to the urban environment, individual experiences to be then used as a resource for further soundscape analysis and to create awareness of everyday sonic fields in order to discuss urban public spaces.

Soundscape research represents a paradigm shift from noise control policies towards a new multidisciplinary approach as it involves not only physical measurements but also the cooperation of humanity and social sciences to account for the diversity of soundscapes across countries and cultures, with more focus on how people actually experience the acoustic environments; and it considers environmental sounds as a ‘resource’ rather than a ‘waste’. The ten questions presented in this paper range from the very basic definitions underlying the emerging soundscape ‘science’, to more applied topics about how to use soundscape as a design approach for the planning and management of the built environments. Although significant research activity has been conducted so far, there is still a need to systematically provide the underpinning science and practical guidance in soundscaping. Thus, the last question aims to identify the most crucial gaps in soundscape research and set the agenda for future advancements in the field.

The increasing importance attributed to soundscape quality in urban design generates a need for a system for automatic quality assessment that could be used for example in monitoring. In this work, the possibility for using machine listening techniques for this purpose is explored. The outlined approach detects the presence of particular sounds in a human-inspired way, and therefore allows to draw conclusions about how soundscapes are perceived. The system proposed in this paper consists of a partly recurrent artificial neural network modified to incorporate human attention mechanisms. The network is trained on sounds recorded in typical urban parks in the city of Antwerp, and thus becomes an auditory object creation and classification system particularly tuned to this context. The system is used to analyze a continuous sound level recording in different parks, resulting in a prediction of sounds that will most likely be noticed by a park visitor. Finally, it is shown that these indicators for noticed sounds allow to construct more powerful models for soundscape quality as reported in a survey with park visitors than indicators that are more regularly used in soundscape research.

We propose a framework based on evolutionary principles and the theory of enactive cognition ("being by doing"), that addresses the foundation of key results and central questions of soundscape research. We hypothesize that the two main descriptors (measures of how people perceive the acoustic environment) of soundscape appraisal ('pleasantness' and 'eventfulness'), reflect evolutionarily old motivational and affective systems that promote survival through preferences for certain environments and avoidance of others. Survival is aimed at ending or avoiding existential threats and protecting viability in a deficient environment. On the other hand, flourishing occurs whenever survival is not an immediate concern and aims to improve the agent's viability and by co-creating ever better conditions for existence. As such, survival is experienced as unpleasant, and deals with immediate problems to be ended or avoided, while flourishing is enjoyable, and therefore to be aimed for and maintained. Therefore, the simplest, safety-relevant meaning attributable to soundscapes (audible safety) should be key to understanding soundscape appraisal. To strengthen this, we show that the auditory nervous system is intimately connected to the parts of our brains associated with arousal and emotions. Furthermore, our theory demonstrates that 'complexity' and 'affordance content' of the perceived environment are important underlying soundscape indicators (measures used to predict the value of a soundscape descriptor). Consideration of these indicators allows the same soundscape to be viewed from a second perspective; one driven more by meaning attribution characteristics than merely emotional appraisal. The synthesis of both perspectives of the same person-environment interaction thus consolidates the affective, informational, and even the activity related perspectives on soundscape appraisal. Furthermore, we hypothesize that our current habitats are not well matched to our, evolutionarily old, auditory warning systems, and that we consequently have difficulty establishing audible safety. This leads to more negative and aroused moods and emotions, with stress-related symptoms as a result.

Psychological restoration in urban agglomerations has become a growing challenge. Although scientific proof of the significance of nature is irrefutable, an increase in built-up areas has led to a decrease in urban greenery. Thus, a growing need for restorativeness in urban surroundings has emerged. To investigate whether positively evaluated sonic environments, represented by natural and urban sounds, have comparable restorative qualities we conducted two studies. The aim of the first (Study 1) was to explore the restorative qualities of positively assessed natural and urban sounds. Participants (N = 88) were asked to listen and to rate 22 recordings (each 1 min long) either from natural or urban environments. In the second (Study 2) we investigated whether positively evaluated sonic environments (natural and urban), demand for restoration (feeling relaxed or fatigued) and company (being alone or with a friend) affect the restorative qualities of natural and urban soundscapes. After reading assigned scenarios (feeling relaxed or fatigued; being alone or with a friend), participants (N = 120) were asked to imagine a walk in presented sonic environments and to complete forms (one for each sonic environment) concerning the restorative qualities of given soundscapes (natural and urban). Top five recordings of natural and urban sonic environments were selected from Study 1 and combined into a 154-s soundtrack, to provide a background for the imagined walks in both settings. Our findings confirmed that natural sounds are perceived more favorably than urban recordings. Even when only the most positively assessed soundscapes were compared, nature was still perceived as being more restorative than urban areas. Company of a friend was found to be more beneficial in the urban surroundings, particularly when there was no need for restoration.

In this roundtable we present the trilateral project City Sonic Ecology – Urban Soundscapes of Bern, Ljubljana and Belgrade which brings together the capital cities of Switzerland, Slovenia and Serbia. The project merges the approaches of urban ethnomusicology, soundscape research, and affect theory in order to investigate into ways people living in the city employ their hearing capacities in identification practices and modes of political engagement. By examining three European capitals which are differently perceived on the imaginary West-East axis (Bern as ‘West’, Belgrade as ‘East’ and Ljubljana as ‘West of the East’ / ‘East of the West’) we focus on three broad themes: sounds of religion, commodification processes, and political participation. International Musicological Society, 20th Quinquennial Congress in Tokyo, 19-23 March 2017.

Using data from a realistic experiment conducted using recorded traffic sounds, the relationship between indicators of magnitude, spectrum, and temporal evolution of the sonic environment and the reported annoyance are analyzed. The exposure is characterized by the binaurally recorded overall indoor sound. It is found that a series of parameters derived from multiple linear models related to the temporal and spectral structure of the sound pressure level produces better models than the overall indoor A-weighted equivalent noise level. The descriptors thus complement this indicator, at least when exposure is based on overall indoor sound. Principle components amongst the exposure indicators studied relate to the detectability of the sound indoors and to the typical temporal difference between road and rail traffic. Linear models based on these indicators also outperform models based on source related facade.

Urban soundscapes at five locations in the city of Zadar were perceptually assessed by on-site surveys and objectively evaluated based on monaural and binaural recordings. All locations were chosen so that they would display auditory and visual diversity as much as possible. The unique sound installation known as the Sea Organ was included as an atypical music-like environment. Typical objective parameters were calculated from the recordings related to the amount of acoustic energy, spectral properties of sound, the amount of fluctuations, and tonal properties. The subjective assessment was done on- site using a common survey for evaluating the properties of sound and visual environment. The results revealed the importance of introducing the context into soundscape research because objective parameters did not show significant correlation with responses obtained from interviewees. Excessive values of certain objective parameters could indicate that a sound environment will be perceived as unpleasant or annoying, but its overall perception depends on how well it agrees with people's expectations. This was clearly seen for the case of Sea Organ for which the highest values of objective parameters were obtained, but, at the same time, it was evaluated as the most positive sound environment in every aspect.

Traffic management solutions are increasingly called for to address problems of transport and mobility. In particular, coordinated traffic lights that create green waves along major arterials are an increasingly used strategy to reduce travel times. Although it is usually assumed that an improved traffic flow will result in lower vehicle emissions, little scientific research has been spent on the effects of synchronized traffic lights on emissions. Moreover, because changes in traffic flow do not necessarily influence travel times, noise and air quality in the same way, there is a clear need for a combined approach. This paper reports on a computational study in which a microscopic traffic simulation model (Paramics) is combined with submodels for the emission of noise (Imagine) and air pollutants (VERSIT+). Through the simulation of a range of scenarios, the model is used to investigate the influence of traffic intensity, signal coordination schemes and signal parameters on the noise, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter emissions along an arterial road equiped with a series of traffic lights. It was found that the introduction of a green wave could potentially lower the emissions of the considered air pollutants by 10%-40% in the most favorable conditions, depending on traffic flow and signal timing settings. Sound pressure levels were found to decrease by up to 1?dB(A) near the traffic signals, but to increase by up to 1.5?dB(A) in between intersections. Traffic intensity and green split were found to have the largest influence on emissions, while the cycle time did not have a significant influence on emissions.

Traffic influences the quality of life in a neighborhood in many different ways. Today, in many patsy of the world the benefits of accessibility are taken for granted and traffic is perceived as having a negative impact on satisfaction with the neighborhood. Negative health effects are observed in a number of studies and these stimulate the negative feelings in the exposed population. The noise produced by traffic is one of the most important contributors to the appreciation of the quality of life. Thus, it is useful to define a number of indicators that allow monitoring the current impact of noise on the quality of life and predicting the effect of future developments. This work investigates and compares a set of indicators related to exposure at home and exposure during trips around the house. The latter require detailed modeling of the population’s trip behavior. The validity of the indicators is checked by their ability to predict the outcome of a social survey and by outlining potential causal paths between them and the outcome variables considered: general satisfaction with the quality of life in the neighborhood, noise annoyance at home, and reported traffic density in the area.

Since 1972, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared noise as a pollutant. Over the last decades, the quality of the urban environment has attracted the interest of researchers due to the growing urban sprawl, especially in developing countries. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of noise exposure in six urban soundscapes: Areas with high and low levels of noise in scenarios of leisure, work, and home. Cross-sectional study. The study was conducted in two steps: Evaluation of noise levels, with the development of noise maps, and health related inquiries. 180 individuals were interviewed, being 60 in each scenario, divided into 30 exposed to high level of noise and 30 to low level. Chi-Square test and Ordered Logistic Regression Model (P < 0,005). 70% of the interviewees reported noticing some source of noise in the selected scenarios and it was observed an association between exposure and perception of some source of noise (P < 0.001). 41.7% of the interviewees reported some degree of annoyance, being that this was associated with exposure (P < 0.001). There was also an association between exposure in different scenarios and reports of poor quality of sleep (P < 0.001). In the scenarios of work and home, the chance of reporting annoyance increased when compared with the scenario of leisure. We conclude that the use of this sort of assessment may clarify the relationship between urban noise exposure and health.

cote interne IRCAM: Susini99b; /; National audience; In a previous study, loudness of a time-varying pure tone was evaluated using a cross-modal matching method. In this procedure, the loudness was matched to an equivalent muscular force. Subjects had to judge the instantaneous and global loudness using a proprioceptive input device with force feedback. Using this technique subjects could respond easly, rapidly, continuously, and with feedback concerning their evaluation. The present study examines the relation between instantaneous and global loudness of sixteen urban soundscapes lasting about 20 s using the same method. First, the procedure is individually calibrated with 1-s soundscapes presented at different sound pressure levels. The data obtained for each subject fit well with a linear relation on log-log scale between the sound pressure level in dB and the associated force in log Newtons. Then, the global judgments are performed under two experimental conditions: one with instantaneous loudness evaluation during stimulus presentation and one without. Good correlation was found between these two judgments. The global judgment and the average over the instantaneous matching contour are nearly identical. In addition, a fluction factor (FI) calculated on the loudness judgment contour reflects the degree of movement produced by the subject as well as the presence of discriminable sources.