Three Tools for Sonic Rupture: Translating Ambiance, Biophilic Sound Design and More-Than-Human Listening
Abstract
Sounds of the city shape everyday perception; thus, as sounds change, so do our moods and responses to the environments in which we live. This article is part of a discourse trying to recognise the essential role that soundscape design should play in urban planning to improve quality of life experiences. It aims to discuss three tools for creating sonic ruptures in urban environments: translating ambiance, biophilic sound design, and more-than-human listening. The three tools are related to the sonic rupture concept, introduced as a form of soundscape design focused on improving the quality of life for urban dwellers and creating new possible approaches for urban design. Translating ambiance leverages ambiance theory to explore the prospects of translating the affective qualities of the natural world into cities. The biophilic sound design tool combines biophilic design and field recording practices to discover innovative ways to bring the sounds of nature into
the city. The more-than-human listening tool explores the possible recordings that multi-microphone arrays can make in natural environments that, while impossible to hear with the human ear, can be integrated into urban installations. In combination, this suite of tools presents new ways of thinking about the roles artistic
research can play in urban soundscape design as a means to expand the range of human experience – and thus the quality of life – in urban environments. The nature term, as used here, refers to those expanses of land free of urban development that present unique sonic experiences and expressions to the artistic researcher, which can be applied to urban design. The described approach has been tested in the creation of the Sonic Gathering Place, an installation that integrates the three post-sonic rupture tools, which will be touched on briefly in this paper.
Keywords
soundscape design; sound art; urban design; biophilia; creative practice
References
Anderson, S. (2016). The Incidental Person: Reviewing the Identity of the Urban Acoustic Planner. Journal of Sonic Studies, 11. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/558606/558694
Auinger, S., Odland, B. (2009). Reflections on the Sonic Commons. Leonardo Music Review, 42, 63-68. https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj.2009.19.63
Augoyard, J. (2007). Step by Step: Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.31.5.714
Augorayd, J. Torgue, H. (2005). Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (A. McCartney & D. Paquette, Trans.). Montreal: McGill University Press.
Axelsson, O., Nilsson, M. E., & Berglund, B. (2010). A principal components model of soundscape perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3493436
Ballas, J. A. (2000). The niche hypothesis: Implications for auditory display design. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 3, 718-721. https://doi.org/10.1177/154193120004402258
Bennet, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Browning, W. D., Ryan, C. O., Clancy, J. O. (2014). 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design. New York: Terrapin Bright Green, LLC.
Brydon-Miller, M., Greenwood, D., Maguire, P. (2003). Why Action Research? Action Research, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503030011002
Carter, P. (2004). Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publication.
Fraisse, V., Wanderly, M. M., Guastavino, C. (2021). Comprehensive Framework for Describing Interactive Sound Installations. Highlighting Trends through a Systematic Review. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/mti5040019
Haseman, B. (2006). A Manifesto for Performative Research. Media International Australia, 118(1), 98-106. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X0611800113
Kang, J., Schulte-Fortkamp, B. (2016). Soundscape and the Built Environment. Boca Raton: CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b19145
Kellert, S.R., Heerwagen, J., Mador, M. (2008). Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Krause, B (1993). The Niche Hypothesis: A virtual symphony of animal sounds, the origins of musical expression and the health of habitats. The Soundscape Newsletter, 6, 6–10.
Lacey, J. (2016). Sonic Rupture: a practice-led approach to urban soundscape design. Bloomsbury: New York.
Lacey, J., Moore, S. Pink, S. Zhao, L. Harvey, X. Qiu, S. Sumartojo, Maisch, S. (2017). Soundscape Design of Motorway Parkland Environments – Transformation, Cancellation, and Ethnography. Proceedings Invisible Places: sound, urbanism and a sense of place. 7–9 April 2017, São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal, 52-63.
Lacey, J. (2020) Sound Installations for the Projection of Atmosphere as a Limited Field of Sounds. In Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen (Eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, 315-324. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Lacey, J., Castro R., Craenen P., Moore S. (2020a). Toward the Possibilities of Urban Sound Parks in Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Senses, Inventions, Worlds. Proceedings for the 4th International Congress on Ambiances. E-conference, Dec 2020, 330-335.
Lacey, J., Pink S., Harvey, L. Moore, S. (2019). Noise transformation: A critical listening-based methodology for the design of motorway soundscapes. Qualitative Research Journal, 19(1), pp. 49-64.
Lacey, J. (2022) Urban Roar: a psychophysical approach to the design of affective environments. New York: Bloomsbury.
Pink, S., Lacey, J., Harvey, L., Sumartojo S., Duque, M., Moore, S. (2019). Recycling traffic noise: transforming sonic automobilities for revalue and well being. Mobilities, 14(2), pp. 233-249.
Schafer, R. M. (1977). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books.
Thibaud, J. (2011). A Sonic Paradigm of Urban Ambiances. Journal of Sonic Studies, 1. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/220589/220590
Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge–London: Harvard University Press.
RMIT University in Melbourne Australia
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7615-5349
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
