Ecoacoustic research
Background & Prior Art[edit]
Ecoacoustics - also referred to as acoustic ecology , soundscape studies or soundscape ecology , is a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between living beings and their environment.
Acoustic ecology studies started in the late 1960s with R. Murray Schafer and his team at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) as part of the World Soundscape Project. Acoustic ecology studies started in the late 1960s with R. Murray Schafer and his team at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) as part of the World Soundscape Project. The original WSP team included Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, Bruce Davies and Peter Huse, among others. The first study produced by the WSP was titled The Vancouver Soundscape. The interest in this area grew enormously after this pioneer and innovative study and the area of acoustic ecology raised the interest of researchers and artists all over the world. In 1993, the members of the by now large and active international acoustic ecology community formed the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology.
The soundscape is the component of the acoustic environment that can be perceived by humans. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline - ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader term acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources within a given area - natural sounds and human-caused sounds – as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.(ISO 12913-1:2014)
The soundscape consists of three major sources or components. They are the biophony (the non-human, non-domestic animal sound signatures that occur in any given biome), the geophony (non-biological natural sounds that occur in any given biome and that include the effects of wind, water, earth movement, etc.), and anthrophony (human-generated sounds that include entropic electro-mechanical noise, and structured sound such as music and theatre).
In relation to soundscapes and the environment, there are two distinct soundscapes, either hi-fi or lo-fi, created by the environment. A hi-fi system possesses a positive signal-to-noise ratio. These settings make it possible for discrete sounds to be heard clearly since there is no background noise to obstruct even the smallest disturbance. A rural landscape offers more hi-fi frequencies than a city because the natural landscape creates an opportunity to hear incidences from nearby and afar. In a lo-fi soundscape, signals are obscured by too many sounds, and perspective is lost within the broad- band of noises. In lo-fi soundscapes everything is very close and compact. A person can only listen to immediate encounters; in most cases even ordinary sounds have to be exuberantly amplified in order to be heard.
All sounds are unique in nature. They occur at one time in one place and can't be replicated. In fact, it is physically impossible for nature to reproduce any phoneme twice in exactly the same manner.
