Advances in Soundscape

A lot has changed in the twelve years since JASA's first special issue on soundscape research. This episode, we talk to the editors of the recent special issue on  Advances in Soundscape: Emerging Trends and Challenges in Research and Practice, Francesco Aletta (University College London), Cynthia Tarlao (McGill University), Tin Oberman (University College London), and Andrew Mitchell (University College London), to discuss these changes, which range from developments in understanding indoor soundscapes, cultural dimensions of soundscape assessment, perceptual assessment tools, and the use of virtual technologies. 

Read all the articles from the special issue here!

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications.

Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

Transcript

ASA Publications (00:25)

If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you've heard us discuss soundscapes before. And for good reason. Soundscape research is a rapidly growing field that touches a variety of areas, whether that's building design or urban planning, or even monitoring underwater sound. Today we're discussing a recent special issue from JASA, The Special Issue on Advances in Soundscape: Emerging Trends and Challenges in Research and Practice. With me are four of the editors of the special issue, Francesco Aletta, Cynthia Tarlao, Tin Obermann, and Andrew Mitchell.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. How are you all doing?

Francesco (00:56)

Hey, we're fine, thank you, how are you? Thanks for having us.

ASA Publications (01:00)

I'm good. Very excited to talk about the issue. So first, just tell us a bit about your research backgrounds.

Francesco (01:05)

Hi everyone, my name is Francesco  Aletta. I'm a lecturer UCL, UC for Environmental Design and Engineering. I've been interested in soundscape studies for a while. I've been kind of stuck with soundscape research for the past 10 years of my life and I've tried hard to get away, but here I am. I'm very much interested about standardization and methods for measuring how people perceive and experience soundscape.

Cynthia Tarlao (01:31)

Hi, my name is Cynthia Tarlao. I'm a postdoc at UQAM in the Department of Urban Studies, and I did my PhD and entry level postdoc in at McGill on soundscapes as well. And I’m interested in the complexity of what shapes our soundscape experiences and to use that knowledge to develop tools with and for the people who actually have a say in how our cities are shaped.

Andrew (01:53)

Hi. I'm Andrew Mitchell. So I'm a lecturer in AI and machine learning for sustainable construction at UCL. But I did my PhD in Soundscape also at UCL in the team with Tin and Francesco. My main focus within Soundscape is on really making the methods that we talk about in Soundscape for doing this sort of holistic view of urban sound perception useful and possible to use in more of an engineering context. So parts of that come to how do we standardize the measurements of people's perception and making machine learning or AI models to help us predict the likely perception of different environments so that we can actually use that in design and assess and design towards that perception rather than towards things like the decibel level.

Tin (02:45)

Hi, I'm Tin Obermann. I'm senior research fellow at UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering. And I started my involvement in the field of soundscapes… Yeah, a while ago, maybe I finished my PhD that was about soundscape interventions in public spaces about 10 years ago. And since then, I worked at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, and then I moved UCL to work with Francesco and Jian and Andrew. And yeah, since then, basically for the past 10 years, I was just working on the soundscape related stuff that were fun and interesting and lots of field data collection campaigns and lab work, designing the lab, designing the lab studies and so on.

ASA Publications (03:40)

Sounds good, yeah. And also, just for our liste ners, Franceso, Andrew, and Tin have their own podcast about soundscapes, “The Rest Is Just Noise.”  We'll link to it in our show notes. To get into the special issue, what is a soundscape, and how does it differ from our previous understandings of environmental sound?

Cynthia Tarlao (03:58)

So soundscape emerged from a more artistic understanding of the sound environment, with for example the pioneering work of Murray Schaeffer. So it's really centered on the human experience of the sound environment. And so we see it as a complement of the acoustic approach, which is centered on the physical phenomenon of sound. However, because it's focused on the physical phenomenon of sound, acoustics cannot tell the whole picture of how we experience our sound environment.

And so when we say the human experience, this ranges from like, you know, the perceptions and quality of life, things that you can actually name and experience, you know, consciously in a way, but it also goes all the way to like health and public health impacts, which are a lot more, you know, hard to necessarily put in words when you're experiencing it. So our approach, soundscape, is really about considering sound not only as noise or as a nuisance, but explicitly exploring it on, like explaining how it can be used as a resource.

ASA Publications (04:51)

Okay, okay, so like the good and the bad of having sound around you. 

Cynthia Tarlao (04:55)

Yeah, exactly.

ASA Publications (04:56)

Right, okay. So we've actually had a special issue on soundscape research before. How has the field of research evolved since then?

Francesco (05:04)

Yeah, so it's nice that we are coming back to JASA with the special issue because as you said, 2013 there was a first collection by hosted JASA about soundscape. That version of the special issue was edited Professor Jiang Kang and Professor Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp. And I think many, many things have changed since then. In general, Soundscape as a topic has been growing constantly over the past 20 years. And I think that that's been growing with an increasing rate, actually, in the last 10. And part of this process, I'm going to claim, but yeah, maybe others in the community may disagree, has been driven by a different process, which is the one about standardization. So in parallel, we've had this ISO working group, based at the International Organization for Standardization, that started to look at common definitions and methods and techniques for data analysis. And while this is not a perfect system or model, in general, I think that it gives a bit of a meaningful framework or shared language to talk about soundscape and think about how we measure things and how we analyze things. So this kind of standardization process started some time around 2018,  and that's where things started to shift a little bit. So the special issue ten years ago was very different, because at the time soundscape research was kind of scattered all over the place, very fragmented in a way, so JASA kindly gave a home and offered the platform for gathering emerging trends, emerging topics and so on. Fast forward 10 years and now we are in a very different situation. I think that in terms of soundscape being a research field, that's kind of accepted now and it's a well  established discipline. So now the agenda have changed and I think the discipline and the field as a whole is kind of looking for and pushing somehow for the next step, which could be something like policy recognition, and how do we actually bring this kind of approach into planning and design practice.

ASA Publications (07:20)

OK, OK. So in your editorial introducing the special issue, you wrote that there were four overarching themes in the issue… So let's go over those a bit. The first was methodological advances in assessment. How hass research advanced in terms of how we measure, analyze, and understand soundscapes?

Andrew (07:36)

So as you said, we sort of grouped all the different papers that came out in this special issue into these four categories. And I think this methodological advances section really, like, addresses some of what Francesco just introduced: that we had this push for standardization, particularly starting in 2018-2019 with the ISO standards.

And so with this set of papers, we see the application of these standardized methods or critiques of them or the extensions of them in ways that really highlight the broad scope of what soundscape means and different interpretations of what that means. So most of what you will hear us and the soundscape community in general talking about is like urban human perception. But the papers here range from that human perception of urban spaces, to underwater ecological soundscapes, to land use models and that sort of thing. And so here the papers are looking at, like, an in-depth look at those standards and standardization of methods. So there’s quite a few things. 

There is a really interesting paper that was looking at the application of urban's infrasound sensor networks from Wynn and Dannemann Dugick, which they presented one that was deployed in Las Vegas using methods to detect signals of interest. So really focusing on this, like, automated sound source identification in practice, detecting things like explosions or tonal noise from turbines in very noise-heavy settings like cities. And that's really this sort of focus on, look, even when we're not researching the perception side, we're focusing on more than just the noise levels in a city. And we see some similar things in a paper from Wilford et al. where they introduce a soundscape code, which is this multi-dimensional framework for comparing underwater soundscapes. So again, expanding what we kind of mean by “soundscape,” and how we can apply consistent thinking or consistent methods across these different applications. 

And I'll close up this section by really talking about the set of a few papers that, again, were more focused on the standard sort of human urban setting, but either challenging or extending the existing methods. So there's a paper from Jedrusiak, which is really trying to bridge these different fields. So they call this a “definition independent formalization of soundscapes,” trying to characterize at the very least the physical side and the contextual side of the soundscapes that we're studying, in a way that they claim doesn't depend on how you define soundscape. You know, there's some competing definitions, competing ideas of it. They were trying to bridge this by giving us a single framework that over arches those. And then there was a paper from actually our group, which was extending that ISO standard for measurement to create a unified framework for defining single-value indices. You know, soundscape is a multi-dimensional thing. There's a lot of different aspects that go into perception, both what affects it and how we measure and express it. And so this paper was trying to condense that multi-dimensional nature of soundscape perception into a way to communicate sort of overall quality of the soundscape without sacrificing the contextual aspect that’s really important to soundscape studies. So there were several other papers in this section, but overall it was, yeah, this sort of refinement and extension of how do we measure soundscapes, how do we talk about them, and how do we apply methods to the broad array of what are considered soundscapes.

ASA Publications (11:32)

So kind of essentially defining a common language that could be used across all the research from various areas, essentially, which is standardization, I guess, by definition. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew (11:40)

Yeah, yeah, and there were aspects of all the papers and a few papers that were also sort of challenging the existing standards and methods and saying these aren't really fit for purpose or you're missing something or to some extent, you know, should we sort of be standardizing in this way? So there's a really broad view across all these papers.

ASA Publications (12:01)

Okay, yeah, it's always fun when there's a little bit of a disagreement within the special issue between different papers. Okay, so the next section, the study of indoor soundscape, has also developed as a subfield of soundscape research. What makes the study of indoor soundscapes different from that of outdoor soundscapes? And what notable findings came up in this issue with regards to indoor soundscapes?

Tin (12:23)

Yeah, so, indoor soundscapes definitely emerged as kind of field of its own, also with very frequent and well-attended sessions at conferences related to noise and soundscapes. And it's one of those areas that kind of follows this refinement that Andrew was mentioning, just going from where the soundscape standard started, with the public open spaces back now more than 20 years ago, and testing the application of this idea and the methods on different indoor spaces. 

So I think one of the first papers that kind of pioneered this approach that was published before this special issue, that followed Francesco's idea really, when we worked with Simone Torresin, from norther Italy, on his experiment, and it was also the first experiment I did when I joined UCL, it was just replicating the original Axelsson’s circumplex model and his approach and his methods, but with an indoor setting, because as we know context is the key part of soundscape perception. So context changes whether we are perceiving the acoustic environment indoors and outdoors, our expectations from the space change and so on. And indoor soundscape is really also, it's not surprising to see the expansion in that field, having in mind that most of the kind of practical consultancy work that acousticians

do is based on indoors, because it's the acoustics that are easier to control that than outdoors. Right? So there's also many, many existing standards on indoors soundscapes relating to speech, relating to office spaces, relating to reverberation and so on. So that's kind of what the papers in this special issue also followed. So we've seen papers that were looking at worship spaces, to schools, to museums and offices. And one common thing they found was definitely the importance of human speeches in all those spaces. So it's not just getting the speech right and clear, as we knew before that is important, but also the way we perceive speech very much influences our overall perception of a soundscape. So for example, paper Reece and Julia Chieng and Bhan Lam and Andrew found that in Malaysian worship spaces, understanding that someone next to you is singing is very, very important for positive experience. So if the sound is so messy that you cannot hear yourself singing and people around you singing, then that kind of ruins your experience. Andrew, I hope I'm interpreting this right. But so this approach of testing the so-to-say traditional acoustic indicators together with soundscape scales is something that was quite interesting to see also in Ben West’s approach to replicating the circumplex model specifically for office spaces, or another very interesting paper by the Italian team, Chiara Visentin, Simone Torresin, Matteo Pellegatti, and Nicola Prodi went looking into primary school classrooms, so getting perceptual responses from children, so using different ways to collect data, some pictograms, so the kids would actually understand what they are being asked and so on. Again, children's voices in classrooms were a major factor contributing to those findings that the sense of control in indoor space is very, very, very important. A fascinating paper that came, so to say, outside of the circle of researchers that are intensively working on the soundscape standard was the museum exploration. I very impressed by reading about the lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US, where they have this amazing room with a 360° screen and a loudspeaker array, so they can use 360 panoramic photos, like in a larger than life kind of setting, and so they use that to explore potential influence of different museums exhibition and like this audio-visual interaction on soundscape and on the kind of to use soundscape on the overall impact that a design will have on the visitors. So there's definitely this idea that indoor soundscape is becoming something very useful to assess if the interior design works well or not and shows indication of what can be improved just beyond the traditional acoustics.

And similarly mentioning educational spaces, there was also work conducted by the Turkish teams, so Zinah and Papatya, worked with interior architecture students again on indoor soundscape, so another more ISO-driven work. But it’s quite cool to see this development in the past, yeah, actually, I would say five to six years. We’ve also noticed that outside of the special issue, at least in the UK, we've noticed that this work has been intriguing the acoustic consultants more and more, so on conferences we can see some consultancies applying something similar to the indoor ISO approach.

So, yeah, great work on the indoor soundscape for schools, very interesting, but not all made it to this special issue, sadly.

ASA Publications (18:40)

Yeah.

Actually, you know, I was just thinking, I was like, wait a second, I know this study with the children and the little pictograms. And I was like, because we actually interviewed Chiara Visenten. So I'll link to that episode in our show notes as well.

Tin (18:53)

Yeah, yes, exactly.

ASA Publications (18:55)

So kind of talked about this a little bit the Malaysian worship spaces and the expectation of listening to music and hearing the singing in the space. But how do cultural, geographic, and contextual factors shape soundscape perception and evaluation?

Cynthia Tarlao (19:12)

So it's a very broad question, but you can imagine all the usual suspects of, you know, urban considerations. So first of all, if we think of, you know, sound as noise, as a pollution, you have all the questions of environmental justice or injustice. So if you take, you know, disadvantaged populations, they’re going to be more exposed by just the way they… where they live, where they work, the way their buildings are made up, so, you know, insulation, or they work in more noisy industries, or they live next to train tracks, you know, things like that. So all the usual suspects in that way. We also know that older people and children are more vulnerable for different reasons, but they're more vulnerable. So even if they're not more exposed, they are more vulnerable to noise. So children, because obviously they're young and not fully formed and older people because they're losing hearing and that impacts them as well in different ways that we don't necessarily fully understand yet. But we also t wanto understand those experiences, even though it's like thinking of sound as noise, it's important to understand those experiences in addition to understanding how the noise is propagated.

And, again, this is very intertwined with other urban considerations, such as safety and access to restorative spaces that people don't necessarily talk about in terms of sound or noise. But for example, someone who is living next to a port, for example, might be very well very tolerant of the noise that is due to the port, to the like seaport, if they have, for example, access to the water a sort of like... not necessarily, you know, counterbalancing factor, but you know, it's kind of nice to be able to say, “I have access to the water,” even if this means being exposed to ship noise, you know. So in general, we find that people in the city are sort of, I don't want to say resilient, but they are very tolerant of things if they have good aspects that they can rely on for, you know, what we call restorativeness, so you know, access to green spaces. So again, it's very intertwined with other urban considerations like, you know, green spaces, or, you know, if the transportation network is well designed for pedestrians or bikers or cyclists, you know, things like that. 

And that also feeds into the gendered experience of the city, because we know, and it's something that hasn't really been explored that well in soundscape, but it's starting to be looked into, is how women tend to go out less than men in the city, and when they do so, they do more in groups. They do it more in groups. So by virtue of being less in the public space, they are less exposed to noise, like traffic noise or, you know, transportation noise, all the noise you can think of, construction, all those things you can think of in the city, but that also means they have less easy access to quote unquote good and varied soundscapes, like going to the park or going to any type of restorative space, that could also be like worship spaces or anything pleasant, also going out less in nature and things like that. So it's a very complex picture that we are barely starting to scratch surface of, but we do have evidence that asking people is a better way than just measuring sound levels to be able to help them shape their or like have a say in how they perceive their environment and how they would want it to be shaped, which is central to how we design our cities. 

Another aspects we were talking about culture, where learned habits will impact how you perceive the sound environment. There's like studies on, for example, how Latin cultures may potentially, because they grew up in more lively urban sound environments, where it's common to play music late at night, and blast it through your windows in the street. Or where, you know, a bit of a funny story is that in Peru, for example, it’s not just Peru, I think, but in Peru, for example, you have the trash collector that plays a little song. And so it kind of livens up the urban space, even though it's, you know, sort of a negative thing when we think of trash collection, you know. So it's all those things where we don't yet know very well everything that is to be known on how culture impacts our perceptions of the sound environment, our experiences in urban sound environments, but we know there is something there to be dug up more deeply. And on that note, I'll let Francesco discuss a study I think he did on a comparison between Europe and China.

Francesco (23:48)

Thank you, thank you, Cynthia. Indeed, another study we had as part of this special issue was indeed looking at differences, let’s call them cultural differences, in terms of soundscape perception and experience between populations and samples basically coming from very different world regions. And that was the idea behind that comparative study between Europe and China. And once again, the standardization aspect come back. That was, I believe, one of the first studies where we were trying to implement the standardized protocol for soundscape data collection. So we were basically asking the same set of questions about very similar public spaces to samples and populations in these two world regions. And we were looking at how those two groups would basically perceive dimensions and perceptual constructs, such as calmness and vibrancy or pleasantness, and how those would relate to the perceived dominance of specific sound sources. And as part of that study, we found out that some, like being able to notice, let's say, natural sound sources, like birdsong or, I don't know, wind in nature, would contribute differently and with a different degree of importance to the perceptual outcome of calmness, for the sample we surveyed in China, as opposed to the sample that we surveyed in some European cities. And that was true also for other types of sound sources, like sounds coming from social activities and human-generated noises. Perceiving those kinds of noises would affect our experiences of vibrancy in different ways based on whether we were China or in Europe. And we assume that that's going to be case also for other world regions. 

And another, let's say, aspect that is probably a very important manifestation of these cultural differences is, I would say, language, as in the language we speak and how the way and the words we use to describe the soundscape may shape our own emotions and relationship to the sound environment. And so in the broader context of soundscape research, there's also lot of interest in how, what kind of words we use to translate these kinds of perceptual dimensions of calmness, vibrancy in different languages.

And, again, this is something that is happening also beyond this particular special issue.

ASA Publications (26:18)

Interesting, interesting. So it's kind of like, not only that you have different cultures that will have different perceptions of these spaces and these sounds, but also you're possibly using different words to describe them, which reflects sort of this different perception.

Francesco (26:34)

Yeah, cultural values, yeah.

ASA Publications (26:36)

So sort of switching gears a little bit from the cultural factors and such. Soundscape research also intersects with some technological advances, like with regards to virtual and augmented reality. How are technological innovations affecting approaches to soundscape simulation, evaluation, and design?

Tin (26:56)

Yeah, it's a great, very interesting field, especially saying as someone who is running an auralization and VR lab here at UCL. And the span of the papers that we're kind of dealing with that theme is quite fascinating but also quite telling of our nature as audio people. Because there's some papers looking at the ecological validity in virtual reality and augmented reality, and how do responses that we get in the lab, how they match the responses that we get in the real world when we ask participants there. But then there's also papers like the one by Nima,  Bruno, Ewan and Ingrid, they are looking into very, very high detail in the possibilities of a speaker system to reproduce sound and and focality of sound and how ninth order ambisonic system is better at rendering highly focal sound sources, while at the same time, the German team, around Josep Llorka-Bofi, Michael Vorlaender, Rouben Rehman, Christian Dreier, and Jonas Hecke, are comparing lab experiments with online delivered experiments. So something that is completely out of our control. I mean, not completely. They are recommending some very interesting ways to compensate for the lack of control when you do an online soundscape listening experiment. But just like that range is fascinating, where we can get very focused on some details, but then when we actually look at the standardized questionnaire and the ISO pleasantness and eventfulness, then we realize that the things that we can get from the participants, especially having in mind their individual traits and the contextual differences and so on. It's all like very broad strokes. So we do consistently find in such studies that the more immersive the simulation is, we can tell that the response is more authentic. So it's an interesting concept that was tested by another paper coming from Germany, if I'm not mistaken. So Ming Yang, Anne Heimes, Michael Vorlaender and Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp did this study where they used the idea of authenticity of the experience, testing it on site and in the lab with different techniques of delivery of the stimuli. They found that all the techniques, like basically the more immersive it is, the better and more authentic. However, even the crudest of the deliveries, just audio stimuli basically, gets you in the right ballpark, when we talk about soundscape, in most cases they investigated. So that’s quite interesting to observe, I think. 

Another development in technology, but not related to VR, but technology in general, is then the one focused around the sensor networks and machine learning, which is another super interesting technological advancement, where Pierre Aumond and Modan and Mathieu and Vincent are working. I mean they came up with a way to predict other sound sources and model other sound sources rather than just traffic data by using the the acoustic sensors network. That’s super interesting and exciting and very soundscape related because it's kind of beyond just all the sound sources that we are thinking when we speak about soundscape. So I don't know, Andrew, was there something that you wanted to bring up here? I jumped in, but...

Andrew (30:52)

Yeah, so across, both in this technological section and also a few back up in the sort of methodological advances category, there's quite a few really interesting AI advancements or applications that we've seen in Soundscape. Tim mentioned a study from the French team from Tailleur, which is it look at can we use pretrained neural networks to identify sound sources from spectrograms, like, mel spectrograms or third octave band data to sort of, you know, part of the idea of this that I understand from speaking with them is kind of trying to improve some privacy concerns, right? In some cases, these source recognition models that are very useful for soundscape studies on sensor networks are too big or too power hungry to put onto the sensor. But then we don't necessarily want to be sending raw audio from the sensor back to a server for privacy concerns. So can we sort of go from third octave band data from the sensor, send that off that, you know, compress the data, makes it much easier to deal with, but then use a neural network to still identify sound sources from this more low-resolution data. And that could really advance a lot of what we could do. Again, taking a large-scale view of sound in cities that is more than just looking at sound levels or spectrograms, actually looking at the meaning of that sound, but being able to scale this up to whole cities. 

And there are a few other studies and advances in AI and machine learning that did this, you know. So study from Versumer, looking at really in depth at different prediction modeling methods and the challenges that came up in trying to predict those soundscape perception attributes and, you know, how people express whether a soundscape is pleasant or vibrant. Trying to predict that from the audio itself. And they found a lot of really interesting, a little bit esoteric challenges in doing that. 

And then finally, what's really cool is this special issue I think contained up to, I will say up to this past week when the same team published a new paper. Up to this past week, it was the state of the art in doing large deep learning prediction of soundscape perception. So a model from Yuano Hou, which simultaneously identifies sound sources and also predicts annoyance ratings. And they found that doing both of those together within the same model really improved how the model performs and how it works. And so not only do we have this  new technology, where we're able to do that prediction simultaneously, but it was really interesting to show that within the model itself, getting it to try to identify a sound source and say how annoying the recording is, incorporating that sort of context within the structure of the model itself really improved how the model worked, which was fascinating. And that has now been expanded on in a new study, which expands that from just in annoyance to the full soundscape circumplex. So it was a really, really cool first step there.

ASA Publications (34:12)

That is very, very cool. So with all of these advances, are there any particular challenges that face researchers in this field currently?

Andrew (34:23)

So I think one of the challenges that faces kind of the field in general, not just like individual researchers, but the field in general, is to an extent like agreeing on what we mean and what falls under soundscape studies and how it intersects with physical acoustics, environmental acoustics, and noise control or noise studies. I think we’ve seen such an explosion of this field, an explosion of what people are doing and how they're talking about it and how they're applying it, that it can become a bit difficult now for us to have a shared language and really all be communicating in the same way with each other and know what everybody's meaning. If I say soundscapes, you know, if I talk about a soundscape in a city, do I mean the same thing as the person who says underwater soundscape? Do we mean the same thing? Where are those differences, and how can we go past that and make sure we're talking about the same thing?

ASA Publications (35:21)

How do you judge the annoyance of a human versus a marine mammal? 

Andrew (35:22)

Or

ASA Publications (35:22)

Or other stuff?

Andrew (35:23)

Even more fundamentally, when we say soundscape for cities or humans, we're talking about perception primarily. When you talk about underwater soundscape, they may not mean perception at all. They mean, like,  the totality of sounds in a space or in an environment.

ASA Publications (35:40)

Interesting,

.

Tin (35:41)

Although we've seen, like they do like behavioral studies of, interventional studies of underwater creatures, which would kind of fall in our idea of what soundscape is, because it kind of implies that they are perceiving it. There was a very interesting keynote at this year’s Euronoise in Malaga by Ana Sirovic, who is currently in Trondheim, with some interventional studies and how you introduce a sound underwater and then you observe in which direction do the whales go and how long do they stay somewhere. It's very similar, very close to what we are doing sometimes. Well, looking at human behavior, but yeah… Although had now soundscape standard with the definition in part one since eleven years ago, I think that remains a challenge, the common language.

Andrew (36:37)

Yeah, and then  I wanted to mention about, yeah, so that's the sort of overarching for specific researchers since the question was what do researchers face? There's always the classic of funding challenges, right? Acoustics itself is often a bit of a niche field. Soundscape is kind of a niche within that, within the niche field. And so there is a challenge across soundscape studies with not just like getting funding but even just maintaining positions for people. We've seen unfortunately quite a lot of, you know, very good researchers who have ended up leaving the field because there, you know, there just wasn't the right sort of positions to keep them around. I'm speaking on that personally. That's happened to me. I moved after my PhD moved out into more broadly AI for construction, rather than specifically in soundscape or acoustics. And I think that's a pretty common thing that we see, which really limits how much work we can actually do on the topic.

Francesco, did you want to talk about policy things?

Francesco (37:43)

Yeah, I had a general comment about, I mean, if we are framing this as challenges and potential issues down the line and bringing for a moment the conversation back to the idea of designing soundscapes for cities and for urban context, one potential challenge I see is more of an ethical dilemma in a way because if we push this idea that soundscapes are things we should be designing and curating, the question that immediately comes is designing for whom? Because there is a risk, based on things we are seeing now out there I. major urban redevelopment of kind of commodifying and trying to sell this idea of positive soundscape as a luxury, as something that is carefully and beautifully designed only for a select group of people. And by designing specifically for someone, we are actively leaving out some other groups, some other communities, and we should indeed question these dynamics and try to make this kind of design and push for positive soundscapes to be as inclusive as possible, that literature emerging about this idea of soundscape gentrification and how environmental sounds may be agents of gentrification. So I think that's slippery slope and we have to be careful that we do not go in that direction by advocating for positive soundscapes. That's a risk that we should be aware of. So that's a kind of ethical challenge, I think, for whoever is working or researching in this space. And I'm sure Cynthia will have also strong opinions about related topics.

Cynthia Tarlao (39:32)

Yeah, I definitely. I mean, the way I see and my team sees soundscape design is not designing for someone, right? It's designing sort of like to afford, like for affordances, right? So that anyone who is in the space can be afforded whatever they need. But that's a major issue for us as well, in terms of like, cultivating the political will, if I can say it that way, where we've been having issues, you know, basically what we've realized is that we need a consistent driving force from political stakeholders, like over time. And that's a rare thing to find. We've not been able to find it so far. And part of the issue is of course that we need to keep, you know, raising awareness about landscape with these people who have the actual like power to help us, whether it's by, you know, being the people in charge of you know, the urban planning, or by, you know, pushing for it, or asking for it in policies, you know, or in like, maybe not the law, but you know, in like, urban plans and things like that. And that also for us involves the people that are going to be impacted by any project, for example, to be aware that this is an issue before it becomes a problem, and to push for it for themselves. So that's also how we sort of see this ethical problem where it's less about we design for people and more we talk to people about their needs in their own environments, as well as in general for the public space, basically trying to push for sound environment in that space that allows anyone basically to be in the space in a safe and comfortable way.

ASA Publications (41:12)

So where do you see soundscape research going in the future?

Tin (41:16)

I hope that it will go further towards practice and that by being recognized and adopted by practice that it will also then change and adapt so to kind of investigate the most relevant bits that are making it the most useful.

Yeah, Francesco.

Francesco (41:37)

No, I just wanted to pick up on this point because I think it's a very important point. And personally, I think that the pathway towards this kind of implementation into practice goes back to making the case for the public health benefits of this approach because regardless of all the discussion and research activity in the space, a lot of the policy attention still is on countering, let's say, negative impacts of noise pollution mostly, while I think our goal now should be to promote and show the evidence of the benefits that positively perceived soundscapes can bring in terms of health of the public and both at individual level but also community level. So, again, a lot of things have developed on the research side. I think for the discipline to progress now, there is this kind of need of engaging with people who actually have power, as Cynthia mentioned, to make and take decisions about our cities, our natural world, to kind of promote this approach and instigate changes in that sense. And I think we need to make the case for the health of the public as well as the health of ecosystems, otherwise no one could listen. And it's a very noisy world in that sense from the policy point of view. It's difficult to advocate for the quality of soundscapes where climate change is all over the place and the world is facing so many other challenges. But I think that’s part of the job that we also as a community need to get done or going.

Andrew (43:22)

Yeah, again, to pick up both on what Francesco and Tin said, both for the sort of putting this into practice and demonstrating the importance for public health, what I would love to see and what I think needs to happen is really identifying what methods and what approaches are appropriate for different use cases, for different purposes. You know, anyone who's familiar with the field or maybe even in the special issue or in this conversation, may recognize that there's a, often a bit of attention within the soundscape field, between a more quantitative focus and a more, qualitative or engaged, like social engagement focus. And I think what, where we need to move to is really identifying where each of those approaches makes the most sense, and where applying the right method to the right thing.  We have seen since the ISO standardization, arguably an over application of the sort of quantitative approach from that to cases where, yeah, it's not the right way to be studying a particular thing. But at the same time, I'm obviously more on like the AI and quantitative approach to soundscape side, because I think that's necessary for what Francesco is talking about. If we want to show the large-scale public health impacts of urban sound, you know, I tend to think that how people actually perceive an urban environment, particularly when it comes to the sound in it, how they perceive it is a better predictor or a bigger driver of how it impacts their health, right? The impact, the effect of the urban environment on people's health is filtered through their perception of it. It's not a direct one-to-one from the like physical environment to people's health. It's filtered through their perception. And so if we can create large-scale, scalable measurement methods and metrics that allow us to characterize people's perception or likely perception, across entire cities or entire countries the way that we have with noise maps, then we can get a better look at how that soundscape impacts their health. And for that, we need these sort of large-scale sensor network quantitative soundscape and AI approaches. But then if you want to understand how specific communities or individuals, or in a specific context or specific project, how that soundscape impacts people and how they interact with it, you can't do that on this large-scale quantitative side. You don't get enough detailed information. And so it's really about, to me, I think we really need to improve and develop where we're applying these different approaches and what sort of viewpoint we're taking on what we're trying to achieve by applying a soundscape approach.

Cynthia Tarlao (46:21)

Yeah, I think we're all in agreement that what we need now is really to apply the knowledge that we've gathered, even if it's not complete, right, but we need to start finding ways to connect this research to the practice. And it's been a, you know, a consideration for a long time in this field. But now that, you know, we feel like, or I feel like we, we have enough to start connecting to the practice. And like Andrew was saying, we need to know which methodology and which approach to use for each project or consideration or question. And for me, as opposed to Andrew, I'm more on the urban side. So I agree that we need standardized models and methods and all that for like specific questions. And on the other side, we also need a deeper level of knowledge, a thicker knowledge for urban practice because the urban practice in and of itself is a very amorphous, thick, complex practice. And the way I see it, soundscape should just be one aspect of all of those. And so we need to be able to talk the language of urban practitioners and basically be one thing that they… it's not a checklist, but one of the factors that they have to take into account, connected with everything else. So it kind of almost like blends in with the other factors. And that's really how I see it. Past research and when the practice where it's not urban planning and urban design, while there are things that can be standardized, is really a lot more… I mean, I don't see it as standardizable in a way, in many, ways. And so we need to be able to be this like flexible or to develop this flexible methods or not necessarily method, but approach to thinking about sounds in the urban practice so that we can help urban practitioners think about soundscape in another way than just, you know, checking a checkbox for noise levels.

ASA Publications (48:15)

Right, right, taking it out of the lab and taking it off of just, not just research on the page, but making it something that can be…

Cynthia Tarlao (48:22)

Yeah, a lot of the research is not really in the lab necessarily, it's also very much talking to people, but it's still very much a thing that then you can't give to urban planners and be like, okay, these people think this environment is pleasant. Wo then what do they do with that information? We need to start talking to urban planners as shortcut for anyone who's involved in shaping projects in the city and things like that. We need to be able to, for them to do this on their own, right? So we do need standardized methods and models and things like that that can help them make those decisions and that, you know, like have a diagnosis of the spaces of the projects and things like that. But also we need to have, you know, like it's more a personal thing. You need to talk to people to understand their needs in addition to the physical and more quantitative information. And that is a bit of a complex thing that you can't just model oftentimes.

ASA Publications (49:20)

So do you all have any closing thoughts?

Francesco (49:22)

Not much from my side other than I really look forward to seeing a third edition of a special issue on soundscape in JASA, but hopefully not earlier than another 10 years because it was a lot of work. Yeah, hopefully someone else will take care of that in another 10 years. We'll see how far we go with that.

ASA Publications (49:44)

Yeah, this was quite the comprehensive special issue, I have to say. There were many, many articles. Folks can, we'll link to it in the show notes. Folks can read all of them.

Andrew (49:53)

Actually I was just looking at it. 28 articles, which is quite a lot.

Cynthia Tarlao (49:57)

I just want to thank you, Kat. Those were really thoughtful questions.

ASA Publications (50:01)

you're welcome. Well, it's crazy how much has happened in the past decade plus since our last special issue on soundscape research. Thank you all again for your varied insight regarding this hot topic. And for folks who are interested in learning more, as I mentioned, we have the collection of special issue articles linked in our show notes. And we do have a couple other episodes that are related to specific articles from this issue. So I will link to those in our show notes as well. And have a great day.

Francesco (50:27)

Thank you.

Tin (50:27)

Thank you.

Andrew (50:28)

Cool, thanks.

Cynthia Tarlao (50:28)

Thanks, you too