A Call for Diversity and Inclusion in Soundscape Research

One of the key components of soundscape research is the focus on the perspective of the listener. However, that perspective may shift depending on the listener's personal characteristics, their cultural background, and other factors. In this episode, Katie Chatburn (Manchester Metropolitan University), Kirsten Van Den Bosch (University of Groningen), and Arezoo Talebzadeh (Ghent University) discuss perspectives that may be overlooked in standard soundscape research practice, as well as share ways to ensure that acousticians use more inclusive methodologies in their soundscape studies.

Associated paper: K. Chatburn, K. van den Bosch, and A. Talebzadeh.  "A critical perspective on inclusion and diversity in soundscape studies." JASA Express Lett. 6, 037201 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0042697.

Read more from JASA Express Letters.
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications.

Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

Transcript

ASA Publications (00:26)

We’ve talked about soundscapes a bit on this podcast. One of the key components of soundscape research is the focus on the perspective of the listener. However, that perspective may shift depending on the listener's personal characteristics, their cultural background, and other factors. Today, I'm talking with Katie Chatburn, Kirsten Van Den Bosch, Arezoo Talebzadeh  about their recent JASA-EL article, “A critical perspective on inclusion and diversity in soundscape studies,” which discusses this topic. Thank you all for taking the time to speak with me today. How are you?

Katie Chatburn (00:54)

Hi, good.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (00:57)

Hi, Kat. I'm doing great, thank you.

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (00:59)

We are good. Thank you.

ASA Publications (01:01)

First, tell us a bit about your research backgrounds.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (01:03)

Well, hello, I'm Kirsten Van Den Bosch and I've been doing soundscape research for over 15 years now. I kind of rolled into it. I have a master's degree in cognitive neuropsychology. So I'm a psychologist by trade interested in how the brain works, how it influences our behavior, how things like perception work. Yeah, I just stumbled upon a PhD position that focused on soundscapes for people with intellectual and multiple disabilities, and it really intrigued me. Perception as a whole but also how people with such severe intellectual and visual and auditory disabilities would perceive the world. So from the beginning my interest and education in soundscape research has been shaped by researching people who have very little autonomy about their surroundings, and I guess that just stuck with me. And that probably has led to my interest in perception by people from marginalized groups, which I still focus on today.

Katie Chatburn (02:09)

I'm Katie Chatburn and I come soundscape studies from a music background. So I'm actually a composer and I do a lot of work as an orchestrator. I was classically trained, but I do a lot of projects that kind of cross boundaries in terms of musical genre. And, actually, during lockdown, I, when I wasn't doing a lot of that kind of work for obvious reasons, I got really interested in soundscape and applied for a PhD. So my PhD is still ongoing, and I’m bringing in some of my sort of musical background by looking at co-creative methods, and I'm investigating the relational potential of soundscape. My work is, yeah, underpinned by notions of social justice.

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (02:58)

I am Arezoo Talebzadeh. I am an architect and currently live and work in Toronto, but I did my PhD on soundscape and people who living with dementia at Ghent University in Belgium. Being an architect, I was always interested in the perception of the environment. And then I found the soundscape studies very similar to what I was doing in the built environment, but in the sonic environment. And recently, all of my research has been with the people who have dementia who, because of this disease, have a completely different perception of the environment and the sonic environment. And that's what brought me to this part of the studies, looking at the soundscape and how disease can change the way that people perceive the space and the sonic environment and how as designers we can be there to help them to have a better understanding of space throughout their life.

ASA Publications (03:52)

That's so neat. It sounds like you guys come from a diverse background of areas of research and such. How'd you guys meet?

Katie Chatburn (04:01)

Yeah, we were all attending InterNoise conference in 2024 in Nantes, and we found ourselves at similar talks and interested in similar perspectives, so we started a conversation from there.

ASA Publications (04:16)

Awesome, very cool. So can you explain the concept of soundscape and how it differs from traditional understandings of environmental sound?

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (04:24)

I think the ISO standards actually do a pretty neat job of layering different definitions of sound. So at first it talks about sound sources, which are sounds generated by nature or human activity. And then if you combine all those sources at the receiver, as the sounds are modified by the environment, we call that an acoustic environment. So it's basically all the sounds present at a certain place and time. But then we still talk about the acoustic dimension of sound. You can characterize it in terms of loudness, frequencies, temporality, reverberation. But it is still kind of objective, abstract way of looking at sound.

 And then when you start talking about a soundscape there's also emphasis on the way that acoustic environment is perceived by people, a person or people, in that specific context. So one acoustic environment can be perceived very differently by a broad range of people. There's this classic example that loud sounds are bad for you because we know that there is a relationship between decibel exposure and all these negative health outcomes like cardiovascular diseases and sleep disturbances. But that's not the whole story, right? People can enjoy very loud music, or concerts, or other types of loud sounds. And soft sounds can be equally annoying as loud sounds. And that's where the soundscape approach focuses on: that subjective experience of sounds as they are perceived or understood and the effects of that perception.

ASA Publications (06:07)

Okay. So then one concern you raise in your article is that current standardization efforts within the field of soundscape research have led to the development of this sort of homogenized average listener, thereby losing some of the nuance that has traditionally come from sound studies and their emphasis on an individual listener's perception. Can you go into that a bit?

Katie Chatburn (06:28)

Yes, so in the article, we share some examples of critique that's perhaps coming from more of a sound studies perspective. So, for example, Stern's critique of Schaeffer's work, and he critiques it as reflecting a kind of masculine, domesticated, bourgeois perspective. In terms of more directly soundscape studies and related initiatives around their ideas of the average listener have emerged driven by a need to make large scale decisions about acoustic space. And what this can do is miss outliers, despite the fact that outliers can often be some of those that are most affected, for example, sound sensitive individuals. 

So, yeah, the idea of a homogenized average listener is in itself interesting. And there's brilliant work by Andrew Hugill and John Drever on the Aural Diversity Project that we found very inspirational in showing that the idea of an auditory normate, as Drever says, is kind of problematic. And in fact, everybody hears differently. If anyone's new to their work, we recommend checking out they have a brilliant infographic which demonstrates this well and also shows that normal hearing is actually only 17% of the population. 

ASA Publications (07:49)

Oh, wow.

Katie Chatburn (07:50)

So, yeah, so this is one of the examples that we talk about in arguing that individual perspective matters and that we're all shaped by the individual intersection of our identities and how we experience sounds and that we should be giving that more consideration.

ASA Publications (08:06)

Can you give examples of kind of how that might be the case as far as, like, explain that example a little?

Katie Chatburn (08:12)

So the infographic itself talks about different experiences of sound for a range of different perspectives—neurological, physiological, psychological—and it's kind of saying that, basically there is no such thing as a “normal “way of experiencing sound.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (08:32)

No, this is a problematic point because in a lot of studies participants are screened on normal hearing, and  often it's just self-reported rather than actually measured ,and also in statistical analysis in psychology often outliers are removed. And I think it was last year during a conference we were having a conversation together with some other researchers who focus on aural diversity, Carmen Rosas-Pérez, and we realized we are the outliers. So it's very weird to remove people who have very valid experiences. And that is exactly what the soundscape approach is about. It's about how sound is perceived by a person in a specific context. And if we then take out all diversity, or at least a large chunk of that diversity, then what is still left from this definition that underlies the whole field of soundscape research?

Katie Chatburn (09:27)

Yeah, absolutely. When I first, as I said, was new to this field in the last few years. And when I started to read articles that were screening for certain kinds of hearing in order for them to be participating in the study for like “normal hearing” in inverted commas, I found that so strange. You know, this like… But isn't this about making changes for everyone? So why would it be about one way of hearing? And then, yeah…  It's pretty fascinating. And Carmen's work that Kirsten mentioned is really important work. She's done a lot of studies looking at experiences of sound through people with autism, and she’s found that the effects that sound in certain environments can have is like, actively preventing people from accessing space and… Basically, there's people that are sound sensitive who are essentially experts on sound, but many of them are not necessarily being consulted or included in studies.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (10:29)

Simply because they are not there.

Katie Chatburn (10:32)

Yeah.

ASA Publications (10:33)

Right, right, that makes sense, right. So let’s go into that more. What perspectives have been traditionally left out of soundscape research? 

Katie Chatburn (10:41)

Yeah, so we  cover a range of perspectives within the article, sort of looking at exclusion from different angles. But I think it's interesting to note  that the kind of history of soundscape mapping has used historically techniques that have served dominant groups. So like 19th century techniques that served a middle class idea of silence.

There's a great article by Samuel Llano who talks about this called “A Listener's Guide to Social Engineering.” And while we've progressed since then, there are still means of assessment that can by their nature be exclusive. For example, the idea of testing hearing and “normal hearing” in inverted commas being a prerequisite to taking part within a study. There are also a great deal of studies that take place in university environments and spaces that kind of prioritize dominant groups.

But in terms of an overall perspective on who's traditionally been left out, I think one of the things that we've talked about a lot and that came up at the conference we met at, is the idea of who isn't in the room. Because many individuals who are sound sensitive may be avoiding spaces completely, yet they're the ones that are being affected potentially the most.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (12:00)

Maybe I can add a little bit to that, because the whole soundscape field is based on the work by Western scholars, and we are developing, or a lot of great colleagues who were on your last podcast about soundscapes as well, they've been working really hard on maturing the field, developing internationally translated and validated tools and methods and instruments and analyses to make the field of soundscape research very robust. But it is all based on a Western epistemology. We have this circumplex model that categorizes people, their experience, and basically we say people find a soundscape pleasant or unpleasant and eventful or uneventful. But in the soundscape, these soundscape attributes, in the translation project, it turned out that this model does not fit all languages and all cultures. And that really interestingly illustrates that this Western model of knowledge is not suitable for everyone. So that shows that other viewpoints or other ways of knowing have been excluded so far.

ASA Publications (13:18)

Your main example in this article was this idea that comes up when folks talk about soundscapes, which is that natural sounds , birds chirping or wind rustling leaves and what have you, typically have positive connotations for listeners. You point out that this assumption is actually inherently biased. How so?

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (13:35)

Yes, it is biased and it's biased in several levels. The first is that what you might call a chromatic or a landscape bias. It's when literature talks about nature sounds, it almost always means temperate, green, blue environment, and we read and talk about bird sounds, water, wind through leaves. That becomes the default definition of “nature” in our literature and by extension, the default definition of restorative soundscape. But that framing implicitly marginalized environment that don't fit that template. For example, the harsh landscape, the extreme climates, the environments that are homes to indigenous communities, for example, or all the global south, which are the majority of the population of the planet. So, we can see that there is a, and we talk about this in our paper, that there is a colonial logic embedded in romanticizing certain landscape as inherently more natural or more restorative. 

And the second level of bias is about the access and relationship to nature. The assumption that people have a connection to green space or have the green space available to them so they can go and use it, and it's universal, doesn't really exist because people may not have that access. And we know that this came  from literature and research by Wilsons on a biophilia hypothesis. And there was this understanding that the nature is what is in that paper. But there's communities that because of their gender, their race, their age, or their socioeconomic background, they may have a completely different idea of the nature or restorative environment. For example, the research shows that women, if they have access to urban green space in their life, it can help their mental health. But they may not have access to it, they may not have time to go and access that environment. And if the park is available for them in that area, they may not feel safe to go and use that space. So the assumption that nature is going to be restorative is okay, but who has access to that space, as Katie mentioned, it is what is very important and what we want to focus on.

ASA Publications (15:57)

Those are both really, really interesting points. So how might different groups experience natural soundscapes?

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (16:04)

So this is a question, and this really goes back to what we frame in our paper as intersectional position we have. And it's very important because as Katie mentioned, the aural diversity, and she mentioned that people with autism, for example, they have a very different understanding and perception of the environment. There is a research by Guo and their colleagues in our paper that look at children with autism and how they have a very different reaction to different soundscape. Also, Carmen Rosas-Pérez, as Kristen mentioned, she did lots of research with people with autism, the older adults and adults with autism, and how  their perception of the sonic environment and their sensitivity to the sonic environment and the soundscapes can actually make them to make a major life decision because, for example, they may not be able to work in one place or they have to change the way that the place that they live because just their sensitivity to the sonic environment. Beside that, there is of course the cultural dimension, the familiarity with soundscape and the perception that comes with it is very important, and there is lots of research around it. But we know that although we have it in the research, we don't really pay too much attention with that.

And this goes back to what Kristen mentioned about the translation of all of the soundscape attributes into different languages and culture. It seems that all of this is based on Western epistemological framework and not other cultures. So when we wnat to do this research, we want to go to different culture  and understand at how different people actually explain or how they contribute to this the whole framework and not just the Western lens through this.

ASA Publications (17:54)

So we've talked about how aural diversity and cultural background might impact one's perception of soundscapes. And you kind of touched on this a little bit, but how does socioeconomic status affect one's perception?

Katie Chatburn (18:05)

Yeah, so, Arezoo touched on this. And we've also mentioned the idea of how landscape assessments can be exclusive in those ways. But there's quite a lot of research that highlights inequality in terms of social and economic status, for example, within city environments, where a lower socioeconomic position is associated with higher exposure to noise, for example, on aircraft routes. 

I think in terms of how socioeconomic status might impact perception, the question really is, what are we doing to work beyond assumptions and be more inclusive in learning about inequality and sound? And we mentioned a report in the paper, I think it was Catherine Guastavino and others, who did a study looking into beneficial sound environments and the relationship to inequality. And they found only one piece of work that had investigated this. So, yeah, it kind of really highlights the need for us to learn more about inequality on all levels.

ASA Publications (19:10)

Right, right, it's kind of Arezoo was saying before about like, do you even have access to this natural soundscape, whatever, ideal or unideal, or is it a safe space for you, or anything like that.

Katie Chatburn (19:22)

Well, yeah, exactly. And just assumptions around the idea that a certain kind of sound is, like this sort of Western colonial idea that there are certain kind of sonic environments that are just good for us and that we all like. And actually, when you dig a little deeper, that’s not everyone's experience.

ASA Publications (19:42)

Not everybody is happy to be listening to a mountain soundscape, necessarily. 

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (19:48)

Or bird sounds.

ASA Publications (19:49)

Or bird sounds.

Katie Chatburn (19:51)

Yeah, I mean, for someone who maybe lives in the city or hasn't had what we might assume are typically oriented socialized experiences of nature or, you know, like there's some of those assumptions are, yeah….  They are assumptions. Yeah.

ASA Publications (20:08)

There are assumptions. You might just not have an experience with it and therefore it's not soothing to you in any way, right? It's not like it's inherent.

Katie Chatburn (20:16)

Yeah, it's the idea of the inherent without looking at the individuals that creates these problems.

ASA Publications (20:21)

Do you have any other examples of how individual diversity might impact perceptions of other types of environments?

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (20:26)

So one area that I work directly related to this question is healthcare and especially the indoor sound for the people who have dementia or any cognitive difficulties. So people who have dementia usually live in long-term care, or in senior housing and nursing homes, and their space is not their typical home settings. And this population, til now at least, they were absent from soundscape research. But these acoustic environment, based on the research, shows that they have a very profound consequential effect on their health and wellbeing. Because we know, through the research, that dementia affects auditory scene analysis, which is the cognitive capacity to make sense of what you're hearing, to separate the different sounds and understand the individual sound sources and then bring them back together to understand what is happening in that environment. So now imagine that you have dementia, so that part of your brain may not really work very well. And then you're inside the environment that is very chaotic and there is lots of alarm happening. People come and go. So not only that place is very chaotic and overloading your cognitive capacity, it's unpleasant, but at same time, it's disorienting and it's very distressing. So your brain, the brain is no longer can understand what is happening in that area. So that's the part that as a researcher working on the soundscape, I have to work with the people and understand how they perceive that sonic environment. And this is something that is not part of the ISO standard at current state. So we don't have any tool in that standard to do this evaluation.

As we all mentioned this during this talk, all of these standards came from average listener and not someone in the edge or the outliers as Katie mentioned. So the whole focus is how we can bring those outliers into this perception and into the understanding of this. And the problem isn't only who is missing from our databases, but the methods that we use just assume that everyone has this specific way of listening. And that's why we are missing so many people and so many perceptions in our researches. And because they are not part of the database, so our result is not going to be very universal, or very inclusive. So when we take that result as a designer or as a policymaker, then I'm missing a variety of the people with variety of experiences and perception, that they are not going to be part of my design or if I'm making a policy, they're not going to be part of that policy.

ASA Publications (23:05)

That's interesting too. It's like, so it's both the issue of if you are designing a space for a specific group with some form of aural diversity, and you need to actually consider their perspectives rather than just some standard perspective, right, to actually serve them. And also, you cannot create a space for everybody if you do not include everybody's perspective. If you cut out those outliers, you can't do anything for them.

Katie Chatburn (23:33)

Yeah, there's also, I don't know if Kirsten, you want to talk about the curb-cut effect, which is kind of embedded in that, isn't it? 

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (23:38)

Yeah, yeah definitely.

ASA Publications (23:39)

Ooh.

Katie Chatburn (23:40)

The idea that if, you know, because sometimes the response can be, oh, well, we just can't accommodate for everyone, and that's impossible, and we have to average and so on. But like, often if you take the outlier perspectives, and as I said before, often they are maybe the experts on sound because it affects them the most, and you make changes that can benefit them, they will typically benefit everybody. Sorry, Kirsten, I pointed that to you and then sort of it. Do you want to add to that at all?

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (24:08)

 I think it's a great bridge actually to your last question Kat as well. Like, so now what? 

ASA Publications (24:19)

Right, right.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (24:21)

How we design for individuality or study this individuality in soundscape studies? And the effect that Katie describes very good one. Like, accessibility efforts aimed at minorities often also benefit the large majority. For example, elevators. A lot of people have healthy legs, but every once in a while when you have something heavy to carry, you're happy that an elevator is there. Or these dents in the curbs. Not only people in wheelchairs benefit from it, but also mothers with kids in strollers or people who have difficulty walking. 

So sometimes we get the questions, like Katie said, should we design for everyone? Yeah, well, why not? Why not aim for that, right? And if you realize that bad soundscape design leads to exclusion of certain groups of people, it really… At least it made us realize that there is like a human rights implication under this research. I think we are obliged or at least make a very, very, very, very conscious effort to include as many perspective as possible because without that we will not truly understand human soundscape perception. And that's why we advocate throughout our paper not only to focus on who is listening, but also how they are listening. And yes, intersectionality is difficult to grasp, and it is difficult to do everything in an intersectional way. But there are ways of approaching that or at least aiming for that. For example, Katie uses art-based or participatory methods in her research.  Participatory action research is becoming more and more popular and I think soundscape research would very much benefit from methods like that. We should stop listening to people but hearing with them as has been written multiple times already in sound studies literature. And there are already great examples out there. So for example, the Aural Diversity Network which has been mentioned before, they have and Aural Diversity Toolkit. That is something you could start or the inclusive design which Ann Heylighen has written a lot about. There are already guidelines. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to find the resources that are out there that can really help us to design spaces that are accessible, usable, and comfortable for the full range of people instead of just the average listener.

Katie Chatburn (27:00)

Yeah. That was great.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (27:01)

Yeah, mic drop.

Katie Chatburn (27:07)

That was great. I mean, that was just such a great final thing. But I was just thinking about this idea of coming back to the beginning, Kirsten's definitions of what soundscape is and recognizing that it is a co-produced entity. And if we treat it as just something to be observed and managed, it kind of negates an understanding of what it actually is. And yeah, some of the methods, as Kirsten mentioned, that I'm really interested in are how we can work co-creatively to explore soundscape and explore solutions to soundscape and actually draw in voices in a co-produced way to reflect that ultimately, that's what soundscape is.

ASA Publications (27:45)

How does that work exactly? I'm curious about this.

Katie Chatburn (27:47)

Yeah. So I've been using creative methods, and some of these have come from my music background. So looking at things like using color and shape to explore sounds in a kind graphic scoring way, which helps in terms of, you know, as you talked about, with standardization and translation. Sound’s inherently is something that a lot of people find quite challenging to talk about. There isn't really a very common public lexicon about sound. We could talk about sound. We might talk about a car. That's not a sound, you know? And so using more abstracted methods can be a great way of exploring this. I also use body maps, which helps to explore the kind of visceral impact of sounds and the embodied qualities. So using color and shape to explore the experience of sound across a body outline. And in terms of the... the co-produced methods, I've been using interactive technology through an app called Flowfile where we've been taking field recordings and composing and reimagining soundscape together. So actually you can kind of, yeah, literally create the sounds by moving a phone and then doing that in group settings, which, you know, it's not like, “Oh, here's a solution to the problem of noise,” but it's kind of opening up the conversation creatively, accessibly and in a co-created way that draws in new perspectives, and I think that we need more of those kinds of conversations.

ASA Publications (29:16)

Right, right, absolutely. Any other closing thoughts?

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (29:19)

I just want to add to what Katie says  that we need to not look at the participant data point, but because we want to do, as Kirsten and Katie mentioned, we want to do the co-creation, co-design knowledge with the communities that we don't understand or we maybe yet not understand. So bring them into our research as co-creators so we can understand them better and help them and help ourselves because, for example, in the dementia research, if I never experienced that cognitive deficit, I do not know what to do, right? So that's why all the ISO standard and all the methods should be just the starting point, not the end point. So we have to bring the people too, so they help us. Those who experience soundscape differently, they help us to understand how to do our research. 

But we are very hopeful because ISO standard is, in roots, is based off subjective perception and context. So if you focus on that, you're actually in a very good path. And as everyone mentioned in this topic, and it is taught, it's just, we want to focus on equity and sonic agency. And the only way that we can get to that point is that our participants be part of our research and not just a data source.

ASA Publications (30:35)

Right, right, that makes a lot of sense, yeah.

Katie Chatburn (30:37)

And just one other thing we mentioned in the article that Arezoo touched upon is positionality, like recognizing where our own gaps in knowledge are as researchers and understanding them is also really important.

ASA Publications (30:50)

Absolutely, yeah. So, well, hopefully this discussion will raise some awareness about both the needs for inclusion and diversity in soundscape research, as well as give folks some ideas about how to go about conducting more inclusive soundscape research. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today, and I wish you the best of luck in your future research.

Arezoo Talebzadeh  (31:08)

Thank you.

Kirsten Van Den Bosch (31:09)

Thank you.

Katie Chatburn (31:10)

Thank you.