Urban soundscapes
Introduction
The concept of soundscape is consolidated in the research interests developed by a working group led by R. Murray Schafer; musician, composer, environmentalist and professor of communication studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.
The concept is formed from the union of the words sound (sound) and landscape (landscape), thus creating the English word soundscape; (first coined by the American urbanist Michael Southworth. Defined by R. M. Schafer, the soundscape is basically a sound environment and can refer to real natural or urban environments, or to abstract constructions (musical compositions, analog or digital montages that are presented as sound environments). In his words: "a soundscape consists of events heard and not objects seen", a statement that leads us to another key concept that lies behind its ecological and aesthetics: clairaudience, which literally means clean (or clear) listening or hearing. "The term simply refers to exceptional listening skills, particularly in relation to sounds in the environment or environment. Through auditory cleaning exercises, listening skills can be trained to achieve a state of clairaudience."
The work of the Canadians inspired the emergence of other concepts such as "acoustic ecology" and "acoustic design", an issue that, according to Schafer, should be assumed by citizens as well as by composers, architects, sociologists or psychologists. For Schafer, the understanding of design as something interdisciplinary has antecedents in the Bauhaus due to the search for integration between the scientific and the aesthetic.[2]The interesting thing about this approach is to expand the idea of acoustic and sound design beyond auditoriums or film soundtracks to deal with our habitat. In that sense, the work of the Canadians shows a certain degree of coincidence with the studies on the environment and urban landscape that Michael Southworth together with his teacher Kevin Lynch carried out from urban planning.[3].
Subsequently, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the World Soundscape Project (WSP) were founded, where Murray Schafer and other researchers such as Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp have published some of the founding documents related to soundscape and acoustic ecology. All of this work became the Soundscape Studies which, according to Schafer himself, seek to bring together the work of studies on sound that have already been carried out in isolation from disciplines such as psychoacoustics, acoustics, urban planning, music and the social sciences.