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Special Applications and Inverse Techniques
Published in Paul C. Etter, Underwater Acoustic Modeling and Simulation, 2017
Over the past decade, the technical and popular literature has often described changes in the ocean soundscape. A soundscape is a combination of sounds that characterize, or arise from, an ocean environment. The study of a soundscape is sometimes referred to as acoustic ecology. Changes in the soundscape have been driven by anthropogenic activity (e.g., naval-sonar systems, seismic-exploration activity, maritime shipping, and windfarm development) and by natural factors (e.g., climate change and ocean acidification). The disruption of the natural acoustic environment results in noise pollution. In response to these developments, new regulatory initiatives have placed additional restrictions on uses of sound in the ocean: mitigation of marine-mammal endangerment is now an integral consideration in acoustic-system design and operation. Modeling tools traditionally used in underwater acoustics have undergone a necessary transformation to respond to the rapidly changing requirements imposed by this new soundscape. Advanced modeling techniques now include forward and inverse applications, integrated-modeling approaches, nonintrusive measurements, and novel processing methods.
Soundscape revisited
Published in Journal of Urban Design, 2020
Most soundscape researchers associate ‘soundscape’ with the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who is famous as the founder of the World Soundscape Project. It began with a detailed study of the soundscape of Vancouver in the early 1970s, and continued with studies worldwide throughout the 1980s. One of its major outcomes was the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Truax 1999), defining ‘soundscape’ as ‘[a]n environment of sound (or sonic environment) with emphasis on the way it is perceived and understood by the individual, or by a society’.