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“Soundwalks in Shiva temple”
Published in Christine Guillebaud, Catherine Lavandier, Worship Sound Spaces, 2019
Today soundwalking is a well-established practice in research and the arts, consisting of listening to and sometimes recording everything while moving about a place. It invites people to think about their sound environments, understand their relationship to the specific moment they pass through a given space, and/or assess this environment in relation to the urban fabric. The term was first used by R. Murray Schafer’s “World Soundscape Project” in Vancouver in the 1970s (see especially Westerkamp 1974), but the practice had been used in previous work.1 The method is now established in research in acoustics and the social sciences devoted to perceptions of the environment, especially in an urban setting, as demonstrated by the authors who went on to propose systematizing it (Adams et al. 2008, McCartney and Paquette 2012 for soundwalks; Thibaud 2001 for commented walks). The method has several variations, however, since it can be practiced in urban areas as well as in nature, and may be based on a pre-determined circuit or a path freely chosen by the walker. Soundwalks can be done individually or in a group, by the in-situ recording of comments in stereo or binaurally, by following a pre-determined questionnaire, with eyes open or completely covered, and so on. If the method has proved itself in the field of perception, it has rarely been implemented in places of worship (Jeon et al. 2014; Laplace 2012), although their specific tonalities contribute significantly to the experience of the devout. This oversight is even more paradoxical since walking, and more specifically “ways of walking” (Ingold and Vergunst 2008), is a rather frequent modality for religious experience, and rather widespread around the world. Description of ritual movement is important in the literature on India, whether it be on walking around places of worship, religious rootedness at broader geographical scales such as itinerant monastic practices (Bouillier 2017), or the ritual circulation associated with pilgrimage sites (Delage 2017).
Indonesian shopping malls: a soundscape appraisal by sighted and visually impaired people
Published in Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 2020
Christina E. Mediastika, Anugrah S. Sudarsono, Luciana Kristanto
The participants’ sonic perception was collected using a soundwalk method, i.e. a walk on an area or route focused on listening to the acoustic environment (ISO, 2018). In this case, the designated routes were in each shopping mall. The routes were designed to cover various segments and tenants within malls over a reasonable time to allow the participants to have a relaxing walk without being too exhausted, which may cause bias in their questionnaire responses. Each shopping mall was segmented into four routes and typically started from the main entrance or the main lobby to the most remote tenants through all available floors. Excluded from the survey in Tunjungan Plaza was the newly extended area, namely, Tunjungan Plaza 6, as it was deemed too far to survey within a reasonable time.