China
Africa
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Introduction
Published in Christine Guillebaud, Catherine Lavandier, Worship Sound Spaces, 2019
Christine Guillebaud, Catherine Lavandier
More recently, in the second part of the 20th century, Gibson (1979) and Gaver (1993) proposed focusing on the ecology of perception (rather than sound), seeking to understand how people interact with the physical world. In the same period in Vancouver, the field of acoustic ecology took off in the pioneering works of R. Murray Schafer (1977) and the “World Soundscape Project”, making of “soundscape” a key notion that is also still widely used in acoustic research on the sound environment, both indoors and outdoors. The combination of the two approaches, physical and perceptual, is often called the “soundscape approach”, and the definition of the “soundscape” was implemented in 2014 in an International Standard: “The soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people in a context” (ISO 12913–1, 2014). This definition, inspired by Barry Truax (1978), puts the emphasis on the relationship between people and the environment. However, although the term has become established for a wide variety of contexts, it is currently widely used by researchers to study the impact of sound on human beings not from a solely negative point of view (sound pollution) but also positively (resourcing spaces). Behind the term “soundscape”, we can see a hierarchization of environments as proposed by Schafer in the terms “lo-fi” (low fidelity soundscape) and “hi-fi” (high fidelity soundscape) or in the terms “unwanted sounds” and “wanted sounds” (Brown 2012). In the present work, when discussing worship spaces we will use the term “soundspace”1 to highlight the fact that the sound is spread over a space and generally experienced as an “autonomous” space, in terms of effects, of affect, and even of states of consciousness. Our use of the term “soundspace” implies no positive or negative evaluation: we are interested in the space to which participants sometimes attach extra-sonic and even extra-worldly dimensions that vary from one religious universe to another.
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’.