Bibliographic record
Abstract
The word “soundscape” is associated with composer and music scholar R. Murray Schafer and his World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Schafer describes the soundscape as “any acoustic field of study.” He argues that, “We may speak of a musical composition as a soundscape, or a radio program as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as a soundscape.” Despite this wide potential, the term has come to be used mostly in relation to the last of these categories, prompted by Schafer’s own explanation of the soundscape as the auditory equivalent of landscape. Schafer argued that modern industrial environments were increasingly polluted by noise, causing harm to human health, culture, and communication. He wanted more thoughtful planning of sound environments as well as the preservation of traditional and natural soundscapes, aims which crystallized in the “acoustic ecology” movement. Schafer provided categories for analyzing and planning soundscapes: “keynote” sounds, “the anchor or fundamental tone” in the background of a soundscape which we may not always notice; foreground “signals” which we listen to consciously; and “soundmarks” which, like landmarks, lend uniqueness to a soundscape. In an urban context, motor traffic might form the keynote (though according to Schafer, an unhealthy one), with sirens, alarms, and religious sounds functioning as signals. What counts as a soundmark is more varied, depending on the cultural listening practices of a community. A church or town hall bell might be a signal, but if it comes to take on special meaning to a community, as in the case of London’s Big Ben clock chimes, it becomes a soundmark and “deserves to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.” Schafer’s way of thinking about sound as both a physical environment and a culture of listening has been influential, inspiring sound recordists, composers, and artists as much as acousticians, architects, and urban planners. It has also underpinned strands of thinking in the interdisciplinary field of sound studies as it has grown since 2000. Contributions to the study of urban soundscapes come from all these directions and more, making it a highly diverse area in disciplinary and methodological terms. Publications on urban sound inspired by these developments may make little reference to Schafer or even to the term soundscape, but are included here because they nevertheless contribute to what may be understood as the field of urban soundscape studies in its broadest sense.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".