The effects of expectation on the perception of soundscapes

Bruce, NS

Abstract

This thesis discusses how expectation is a contributory factor in the perception of
soundscapes. "Soundscape" is a term attributed to R.Murray Schafer to define the acoustic
environment, a recent ISO workgroup has proposed a formal definition as the "perception and
understanding of an acoustic environment, in context, by the individual, or by a society" As
such there is a move away from traditional acoustic methods of understanding environmental
sound towards a more holistic, and interdisciplinary, approach to the sound environment.
Previous soundscape research has identified the importance of semantic meaning attributed to
soundscapes focusing on investigating linguistic and textual approaches of how people
describe the soundscape. This thesis aims to extend the concept of meaning to give an insight
into what particular soundscapes mean to people, and if this related to a predefined
expectation based on context. This work expands Truax's notion of soundscape competence,
and investigates how people perceive the soundscape. In particular how expectation of a
particular space impacts on the perception of that space. This in turn addresses the issue of
defining a context for a space and understanding how the soundscape is of importance to
perception of spaces.
The research which forms this work uses a number of interdisciplinary methods, from the
fields of acoustics, social science and psychology, with the aim of developing a new
qualitative and quantitative methodology for soundscape research. The work consists of
qualitative fieldwork, and the development of a soundscape simulator in the laboratory.
Through the use of an enhanced version of soundwalking, participants were asked questions
aimed to analyse their pre-determined environmental expectation and their actual experience
of a number of different spaces, and how this impacts on their perception and evaluation of
the soundscape. The soundscape simulator was a tool by which participants could control and
design their own soundscapes, whilst providing useful quantitative and qualitative data about
choices made in the design process. Soundscape expectation is shown to relate not only to
competence in perceiving the components of the soundscape but also to attitudes towards
safety, social norms, accepted behaviour, visual aesthetics and control attributed to the space.
Expectation based on competence forms the basis of place expectation or context, and relates
to the overall perception of the soundscape for each space. When one or more of these factors
conflict with a perceived place expectation, then perception of the soundscape becomes more
important and impacts on the perception of the space. This work concludes that the meaning
of a soundscape and its perception is related to an individual's expectation of the context of a
space.

Citation

Bruce, N. The effects of expectation on the perception of soundscapes. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 3, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 3, 2012
• Award Date: Jan 1, 2011