Marine communities face anthropogenic pressures that degrade ecosystems. Because underwater soundscapes carry information about habitat quality, we explored whether destructive impacts of fishing could be evaluated via the soundscape. Maerl beds are recognized as biodiversity hotspots and they experience major worldwide degradation owing to fishing. We collected field acoustic recordings in mae...

Over the years the environmental potential of urban parks has attracted increasingly attention. In order to preserve their positive influence for communities, the sonic environment perception (soundscape) must be considered too. Urban parks’ sonic environment is influenced by attenders moving around; indeed, walking sounds have very high occurrence in such contexts. However, studies investigati...

We propose a new IEC for musical works based on an adaptive walk on a fitness landscape of sounds. In this system, there is a virtual plane that represents the genetic space of possible musical works called fitness soundscape. The user stands on the soundscape, and hears the multiple sounds that correspond to one’s neighboring genotypes at the same time. These sounds come from different directi...

In complex systems, log-log linear relations between appropriate descriptors are quite common. In this paper, the rural and urban soundscape is assumed the voice of a complex system. Self-organized criticality is shown to occur at different levels in this underlying system. The power spectral density of loudness and pitch in recordings of rural and urban soundscapes indeed often follows quite c...

Candidate's Name: John Levack Drever B. Mus, M. Mus Title of Thesis: Phonographies: Practical and Theoretical Explorations into Composing with Disembodied Sound This is PhD submission is both practical and theoretical. The practical element consists of nine electroacoustic compositions. The dissertation acts as a discursive accompaniment to the compositions, addressing many of the contextual an...

While there is a lot of research about other aspects of game design, there are fairly few studies about music and sound in video games. Since music and sound are components of next to all games, it is interesting to investigate how this aspect affects the perceived immersion of gamers. The aim of this study is to investigate how sound and music affect player sense of presence in a video game, T...

This paper discusses the development of an interactive soundscape simulator, enabling users to manipulate a series of parameters to investigate if there is group correlation between factors such as source selection, positioning and level. The basis of the simulator stems from fieldwork and recordings carried out in London and Manchester. Through the use of an enhanced version of soundwalking, r...

Construction of a simulator to recreate the soundscape inside residential buildings exposed to sonic booms is scheduled to start during the summer of 2008 at NASA Langley Research Center. The new facility should be complete by the end of the year. The design of the simulator allows independent control of several factors that create the indoor soundscape. Variables that will be isolated include ...

In this paper, the use of fuzzy ant clustering in classifying a large database of environmental soundscape recordings is outlined. Fuzzy ant clustering is a soft computing technique inspired by the clustering behaviour observed in colonies of several ant species. Virtual ants or “agents” move through the database, “pick up” soundscape recordings and drop them on places where similar recordings ...