Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds

About this book

Never before has the everyday soundtrack of urban space been so cacophonous. Since the 1970s sound researchers have attempted to classify noise music and everyday sounds using concepts such as Pierre Shafers sound object and R. Murray Schafers soundscape. Recently the most significant team of soundscape researchers in the world has been concerned with the effects of sounds on listeners. In a multidisciplinary work spanning musicology electro-acoustic composition architecture urban studies communication phenomenology social theory physics and psychology Jean-Franois Augoyard Henry Torgue and their associates at the Centre for Research on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON) in Grenoble France provide an alphabetical sourcebook of eighty sonic/auditory effects. Their accounts of sonic effects such as echo anticipation vibrato and wha-wha integrate information about the objective physical spaces in which sounds occur with cultural contexts and individual auditory experience. Sonic Experience attempts to rehabilitate general acoustic awareness combining accessible definitions and literary examples with more in-depth technical information for specialists. From the book: Cocktail or Cocktail Party: Our ability to focus attention on the speech of a specific speaker by disregarding irrelevant information coming from the surroundings. From the physical point of view one of the predominant elements is the spatial separation of noise and speech on the psycho-physiological level selective listening is governed by our capacity to discriminate sounds from different sources - that is by our capacity to localize in the noise.