Translations:What is sonification/11/en

The aesthetic is important. A sound can be mapped very precisely but sounds “awful” to the user. This could be considered as a defect and therefore it could limit the efficacy of the system because the user will not bear listening to it. On the other side (i.e. in alarms) the sound can be intentionally noisy and aggressive. The choice of the output sound is in some way artistic in a sense that it must take into consideration the type of audience and its taste. It does not mean that we are obliged to play something that the user will like, but at least be aware of what type of sound is familiar to him/her. Even if the taste is subjective we would like to recall the work done in the field of acoustic ecology. There are some common factors indicated by psychology studies and also cultural models of “beauty”. In the present project, as the name of the project suggests, we reference the work and vision of the Canadian composer Murray Schafer, who popularized the term “soundscape” in the book “The Tuning Of The World” in 1977. Soundscapes can be simply considered as a composition of the anthrophony, geophony and biophony of a particular environment. The author argues that we've become desensitized to the rich sounds of our environment, which he calls the "soundscape." This soundscape encompasses all the natural and human-made sounds that surround us, and Schafer believes we should learn to appreciate and manage it for a better world.His work generated the “acoustic ecology movement” which aims to study the relationship between humans, animals and nature, in terms of sound and soundscapes. The Acoustic Ecology Institute was founded to raise consciousness of the effect of noisy acoustic environments, proven to be harmful for increasing stress levels on individuals when immersed in these.