A cognitive approach of urban soundscapes

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 105; no. 2_Supplement; p. 1281
• Main Authors: Dubois, Daniele, David, Sophie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-02-1999
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.426115

The presented cognitive approach of noises in urban environments focuses on meaning and as such integrates linguistic, psychological, and acoustic conceptualizations and methodologies. It deals with the acoustic phenomena that are perceived, conceived, and said as relevant by the subjects. The productivity of this approach has been evaluated in two research programs. Experiments combining linguistic and psychological analyses showed that urban soundscapes include a complex combination of unpleasant and pleasant noises. The identity of the source and the temporal and spatial contexts of occurrence of the noises are present in subjects’ cognitive representation and influence their perception. Experiments on alarm signals showed that contextual contraints influence the perceptual thresholds of the signals, their identification, and their efficiency (contrasting signals as such with nonmeaningful noises). In conclusion, such a ‘‘situated’’ cognitive (and pluridisciplinary) approach allows (i) at a theoretical level, to identify the roles of top down (high level) constraints on low-level perceptual processing and (ii) at a methodological level, it suggests to first design procedures to identify the meaningful categories of sounds and their properties at linguistic and psychological levels before describing them in physical dimensions and experimentally manipulating them in psychophysical paradigms.