An Interactive Abstracted Soundscape

INTRODUCTION

Tim Ingolds’ reflection on the soundscape from an anthropological perspective, in a chapter titled ‘Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape’ (2011 pp. 136-139, originally ‘Against Soundscape’ 2007), discusses what Ingold believes are issues with the concept of soundscape.

Ari Y. Kelman (2010) explains that the term soundscape has been used and misused widely, and in many fields beyond music and sound study, causing it to have a broad and unclear meaning, often being redefined by scholars to “suit their needs” (p. 212). He explains that R. Murray Schafer’s seminal work which caused the term to become “resonant” (p. 214) was concerned mainly with listening and the distinction between sound and ‘background’ noise (p. 5). Kelman gives the following idea: “Like ‘landscape,’ to which it alludes, a ‘soundscape’ seems to offer a way of describing the relationship between sound and place” (p. 215).

In this critical literature review I will summarise Ingolds’ objections, and evaluate his ideas based on my reflection of the text as well as by discussing other authors’ considerations on the concept.

SUMMARY

Ingold’s four objections are as follows:

He is against the idea of dividing into “scapes of every possible kind” (p. 136). Ingold believes that experiences are the convergence of all our senses, and to divide or remove senses in an experience decreases the value of the experience as a whole.

Ingold states that “the power of hearing” does not exist in recordings (p. 137). His view is that it is important to actively listen to our surroundings as we experience them, as hearing happens in the body of the observer, not in the recording. He continues, saying that ears are “organs of observation, not instruments of playback” (p. 137).

Sound is analogous to light, rather than vision – it’s a medium in which we observe. We wouldn’t describe a “lightscape”; we would see a “landscape bathed in light” (p. 138).

Additionally, Ingold states that sound and light are so tightly bound to one another that they are inseparable (pp. 137-138).

His final objection is that the idea of a soundscape places the emphasis of consideration on surfaces rather than the medium of sound and its fluxes (p. 138).

Stefan Helmreich (2010) sums up Ingold’s point of view (p. 10):

Tim Ingold in “Against Soundscape” suggests that soundscape objectifies sound rather than treating it as experiential. For Ingold, sound is an occasion of “our immersion in, and commingling with, the world in which we find ourselves.”

EVALUATION

“The world we perceive is the same world, whatever path we take” is Ingold’s reasoning for being against “multiplying scapes of every possible kind” – or rather, dividing our world into scapes. He says that “The power of the prototypical concept of landscape lies precisely in the fact that it is not tied to any specific sensory register” (p. 136). The physical world does not change depending on which sense we choose to use or focus on, and to actively observe a landscape with all our senses can be a particularly memorable or special experience. However, when two or more people want to discuss and compare their experiences, or even one person comparing two of their own experiences, it is useful to be able to discern between aspects of our observation. Inevitably, there will be occasions where it was a particular sense that you felt was more dominant in immersing you into an environment. Having a word for ‘the auditory stream of that experience in that environment’ is valuable in discussing and comparing ideas and reflections of observation. Robert

Curgenven (2008) expands on this idea of dividing, describing the soundscape as “a world of ‘wholes’” that shouldn’t be abstracted to sound objects: “sound objects, stripped of their context, [are] reduced by a subject to an occurrence outside of the continua of the moments surrounding it.” (p. 46). However, describing and comparing sounds within a soundscape is useful. It might be a particular sound object, or the particular combination of sound objects that make a soundscape uniquely identifiable. It is only possible for sound to be “spatially evocative” (Curgenven, p. 45) by comparing the location of sound sources, as space is relative to the listener and other sounds. The interplay of different sounds in space and frequency creates a dynamic and unique listening experience. The acoustic niche hypothesis (Krause 1993) requires thinking in abstracted sounds. Almo Farina (2014) explains: “In environments with a high diversity of vocal animals, spectral and temporal overlap should be reduced to avoid masking and confused signals” (p. 55). Each animal (as a ‘sound object’) is aware of the frequency response of their vocalisations and waits for a space in time where those frequencies are absent from its environment to make its call.

If we agree with Ingold that the “power of hearing” does not exist in recordings (p.137), does that really put us against the concept of a soundscape? I posit that a soundscape and a soundscape recording are not the same, a delineation that Ingold has seemingly overlooked. When we have access to a soundscape recording, we can use our ‘power of hearing’ when we like, transporting us through our sense of hearing to different environments. The value of a soundscape recording is in its ability to be played back for our ears to (re)observe – recreating a soundscape (though not identically due to microphone quality and other technical challenges, see Curgenven 2008). The soundscape recording may not replicate or substitute the experience of listening to that landscape in person, but it still can create affect in a listener. Ingold makes no mention of music recordings. Again, listening to a recording of music is not the same as listening to music live, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a music recording is better or worse than a live performance. There are often details on a recording that are there because of the possibilities of the medium, that might not appear in a live performance. Likewise, in a live performance, there are things about the performance that make that experience completely unique, like interaction with that specific audience or an improvised variation of a line. With the delineation that a recording is not a soundscape, rather a soundscape is created by observing a recording, is also becomes possible to consider ‘composed’ soundscapes, including those that might use sounds that are nonnaturally occurring in the world – facilitated by the possibilities of the loudspeaker. A soundscape recording is also useful in sharing (an aspect of) your experience. Particularly interesting soundscape recordings are ones that sound considerably different to the soundscapes one is surrounded by in day-to-day life (for instance, Chris Watsons’ 2003 ‘Vatnajokull’ & Annea Lockwoods’ 2008 A Sound Map of the Danube are memorable listens for me, compared to the soundscapes of London).

Ingold’s assertation that describing a “concept of ‘lightscape’ would not make sense” (p. 138) connects back to his idea of dividing into “scapes of every possible kind” (p. 136). He furthers his argument: light is not an object but the medium of our perception (p. 138); it is “ill-advised to assimilate the experience of light, sound or feeling to a landscape perspective” (p. 134). Ingold believes that, because it is a medium, light is all around us and it would be incorrect to bind light to a particular place as an object – a lightscape. A key difference between the mediums of light and sound is that sound is created in the natural world more ubiquitously than light. What we see is predominantly due to the reflection of light; what we hear is predominantly due to the creation of sound (see Appendix A). A candle flame, for example, creates light and therefore would make sense to be a ‘light object’. Consider the night sky as a lightscape, or “Lightscape” installations, with many light sources (Chicago Botanic Garden 2023, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria 2023). As the world has many sound sources, Ingold’s analogy and objection to the lightscape is not equivalent to the soundscape. Ingold states that “light is another way of saying ‘I can see’” (p. 137). In chapter 10, ‘Landscape or Weather-World?’ (pp. 126-135), Ingold explains that “light is an experience”– “the experience of inhabiting the world of the visible, and its qualities” (p. 128). Ingold is not oblivious to blind experience (he mentions “formerly blind persons whose sight has been restored”, “the newborn opening their eyes for the first time”, p. 128), yet blind experience so clearly comes into conflict with his statement: a blind person cannot see despite light existing. Also, consider that wavelengths of sound and light exist above and below that which humans can perceive – sound and light exist as physical properties of the universe. I agree with Ingold that light and sound are closely entangled but find it interesting to purposefully disconnect one from the other. When listening to soundscape compositions, sound art or music, I find it fascinating to close my eyes, often resulting in unforeseen visualisations of worlds in my mind, possible or impossible, that are connected to the sound in some way and that exist as a response to the sound without the visual aspect of the experience. It is perhaps because light and sound are so intertwined that this happens at all.

When explaining his final objection, concerning the “fluxes” (p. 138) of sound, Ingold seems to dismiss the importance of surfaces that sound and light interact with. It is the surfaces that absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light that result in our perception of colour, and sound too is absorbed and reflected in different ways by different surfaces, resulting in changes of the character of the sound, including frequency content and reverberation. Ingold discusses his idea of “fluxes” in chapter 2 of the book, ‘Materials Against Materiality’ (pp. 1932), explaining that we should try to understand the “tangled web of meandrine complexity” that is the materials versus the materiality of objects (p. 26). He gives, among others, an example of boiling fish bones creating a glue rather than a “fishy kind of materiality in the things glued together” (p. 26). He is interested in the permanence of materials, and the impermanence of the objects – the materiality – that the materials form. Ingold’s final objection to the concept of soundscape then, is about the impermanence of sound, that should not be fixed, constantly generating and regenerating. He is against the idea of a fixed conceptualisation of an experience that should be lived in (“perceive in”, “touch in”, “see in”, “hear in” p. 138). This objection then, is with the soundscape recording, rather than the continual, ever-generating reality of the soundscape. Repeat listeners to one soundscape (not a soundscape recording) will intuitively understand that each listen is different than the last, perhaps enjoying the fluxes, the uniqueness of the experience. That soundscape will no doubt have defining characteristics such as the timbre of calls from specific creatures, the relative levels of biophony, geophony and anthrophony, and the reverberation of sound in the listening space. It is possible to appreciate the soundscape with awareness of the fluxes of sound.

CONCLUSION

Ingold’s four objections to the concept of soundscape are not completely justified. Though his view is formed mainly from valuing observation as experience, he fails to consider that the soundscape is a useful way to distinguish between the sonic and the other aspects of one’s observation. Ingold doesn’t mention music in his critique of the soundscape, which can be useful in contextualising ideas that are true of both soundscapes and music – like his objection regarding ‘the power of hearing’. Ingold is against the objectification of sound but is mistaken to equate the soundscape with recordings; a recording would have no value if there was no means of playing it back for (re)observation. Ingold, in his experience-first deconstruction of sound and light, chooses to ignore blind and deaf experiences to show that sound and light are “not merely a phenomenon of the physical world” (p. 128). In his description of the analogy of sound to light, he treats them as equivalents, whereas sound and light are pervasive for different reasons. Ingold’s desire for the fluxes of sound to be a feature of listening experience is not an objection to the concept of soundscape. It is even possible to ‘objectify’ a soundscape into a generative system that embraces this idea of fluxes, that sits somewhere between recording and the ‘natural’ soundscape. In video games, for example, where players can “experience, know and move around in” (p. 136) a virtual environment, the resulting soundscape could dynamically generate and react in real time, from abstracted sound objects, satisfying Ingold’s desire for exploration of an environment based on its sonic qualities.

To continue my research in this area, I would like to realise this dynamic soundscape within a video game. It could, for example, include complex behaviour like animals stopping their calls if startled by the player’s proximity, or obeying the acoustic niche hypothesis. It would be interesting to experiment with removing the visuals from the game – challenging the entanglement of hearing and vision.

APPENDIX A

While pondering this statement, I looked at a particular brick in the building across from my window. I could see that brick because light created by the Sun being reflected by it, then travelling through my window and into my eye. I closed my eyes. No matter how hard I tried, I was not able to become aware of that brick by listening, even though sound would be reflected by it. Then a bird cawed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chicago Botanic Garden (2023) Lightscape, Available at: https://www.chicagobotanic.org/lightscape (Accessed 11/03/2023).

Curgenven, R. (2008) ‘Sound, Landscape and the bastard child Soundscape’, Lo Squaderno, 10, pp. 45-48.

Farina, A. (2014) ‘Sonic Patterns II: The Animal Choruses’, In: Soundscape Ecology:

Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications, Dordrecht: Springer.

Helmreich, S. (2010) ‘Listening Against Soundscapes’, Anthropology News, 51(9, December), p. 10.

Ingold, T. (2007) ‘Against Soundscape’ in A. Carlyle (ed) Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, Paris: Double Entendre, pp. 10-13.

Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 1st Edition, London: Routledge.

Kelman, Ari Y. (2010) ‘Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies’, The Senses & Society, 5(2), pp. 212-234.

Krause, B. (1993) ‘The Niche Hypothesis: A Virtual Symphony of Animal Sounds, the Origins of Musical Expression and the Health of Habitats’, The Soundscape Newsletter, 6, pp. 6-10.

Lockwood, A. (2008) A Sound Map of the Danube, Lovely Music.

Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (2023) Lightscape. Available at: https://www.rbg.vic.gov.au/melbourne-gardens/what-s-on-melbourne/lightscape/ (Accessed 11/03/2023).

Watson, C. (2003) ‘Vatnajökull’ Weather Report, Touch.

INTRODUCTION

Tim Ingold’s ‘Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape’ (2011) discusses his view of the issues with the concept of soundscape. In my critical literature review (2023), I discussed Ingold’s objections and other considerations from soundscape literature, concluding that Ingold’s objections are not fully justified. My creative practice project seeks to support this conclusion by engaging with and challenging Ingold’s objections.

My creative project is a video game where the player can walk around in a virtual environment filled with many creatures of several kinds which produce sound. The player, led by their ears can explore this dynamic, generative soundscape.

In this commentary, I will explain how my creative project responds to the debate, why I made certain decisions, and the technical challenges and methods used. I will then evaluate my project, discussing learnings and what I would do differently in future work.

RESPONDING TO THE DEBATE

I am engaging with “the power of hearing” (Ingold, p. 137), as the purpose of the game is for listeners to actively listen to the environment, which, due to randomness (when creatures produce sound, the sounds they make, subtle pitch changes, and how they move in the world), is never identical, though is undoubtably identifiable as that environment. This randomness, and the fleeting moments it creates, engages with Ingold’s desire to appreciate the “fluxes” of a soundscape (p. 138).

Ingold is against the objectification of sound. He mistakenly equates a soundscape with a soundscape recording, but the topic of objectification has more depth. Robert Curgenven (2008, p. 46), responding to Ingold’s essay, says that sounds in a soundscape should not be abstracted to sound objects. In video games however, sounds must be abstracted to create a convincing soundscape. Each game object that makes sound (a sound object), must have its own sound so that as the player explores the three-dimensional space, it can be properly localised. The abstraction of sounds within a soundscape is also necessary for the acoustic niche hypothesis (Krause, 1993), as each creature listens to its environment and themselves produce sound. I simulated the acoustic niche hypothesis in the virtual environment using programming, detailed below. This project also challenges the objectification of sound, using recorded, ‘objectified’ sounds to generate new compound sounds in real time, moment by moment.

Ingold is against the separation of the senses in experiencing reality, dividing a multisensory experience into a unisensory one, a soundscape. Ingold chooses to ignore blind experience and is not interested by what happens if you choose to divide the senses that are so closely intertwined. For these reasons, I chose to completely remove the visual aspect of the game, providing instead a black screen. My aim is for the player to be immersed in the virtual world and led through it completely by their ears. I encourage the player to close their eyes and try to imagine the space in their mind.

DESIGN BREAKDOWN

I chose to make my soundscape as a video game because it facilitates interaction with a player, is generative, and also to further develop my understanding of the Unity game engine, programming and audio middleware Wwise, where the majority of my experience in these tools so far was in the context of dynamic music.

To facilitate the abstraction of sounds, to engage with the idea of a composed soundscape mentioned in the critical literature review (p. 4), and to develop my sound design skills, I chose to synthesise all the sounds in my soundscape. This meant that there was no bleed of other sounds that there might have been had I recorded them. I wanted to create recognisable animal sounds but embraced the unreality of my composed sounds – this is a virtual soundscape that is not trying to replicate any particular exiting real soundscape.

I created the virtual environment in Unity. I created a flat plane for the ground, and sphere objects as my animals, to which I added my script that triggers each animal to play as detailed below. I also added barriers to the edge of the plane so that the player is bound to the intended area and can’t fall off the world. I also reduced the density of sound sources further from the centre of the plane to guide players toward the intended area.

To create the sounds for each animal, I listened to recordings to get an idea for typical sounds they make. Then I synthesised sounds in that likeness, generally using sine waves and modulation of LFOs, pitch bend, filters, etc. The sounds that each creature make are designed to vary, rather than repeating exact phrases. Parts of each animal call were exported separately and are combined in a random order in real time for each call. The length (how many parts of the call) also varies, in most cases set to play two parts, altered randomly in a range of minus one to positive two, resulting in some calls being only one part long, and others up to four. Each call also has a randomised range of pitch, creating more variation in the sounds. A similar approach was taken with the footstep sounds which are triggered each time the player has travelled 1 unit (a measure of distance within the game), where different variations of sounds are combined randomly with subtle pitch randomisation. I created sounds for hummingbirds, owls and an imagined bird species, crickets, grasshoppers, and frogs. These sounds covered a variety of frequency bands, with the hummingbirds and the imagined birds competing for an acoustical niche.

To simulate the acoustic niche hypothesis, I first simplified it. The optimal or immediately obvious solution to this problem would be to have each creature within the game-world listen to their environment. This way, each creature would have a stream of audio which could be analysed, perhaps by calculating the loudness of a particular band of frequencies. This method would be the most realistic, and adaptable to changes in the environment. However, due to the multiplicity of creatures within the game-world, analysing many streams of audio at scale would be taxing to compute, and tools for this don’t seem to be available. I simplified this problem by limiting the information required by each creature, and abstracting information into simple variables, which the computer can more efficiently work with. Each creature is assigned a category of frequency band which is the frequency band that they themselves produce. A Boolean variable keeps track of whether the creature is making sound. Each creature also has float (decimal number) variables that store information about the threshold loudness in their frequency band that would prevent them from playing, the creatures loudness, and the probability (as a percentage) that the creature will try to play at given intervals. When the creature randomly ‘decides’ to play, it first checks the loudness in its frequency band. The script finds each game object with the ‘creature’ tag, and if the frequency band of that creature matches, checks to see if that creature is playing. If it is, its loudness, divided by the distance between the two creatures, is added to a cumulative loudness variable. Once each creature has been checked, if the cumulative loudness is above the threshold, the creature instead does not play. Otherwise, it plays, changing its ‘Playing’ variable to true until the sound ends. Each time the creature tries to play or does play, it waits a duration before trying again.

There is a stream and a pond in the virtual world. I used a particular type of Wwise sound object, an ‘AkAmbient’ object set to ‘Large’ mode, which creates many sound emitters for the stream. I placed these emitters along the length of the stream, with a few clustered in the pond area. They are linked and so play the same audio, reducing the workload on the computer. The audio is randomly selected from three 30-second-long clips from a recording I made in Scotland in 2021. I also made a script that makes the player’s footsteps include a splashing sound when they are walking in the water. When the player object’s collider enters (intersects with) the stream objects, it sets a state to wet. The player footstep sounds include a splashing sound (from a recording I made in 2019) when this state is set to wet. When the player leaves the stream, the state is set to dry, and the volume of the splashing is set to -infinity and thus is not computed.

To simulate the change of frequency response of sounds based on the listeners direction relative to the sound, I made a parameter that measured the angle between the forward direction of the player’s head, and the sound object that is playing. This parameter then drives a subtle low-pass filter so that when the player is facing the complete opposite direction to the object, the low-pass filter is fully engaged, reducing high frequencies.

The animals also move around in the virtual world, changing the soundscape. Each of the birds randomly selects a tree to fly to, the frogs select a section of stream to walk to, creating footstep sounds as they jump around, and mice move somewhat aimlessly, turning randomly in a 20-degree range in front of them and walking forward, creating footstep sounds as they scurry around.

EVALUATION

In my future work, where I might be creating soundscapes for virtual/game worlds, I would like to try to use recordings of creatures. Synthesising creature sounds had the benefit of not containing other sounds from its surroundings, but was challenging as creature sounds are very complex, requiring detailed control of parameters to create recognisable sounds. Recording the whole sound and then removing unwanted sounds might be a better approach, although, this does limit the types of sounds you can include to the sounds that you could feasibly record. Additionally, it would be interesting if there were distinct soundscapes that you could move between. This could be subtle, like moving from a particular kind of forest to another, where certain species of animals are more or less common, or more explicit, like moving between forest and coast, for example.

The implementation of the acoustic niche hypothesis is somewhat limited, and I would like to improve it in future work. In its current form, each creature only considers other creatures within its designated frequency band. This means that sounds on the upper or lower edges of the frequency bands are not considered by the creatures in neighbouring bands. In real life, this could affect the sounds created by the creatures, such as raising or lowering their own sounds in pitch to better fit into a niche. Any other sounds in the world are also not being considered, despite the potential for those sounds to occupy specific frequency bands at a significant volume. To include those sounds under the current system, each sound object would need to be assigned frequency bands, but this would require manual frequency analysis and assignment for each sound, which might pose problems when working at scale with many sounds and sound objects.

The localisation of sounds in the virtual space while playing is sometimes unclear. This could be a result of the lack of visual information (as in blind experience), but potentially could be improved with better implementation of sounds. For example, the attenuation of volume and the change in frequency response due to distance could be refined, perhaps using real-life data from impulse responses captured at varying distances and orientations in a real space. Additionally, due to the simplification of the development process and with the player not being able to see in mind, the ground of the virtual space is completely flat, and the trees are without trunk surfaces (so the player doesn’t get stuck while trying to walk around), which would affect how sounds permeate the environment. A more realistic or immersive soundscape might be achieved with changing grounds and surfaces to reflect the sound.

APPENDIX A - ANIMAL SOUND FREQUENCIES

Each creature and their respective peak frequency range and assigned frequency band are listed below:

Owl 200-300Hz [1]

Frog 800-1500Hz [2]

Imagined Bird 1500-2500Hz [3]

Hummingbird 2000-3000Hz [3]

Cricket 3000Hz [4]

Grasshopper 5kHz+ [5]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curgenven, R. (2008) ‘Sound, Landscape and the bastard child Soundscape’, Lo Squaderno, 10, pp. 45-48.

Ingold, T. (2011) ‘Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape’ in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 1st Edition, London: Routledge, pp. 136-139.

Krause, B. (1993) ‘The Niche Hypothesis: A Virtual Symphony of Animal Sounds, the Origins of Musical Expression and the Health of Habitats’, The Soundscape Newsletter, 6, pp. 6-10.

Roffey, B. (2023) ‘Critical Literature Review: Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape’. Assignment for MUM124 Contexts of Music and Sound Practice, MA Music by Research, City, University of London. Unpublished.