Abstract
The ISO 12913 standards acknowledge the primacy of context in perceiving acoustic environments. In soundscape assessments, context is constituted by both physical surroundings and psychological, social, and cultural factors. Previous studies have revealed similarities in people’s soundscape assessments in comparable physical surroundings, such as urban or national parks, despite differing individual associative contexts. However, these assessments were found to be capable of shifting in the historic setting of the Berlin Wall Memorial. Providing contextual information from the past appears to have some bearing on soundscape perception. The COVID-19 lockdown measures enacted since March 2020 in Germany have prevented most tourist activity at the memorial, and a resulting shift in user activity has been observed in the otherwise open and accessible memorial landscape. Building on previous soundscape investigations conducted at the memorial, this paper investigates what effect the restrictions have had on the soundscape context and its perception by visitors. Informal interviews paired with comparative measurements indicated context pliability for local stakeholders. In contrast to site programming alone, tourist presence also appears to affect context perception for local users. This holds repercussions for soundscape and heritage site designs serving local and tourist populations—and their divergent perceptions—alike. The impacts of soundscape assessments being neither static nor generalizable across stakeholders are discussed with suggestions for further research.
Highlights
Despite the central role that context plays in soundscape perception, its components and influence attract far less research attention than perception descriptions
As the participants visited four positions twice during the soundwalk, it is of interest whether significant changes occurred between visits due to the addition of historic context information
A two-way analysis of variance was employed to compare the influence of instructions with historical information and the influence of different positions on the multiple rating scale responses
Summary
Despite the central role that context plays in soundscape perception, its components and influence attract far less research attention than perception descriptions. Researchers have taken note and begun to study these shifts during lockdown measures, focusing on the domestic sphere [2], city neighborhoods [3], and selected locations representing cross-sections of urban public spaces [4] Several of these studies demonstrated a change in noise levels due to reduced mobility and lockdown measures and observed a change in people’s behavior that likely contributed to the soundscapes. This publication builds on a series that has investigated soundscape perception in the historic environment of the Berlin Wall Memorial [5,10,11,12] This previous work affirmed how perception related to context could shift based on immediate experience (visiting a condition twice during the study) and the introduction of historic information relating to the place. Additional research in 2021 investigated whether these observations would be applicable during a significant change in user profiles and societal norms brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic
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