Sounds Of Everyday Life Research Articles

브뤼헐의 종교화에 나타난 저항의 소리풍경 연구

The purpose of this study is to examine how Pieter Bruegel de Oude uses sound in his work to secretly and effectively lead his own resistance to the foreign powers of Spain and Catholicism through the analysis of the soundscape of resistance in his religious paintings. Of the total of 45 paintings by this artist, 20 are religious paintings, of which 10 are allusive to the subject of resistance. First, in these paintings, he achieves the purpose of covert resistance through art by marginalizing the “sacred noise” by letting the secular sounds of everyday life bury the noise in it. He also effectively uses sacred noise and secular sounds of everyday life to mask or reinforce the subject of resistance by appropriately placing them in the “figure” or “ground.”

Forward Broadcast: Conversation with Sue Baker Kenton

Rebecca Partridge: We are at Leicester Print Workshop in the run up to Forward Broadcast, an exhibition of prints which you have largely made here in the workshop. Could you describe the work and the installation? Sue Baker Kenton: The installation comprises of two walls that face each other: on one side is an array of monochrome etchings of sitters under the age of 30. All the etchings are all mounted on boards with some of the portraits ‘leaving’ the wall onto free-standing panels. The wall opposite appears blank, but, as the light shifts, constellations of tiny portrait heads of an older generation are revealed, printed in transparent greys directly onto the wall. These sitters are gazing directly at us, unlike the subjects in the etchings who are gazing at their phones. None of the work is under glass, which emphasises the materiality of the surface. It’s really important to me with this exhibition that it’s a sensory, immersive experience and that the audience engages in a physical way. Integral to the installation is a sound piece which suggests auditory interference: sounds of everyday life and snippets of conversation which come and go, the content building then dropping out just as you begin to make sense of its patterns. On the large gallery window there are multiple drawings of heads which have been silkscreen printed onto the glass itself, and which cast shifting shadows across the space during the day.

Sound Event Detection: A tutorial

Imagine standing on a street corner in the city. With your eyes closed you can hear and recognize a succession of sounds: cars passing by, people speaking, their footsteps when they walk by, and the continuous falling of rain. The recognition of all these sounds and interpretation of the perceived scene as a city street soundscape comes naturally to humans. It is, however, the result of years of "training": encountering and learning associations among the vast varieties of sounds in everyday life, the sources producing these sounds, and the names given to them.

The Potential of Electronic Media Integrated Islamic Values on Students' Motivation and Creative Thinking Ability

This research is a preliminary study regarding the teacher's description of learning, student learning motivation, students' creative thinking skills, and the need for developing electronic comic learning media based on integrated problem based learning Islamic values at SMPN 3 Watumalang. This research uses a descriptive method. This study's subjects were 44 students of class VIII and teachers of science subjects at SMPN 3 Watumalang. The research was conducted from October to November 2020. The data collection instruments were questionnaires, interview guidelines, and creative thinking skills test questions. The results of interviews with students indicated that the students' intrinsic motivation was still low. The ability to think creatively is still lacking, with a percentage of 42.8%. In the elaboration indicator, most students answered correctly, while in the originality indicator, students were less careful in answering, and only 14.3% of students could answer correctly. Based on the questionnaire analysis results, electronic comic learning media based on problem based learning integrated Islamic values as an alternative media for learning media on vibrations, waves, and sounds in everyday life are needed for development with a percentage of 64%. The use of electronic comics is expected to increase student motivation and creative thinking skills.

Погляд на мистецтво як на породжуючу модель дійсності

The purpose of the work is to analyze the views of the researchers of modern cultural processes, to identify the principles of existence of art in the socio-historical dimension and determine its role in modeling reality. The methodology is based on analytical, comparative, historical and descriptive research methods. Scientific novelty is to consider art as a form of creative activity aimed at creating new spiritual values, which is a reflection of reality in the minds of the artist on the principle of its model, which, in turn, generates this reality. Conclusions. The main purpose of art is not only that with the help of artistic means to give a person to know his nature deeper and determine the place in society, as well as to receive recommendations for the spiritual transformation of the world. The basic objective of art is a show, that is, the representation of a materialized image of reality in the form of its model. Art existed in all civilizations, so its works that arose in a certain historical environment, carried an imprint of the era. That is, real physical objects or events that received material incarnation in artistic processing were transferred to a large audience of listeners, spectators and readers through their feelings. By transferring in various art forms of the image and sounds of everyday life, art reproduces its model, which becomes a transformed species of reality, on the one hand, allows you to interpret works of art as a cultural value that affects social progress and promotes the democratization of art, bringing it closer to the wider masses, on the other hand, this transformation can mean a complete change in the function of art in its relations with a society in which it plays the leader of the socio-historical process and the basis for understanding its deep entity. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that the main function of art in society, that is, the formation of collective and individual worldviews, an objective scale assessment of the events of the past and present for a person’s rational and argumented orientation in the surrounding reality and the definition of its place in society, may be completed in full in view of this type of artistic creative activity as a model that generates reality.

Noise poetics

This paper attempts to analyze connections between the urban sound environment and electroacoustic–acousmatic music composition. Having chosen recorded sound as the main material of my sonic art, I sometimes use unprocessed sound and drive the composition forward by editing, according to the locally emerging myth. Alternatively, I might use recorded sound as a malleable material I can warp to the extreme. 'Real world' sound has a certain power on the mind of the listener and so have processes of its transformation, playing with degrees of recognizability and laying out idiosyncratic dream-scapes to follow and explore. The urban soundscape, appreciated as a city dweller’s natural sonic environment, significantly informs my creative processes. As continuous exposition to certain sounds tends to redefine the archetypes that govern the way sound is evaluated as art, the meaning and cultural significance of noise changes. Exploring the concepts of noise, soundscape and creative field-recording as listener, engineer, sound designer and composer, I approach mechanisms that allow the sounds of everyday life to participate in the development of a compositional language connected with fundamental elements of music tradition and directly dependent on the ways sound might be appraised.

Recoding Art

When Varèse lived in that street sixty years earlier, he was creating Poème Electronique, a commission from the Philips company. The eight-minutes song would become the soundtrack of the pavilion created by Le Corbusier at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. For this composition, Varèse gathered trivial sounds from Eindhoven, noises that would only be the disposable sounds of everyday life for many. But not the composer who, exhibiting keen attention and sensitivity, saw poetic power in these sounds and produced a striking composition. [...]

Sensory Habituation as a Shared Mechanism for Sensory Over-Responsivity and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms.

BackgroundSome individuals who suffer from obsessive–compulsive (OC) disorder (OCD), report disturbing sensory preoccupations. The inability to stop obsessing over stimuli resonates with a difficulty in sensory habituation. Impaired sensory habituation, to a degree that clearly dysregulates response to sensory stimuli, and impairs participation in everyday activities, can be part of a disorder known as sensory over-responsivity (SOR). Although previous studies indicated a correlation between OCD and SOR, physiological experiments show that individuals with OCD are not more sensitive to sensory stimuli than controls. In the current study, we (1) validated a sensory habituation psycho-physiological protocol and (2) tested whether a “slow to habituate” mechanism can explain the occurrence of elevated SOR and OC symptoms.MethodsWe designed a protocol to test auditory sensory habituation through electrodermal activity (EDA) recording. The protocol included two randomly ordered aversive and neutral sound conditions; each set of six everyday life sounds was presented as a continuous stimulus. During the presentation of sounds, EDA was measured and participants could press a button to shorten the stimuli. Participants also completed sensory and OC symptom questionnaires. Participants included 100 typically developing adults that were divided into high versus low OC symptom groups. Mixed models analysis was used throughout to meet the need for capturing the temporal nature of habituation.ResultsDistinct physiological indices were computed to measure sensitivity versus habituation. Habituation was slower in the aversive versus neutral condition. Sensitivity was higher for the aversive stimuli. Self-report of sensory habituation and sensitivity partially correlated with the physiological habituation indices. A comparison of the physiological pattern between those with high versus low OC symptoms revealed significant differences in the habituation and sensitivity indices, across conditions.ConclusionThe interplay between SOR and OC symptoms can be explained by a “slow to habituate” mechanism. Identifying behavioral and physiological markers of sensory problems in OCD is important for assessment, intervention and the discovery of underlying mechanisms.

«В ПРОМЕЖУТКЕ МЕЖ ЗВУКОМ И СЛОВОМ»: АКУСТИЧЕСКАЯ ОБРАЗНОСТЬ ЛИРИКИ Б. АХМАДУЛИНОЙ

The article analyzes relations between the sound and the word in the image-bearing system of B. Akhmadulina’s lyrical poetry. Among the acoustic objects in the poetess’ works one may discover sounds of natural environmental phenomena, as those of rain, of dripping water, cock’s crowing, etc., as well as the audible strata of culture (sounds of music, singing, or gramophone play). Meaningfully, the audible natural world is often expressed by either comparing it with music, or metaphorically, associating it with human speech, or, ultimately, with a prophetic or even sacred word. Sounds of everyday life, as the click of an electric switch, or the squeak of an opening door, as a rule, lose their direct material meaning and acquire metaphorical and symbolic connotations. The acoustic background of everyday life in Akhmadulina’s lyrical contents is turned into the «speech» of ordinary objects and can be juxtaposed with the poetess’ word, the poet being responsible to endow space with a voice. Paradoxically, it cannot be achieved by music. For all the high density of Akhmadulina’s musical associations, she seldom describes them, more often than not in the majority of musical fragments there appears «the silent movie effect», when acoustic means of the performed music is represented via its visual analogs, while musical instruments are needed only metaphorically or as means of comparison. Real sounds, those that will acquire actual meaning serve as blood emphatic accents which turn into ‘bleeding speech’. It is only then that the gap between the sound and the word dies away. The process of extracting the sound is hard and almost always painful. Still, that is the only way of overcoming the existing noise which claims the word’s space, and thus saves the object from namelessness. It is only the poet’s living voice that is able to give speech its identity and credibility. It is only by extreme effort that one can give name to the existing matter. Only by saying it aloud can you come into contact with Truth.

Smart Sound Sensor to Detect the Number of People in a Room.

Ambient sound monitoring is a widely used strategy to follow older adults, which could help them achieve healthy ageing with comfort and security. In a previous work, we have already developed a smart audio sensor able to recognize everyday life sounds in order to detect activities of daily living (ADL) and distress situations. In this paper, we propose to add a new functionality by analyzing the speech flow to detect the number of people in a room. The proposed algorithms are based on speaker diarization methods. This information can be used to better detect activities of daily life but also to know when the person is home alone. This functionality can also offer more comfort through light, heating and air conditioning adaptation to the number of people in an environment.

John Cage and nonrepresentational spaces of music

ABSTRACT John Cage’s influence as a composer is exemplified by the ways he challenged the spatial norms of music composition and performance. His most famous work, 4ʹ33” (1952), brought the musicality of everyday soundscapes into the concert hall and altered the geographies of serious music in the 20th century. This paper argues that in addition to being a composer, John Cage was a geographer – one whose work reconceptualized the boundaries between “music’ and ‘life,’ and composers, performers and their audiences. Two primary questions are addressed in this paper. Is John Cage’s work nonrepresentational? If so, in what ways can it be understood within the context of nonrepresentational theory (NRT) that appeared decades after his work was first performed? In its utilization of nonintentionality and indeterminacy, Cage’s music is shown to be nonrepresentational in its reliance upon practice, affect, assemblages and the sounds of everyday life. The conclusion is that Cage’s work is inherently geographical in its focus upon material landscapes, its challenges to spatial norms and its integration of broad philosophical influences that informed John Cage’s conceptualizations of space.

Acoustic Comfort in Virtual Inner Yards with Various Building Facades.

Housing complex residents in urban areas are not only confronted with typical noise sources, but also everyday life sounds, e.g., in the yards. Therefore, they might benefit from the increasing interest in soundscape design and acoustic comfort improvement. Three laboratory experiments (with repeated-measures complete block designs) are reported here, in which effects of several variables on short-term acoustic comfort were investigated. A virtual reference inner yard in the ODEON software environment was systematically modified by absorbers on building facades, whereby single-channel recordings were spatialized for a 2D playback in laboratory. Facade absorption was found, generally, to increase acoustic comfort. Too much absorption, however, was not found to be helpful. In the absence of any absorbers on the facade, absorbing balcony ceilings tended to improve acoustic comfort, however, non-significantly. Pleasant and unpleasant sounds were associated with comfort and discomfort, accordingly. This should encourage architects and acousticians to create comfortable inner yard sound environments, where pleasant and unpleasant sound occurrence probabilities are designed to be high and low, respectively. Furthermore, significant differences were observed between acoustic comfort at distinct observer positions, which could be exploited when designing inner yards.

Les Paysages sonores: du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance. Sous la direction de Laurent Hablot et Laurent Vissière.

This interdisciplinary volume combines essays by historians, literary scholars, and musicologists, all of whom bring diverse approaches to the representation of sound in the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (its ‘soundscape’). Divided into three parts, the book addresses questions of order and disorder in the soundscape, songs of war and war cries, and closes by considering the sounds of everyday life. As Jean-Marie Fritz writes in the book’s excellent Conclusion, the task of exploring the soundscape of an era so long past is inherently fraught: ‘on est toujours dans l’aporie, dans le manque et, par voie de conséquence, dans l’hypothétique et dans la fragilité d’une reconstitution’ (p. 290). The volume’s authors attempt to reconstitute elements of this soundscape through a variety of primary sources, including liturgical chant, legal documents, trouvère song, vernacular polyphony, and Arthurian romance. Interesting contributions discuss the role of sound in judicial proceedings (Romain Telliez), the noises that accompany death (Karin Ueltschi), as well as propaganda songs (Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin). As a whole, contributions train their attention on sounds that are unmusical and inarticulate, focusing on cries of various kinds (see the essays by Sophie Albert, Telliez, Hablot, David Fiala, Martine Clouzot, Isabelle Ragnard, Christelle Cazaux-Kowalski, and Nelly Labère). The soundscape of the period was undoubtedly noisy and disorderly. The somewhat odd focus on shouts and cries prevents the emergence of the kind of immersive, holistic aural picture painted in Fritz’s work. Readers hoping for a broad introduction to the topic of medieval and Renaissance soundscapes or a complete review of literature from the burgeoning field of ‘sound studies’ will likely be disappointed. (The volume does not include a separate bibliography.) The authors only occasionally bring their readings into dialogue with a broad array of relevant English-language scholarship (Fiala’s and Fritz’s up-to-date chapters are the exception).

Daily Sound Awareness of CI Users

Daily Sound Awareness of CI Users

Modelling auditory attention.

Sounds in everyday life seldom appear in isolation. Both humans and machines are constantly flooded with a cacophony of sounds that need to be sorted through and scoured for relevant information—a phenomenon referred to as the ‘cocktail party problem’. A key component in parsing acoustic scenes is the role of attention, which mediates perception and behaviour by focusing both sensory and cognitive resources on pertinent information in the stimulus space. The current article provides a review of modelling studies of auditory attention. The review highlights how the term attention refers to a multitude of behavioural and cognitive processes that can shape sensory processing. Attention can be modulated by ‘bottom-up’ sensory-driven factors, as well as ‘top-down’ task-specific goals, expectations and learned schemas. Essentially, it acts as a selection process or processes that focus both sensory and cognitive resources on the most relevant events in the soundscape; with relevance being dictated by the stimulus itself (e.g. a loud explosion) or by a task at hand (e.g. listen to announcements in a busy airport). Recent computational models of auditory attention provide key insights into its role in facilitating perception in cluttered auditory scenes.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Auditory and visual scene analysis’.

Impurities: Thinking Ecologically WithSafe

Locating in Todd Haynes's (1995) film Safe an example of “ecological art,” this essay demonstrates how formal and narrative elements of the film generate an “atmospheric rhetoric” within which audiences are invited to attend and attune to both the protagonist's and their own ecological enmeshment. These forms of attention—to the banal details of coexistence—and attunement—to the strange sounds of everyday life in postindustrial societies—provoke a mode of “ecological thought.” As this essay argues, thinking ecologically engenders a meaningful mode of political engagement that invites reflection on the consequences of impure relations.

Elevated Acoustic Startle Responses in Humans: Relationship to Reduced Loudness Discomfort Level, but not Self-Report of Hyperacusis.

Increases in the acoustic startle response (ASR) of animals have been reported following experimental manipulations to induce tinnitus, an auditory disorder defined by phantom perception of sound. The increases in ASR have been proposed to signify the development of hyperacusis, a clinical condition defined by intolerance of normally tolerable sound levels. To test this proposal, the present study compared ASR amplitude to measures of sound-level tolerance (SLT) in humans, the only species in which SLT can be directly assessed. Participants had clinically normal/near-normal hearing thresholds, were free of psychotropic medications, and comprised people with tinnitus and without. ASR was measured as eyeblink-related electromyographic activity in response to a noise pulse presented at a range of levels and in two background conditions (noise and quiet). SLT was measured as loudness discomfort level (LDL), the lowest level of sound deemed uncomfortable, and via a questionnaire on the loudness of sounds in everyday life. Regardless of tinnitus status, ASR amplitude at a given stimulus level increased with decreasing LDL, but showed no relationship to SLT self-reported via the questionnaire. These relationships (or lack thereof) could not be attributed to hearing threshold, age, anxiety, or depression. The results imply that increases in ASR in the animal work signify decreases in LDL specifically and may not correspond to the development of hyperacusis as would be self-reported by a clinic patient.

Introduction—emergent Sino-soundscapes: musical pasts, transnationalism and multiple identities

ABSTRACTFocusing on performative Sino-soundscapes that include the music and sounds of everyday life, this special issue contributes to current dialogues on the meaning of being Chinese and locates those dialogues within the history of Chinese migration ranging from the late nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first century. The articles provide historical perspectives on how Chinese communities in Australia, British Malaya, Burma, Hong Kong, North America, the Philippines and Taiwan have reconstructed their musical practices and recreated their distinctive musical presence. Sino-soundscapes are considered emergent as they are constantly being recreated with new meanings, functions, forms, content and practices. Looking beyond the nation-state or China-centred analysis, we argue that transnationalism and transborder musical practices, soundscapes, interactions and networks are crucial to the representations and constructions of Chinese identities. By examining continuities and differences in the articulations of Sino-soundscapes, we show that Chinese identities are flexible and are continually being reworked and re-imagined across space and time depending on the socio-political conditions of the locations studied.

Everyday Life Sounds Database: Telemonitoring of Elderly or Disabled

AbstractThis article describes the construction phase of a corpus of everyday life sounds for a system of separation and classification of audio sources in a habitat: an application for telemonitoring of the elderly or disabled. We first present the key concepts of the research area, and then we present works and projects that address detection of distress situations and recognition of activities. Thereafter, we discuss the different sounds used in an application for telemonitoring, which inspired us to create our database. Finally, we present our experiment aimed at classifying the various environmental sounds in a habitat. The objective of this experiment is to present the global idea of our future work and to explain the necessity of creating a database of everyday life sounds.

“Sometimes I walk and walk, hoping to get some peace.” Dealing with hearing voices and sounds nobody else hears

Our objective in this article is to add to the understanding of how people with mental illness experience dealing with hearing troublesome voices and sounds in everyday life. Fourteen people contributed through in-depth interviews and we analysed these using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. We found that the participants (a) tried to block out the voices and sounds, (b) navigated the health care services, and (c) struggled to come to terms with limitations. Our overall understanding of how the participants dealt with hearing voices is that they sought to be independent and lead ordinary lives despite being troubled by voices. The participants fought desperately to find relief and avoid being overcome by the voices and sounds in intense phases. In less intense phases, they developed ways of getting along with daily life in spite of these experiences. We reflect on the implications of these findings and emphasize the need for care providers to attempt to understand and engage in collaborative explorations with service users in search of the most helpful ways of dealing with hearing troublesome voices and sounds in everyday life.