Sound Design in Our Sound Environment: Soundscape Design, Auralisation and Evaluation in Environmental Acoustics  Seminar

Abstract              

The soundscape of our environment helps us to better understand the world we live in, and has a direct effect on our health and wellbeing. Human society has battled with the concept of excessive noise since hitting one rock against another produced some of the first tools, and yet the complete absence of sound in our environment can prove to be equally unsettling. If the presence of sound, both wanted and unwanted, is something that cannot be avoided, how might we design our environment to deliver a more optimal or pleasing aural experience?

Auralisation – the audio equivalent of visualisation - is key in developing a better understanding of how significant changes or infrastructure planning in our urban environment can have an impact on our related environmental soundscape. It allows consultants, planners and other stakeholders to hear the potential acoustic changes that might result, so that designs might be better optimized; it is also a valuable dissemination tool for informing the public as to the nature of such changes. Auralisation also facilitates subjective soundscape assessment of proposed developments at the design stage and once construction is complete, smart sensor networks enable soundscape monitoring and objective evaluation on an ongoing basis. 

This presentation gives an overview of how auralisation has been used in the context of recent soundscape case studies at the University of York AudioLab. The complete auralisation chain is presented, from source measurement to soundscape monitoring, through sound propagation modelling using numerical simulation, soundfield rendering and the potential for immersive multimodal presentation.