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Abstract
Limerick SoundScapes is a sound-mapping project that seeks to critically engage citizens of the multicultural, socially and economically divided post-industrial City of Limerick in the Republic of Ireland. Facilitated by an interdisciplinary team at the local university, citizens from all walks of life are encouraged to traverse the city, using hand-held recorders to capture a vast array of sounds and create soundscapes. Initially, we locate the project within the context of a city currently experiencing a state-sponsored programme of urban regeneration. The project is also understood in terms of top-down and bottom-up cultural initiatives, particularly in relation to Limerick's designation as National City of Culture 2014. In addition to looking at how Limerick SoundScapes was conceived and realized through a pilot programme in 2013, we focus specifically on two members of two local participating organizations as an example of how the project operates. Through the activities and experiences of these two volunteer recordists, we illustrate how the project is as much (if not more) focused on engagement and building social relations as it is on producing a finished product that seeks to sonically and culturally represent the city. Such projects have the capacity to promote real diversity and a critical and participatory citizenship through shared, creative goals and a dialogic of doing. However, we also show that culture is often understood in a particular way in Limerick, which we argue is to the detriment of investing in bottom-up projects that can potentially build 'institutional capacity' and boost 'civic creativity'.

A soundscape is the representation of an acoustic environment in a specific context and time. Soundscapes evolve over time according to the changes in social, cultural and political contexts, and they constitute a unique way of experiencing auditory memories of a specific period in history. Considering that the soundscape of a place is ever-changing and it can provide us with important information about a location's context in time, the study and preservation of soundscapes, in particular historic soundscapes, has gained relevance in the cultural heritage protection and promotion process. Soundscapes enrich the history of places and contribute to enhance the visitors experience in tourism contexts. However, it is impossible to go back in time and record the acoustic experiences from centuries ago. For that reason, the closest we can get to experience an historic soundscape is by trying to recreate it. This can be done with the support of historic documentation and audio immersion technology. We created a solution that allows users to construct scenes that provide immersive auditory experiences. The immersive audio files generated are obtained by combining different current sound recordings, and by composing an immersive auditory scene that can be recorded by the user. Here, we propose Immerscape, a tool that non-expert users can easily use to create immersive historical soundscapes. This work was validated by a user study that evaluated the tool's functionalities and its acceptance by users. The proposed work is a contribution to the PASEV project, whose main purpose is to preserve and promote Évora's rich cultural heritage, in particular, their historic soundscapes corresponding to the period between 1540 and 1910. ; A paisagem sonora é uma representação de um ambiente acústico num contexto e período de tempo específicos. As paisagens sonoras evoluem ao longo do tempo de acordo com mudanças em contextos sociais, culturais e políticos, e constituem uma maneira única de experienciar memórias auditivas de um ...

Soundscape Ecology represents a new branch of ecology and it is the result of the integration of different disciplines like Landscape ecology, Bioacoustics, Acoustic ecology, Biosemiotics, etc. The soundscape that is the object of this discipline, is defined as the acoustic context resulting from natural and human originated sounds and it is considered a relevant environmental proxy for animal and human life.With Soundscape Ecology Almo Farina means to offer a new cultural tool to investigate a partially explored component of the environmental complexity. For this he intends to set the principles of this new discipline, to delineate the epistemic domain in which to develop new ideas and theories and to describe the necessary integration with all the other ecological/environmental disciplines.The book is organized in ten chapters. The first two chapters delineate principles and theory of soundscape ecology. Chapters three and four describe the bioacoustic and communication theories. Chapter five is devoted to the human dimension of soundscape. Chapters six to eight regard the major sonic patterns like noise, choruses and vibrations. Chapter nine is devoted to the methods in soundscape ecology and finally chapter ten describes the application of the soundscape analysis.

Urban parks play an important role in preserving and promoting the health of citizens who are often exposed to noise pollution and the stress of daily life. The present study describes the main results obtained from a survey performed in five urban parks in Milan. Measurements of the acoustic environment were carried out in 29 sites together with interviews with 231 users on certain aspects of the parks not limited to merely sound. Acoustic data show that the surveyed parks mostly do not comply with the noise limit issued by the Italian legislation on protected areas. The unweighted 1/3-octave spectrum centre of gravity G and LA50 perform satisfactorily in discriminating among the acoustic environments. Such clear distinction was not observed in the subjective ratings on the perceived quality of the soundscape, likely due to the influence by non-acoustic factors that act as mediators in the assessment. This hypothesis is supported by the collected data on the perceived quality of quietness, which was rated worse than that of the soundscape. Comparing acoustic data with ratings, the perceived quality of the total environment was found to be less dependent on LAeq than soundscape and quietness.