Speaker: Marc C Green, University of Salford, UK
Wed 4th December 12:00 – 13:00 UK time. This seminar will be held in person in Peel 120 and you can join us online via Microsoft Teams.
Abstract
In this talk I will give a broad overview of the various approaches to environmental sound monitoring, introducing the Soundscape approach and contrasting this with the prevailing environmental noise approach. I will discuss the initial ideas and taxonomy of R. Murray Schafer, and how this has latterly developed through the work of Axelsson and others to the ISO 12913 standard.
I will then give an overview of the aims of project RefMap, and how we have been utilising the soundscape approach in novel ways to assess the potential impact of drones on urban soundscape perception. These include a series of ‘soundwalks’, where groups of participants are led in guided listening around areas of interest and their perceptions of the sound scene assessed by questionnaire. I will describe the soundwalk studies done in Salford, Athens, and the Isles of Scilly, and outline the key findings that are emerging from our analysis of this data.
Biography
Dr. Marc C. Green is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Acoustic Engineering, working on the RefMap project, which aims to reduce the envrionmental impact of Unmanned Aerial Systems. Marc achieved his PhD in Music Technology from the University of York in 2020, with a project that combined approaches from spatial audio, machine learning, and soundscape studies to pioneer novel methods of environmental sound analysis. The project was awarded the EPSRC connected nation pioneers prize for ‘Creative Computing for the Digital Economy’, with a major contribution being the EigenScape database of acoustic scene recordings.