The listening of two piazzas in Rome

Abstract

We report on the soundscape of Piazza Fontana di Trevi and Piazza Testaccio, gathering places in Rome. Soundscape is a realm of research about the interactions between cultural, cognitive and physical aspects of sound in space, still yielding interesting open questions.We performed perceptive surveys and instrument measurements, carefully spatialized in both cases. The perceptive results concern the recognizability of a particular sound in a conglomerate of sounds across an urban space and the sense of bodily orientation given by sound. They are proposed via verbal narratives and original visualizations of the place. We then use computer models to validate some of the perceived (unexpected) spatial perceptive features, by a ray-tracer simulation. The point of the paper is in fact to compare methods about sound in space, starting from perceptive evaluations, to drive objective analysis and collection of data toward new aspects, and always pursuing spatialization of data.