The soundscape in cultural heritage

Abstract

Soundscape analysis started to be a research field in the late sixties and received significant attention by researchers in the last twenty years. Experts in community noise and environmental acoustics and, more recently, policy makers and practitioners show interest for soundscapes, due to its multidisciplinary approach focusing on how people actually experience their acoustic environments in different indoor and outdoor environments. In 2014 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) officially defined Soundscape as “acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by people, in context”. The peculiarity of the Soundscape approach is that it firstly relies upon human perception and then turns to physical assessment. The study of the soundscape related to cultural heritage is a subject not yet very widespread and deeply investigated by researchers and designers. In this paper, after an introduction about the general soundscape concept and approach, its connection with quiet areas is addressed. Moreover, existing methodologies to deal with the soundscape of cultural heritage are reported, together with the recent trend of archiving sounds considered to be disappeared or lost in memory, to enhance them as the cultural heritage of our society.