Lake district soundscapes: Analysing aural experience through text

Abstract

The importance of perception across all the senses has been recognised in previous studies on landscape preferences. Here, we focus on aural perception, and in a preliminary study explore how references to sounds and their sources can be extracted from descriptions of images in a corpus containing 85,000 documents. We classified references to sounds according to previous work as biophony, geophony and antrophony. As a first step we have extracted descriptions related to sounds associated with verbs. The most common sound emitters in our corpus are wind (geophony), birds (biophony) and traffic (anthrophony) respectively. In future work we will move beyond the sentence level to deal with co-references, and use other parts of speech (e.g. adjectives such as quiet and loud or nouns such as noise, silence, echo, etc.).