Visualizing the soundscape: an approach at the interface of music and ecology

Adèle de Baudouin, Jérôme Sueur et Pierre Couprie

https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/rfim/index.php?id=975

Soundscape is a concept that expresses several musical, ecological and social realities. In a context where ecosystems and biodiversity are threatened, studying and listening to soundscapes provides a mediation tool with natural environments. Electroacoustic and ecoacoustics have both developed visualization tools to analyze soundscapes. We propose to visualize a corpus of soundscapes differing in sound material, compositional type and acoustic space. This corpus produced by women composers is analyzed with a transdisciplinary approach to improve our ecological and musical perception of soundscapes. For this purpose, we select different efficient visualization tools (Soundscape Chord Diagram, Brightness Standard Deviation, Self-Similarity Matrix) from electroacoustic and ecoacoustics. For the first time, we also propose a multipanel representation of a time wave, the Frequency Band Waveform. All these visualizations allow us to understand the compositional process as well as the ecological information of various soundscapes. This transdisciplinary method of analysis by corpus seems essential to pursue the development of specific visualization tools for soundscapes. In particular, the corpus of ecofeminist soundscapes deserves our full attention because it offers a particularly relevant view of the current ecological crisis.