| Popis: |
The present research on cognitive categories for soundscapes focuses on their interpretations and can be seen as mediating between individual sensory experiences and collective representations shared in language and elaborated as knowledge. Results of field inquiries in Paris, Lyon, and Nantes are presented together with results from categorization of recorded soundscapes in laboratory conditions. Categories were identified by means of linguistic analyses of verbal comments and mathematical analyses of similarity judgments. Results indicate that people categorize environmental sounds on the basis of semantic features, namely source identity and pleasantness judgments, rather than perceptual features. Effects of noise on human subjectivity cannot be quantitatively measured thoroughly in terms of physical parameters: auditory judgments depend upon the meaning attributed to acoustic phenomena and noise sources, rather than on inherent properties of the acoustic signal. These findings highlight the fact that ... |
