CATEGORIES FOR SOUNDSCAPE : TOWARD A HYBRID CLASSIFICATION

To complement recent efforts in standardizing perceptual assessment of human sound preference through a taxonomy, we propose to contribute to the elaboration of a scientific classification of the diversity of soundscapes as presently studied, from our theoretical knowledge on categorization and naming. In a small collection of publications, selected on the basis of their explicit reference to soundscape studies, we identified exemplars of soundscapes, their structure, and naming. Furthermore, we assessed the consensus of categories mentioned by different research domains in this corpus. Through a linguistic analysis of the wording of the categories we identified different types of classifications, dependent on the research domain, and the object under investigation. Based on this finding we suggest that researchers should be explicit about the type of categorization they apply, and to which aspect of soundscape they are contributing. This suggestion is aimed at reaching a consensus not only on a generic definition, but also on the empirical investigations in a more explicitly structured domain, which the concept of soundscape intends to cover.

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