This thesis contributes to the field of Game Studies by presenting the hypothesis that the player(s) and soundscape(s) in the first-person shooter (FPS) game, and the relationships between them, may be construed as an acoustic ecology. It explores the idea that the single-player FPS game acoustic ecology has the basic components of player and soundscape and that the relationships between these two lead to the creation and perception of a variety of spaces within the game world constituting a significant contributing factor to player immersion in that world. Additionally, in a multiplayer FPS game, these individual acoustic ecologies form part of a larger acoustic ecology which may be explained through autopoietic principles. There has been little written on digital game sound (much less on FPS game sound) and so the research contained within this thesis is an important contribution to the Game Studies field. Furthermore, the elaboration of the hypothesis provides insight into the role of sound in the perception of a variety of spaces in the FPS game, and player immersion in those spaces, and this has significance not only for Game Studies but also for other disciplines such as virtual environment design and the study of real-world acoustic ecologies. A text-based methodology is employed in which literature from a range of disciplines is researched for concepts relevant to the hypothesis but, where necessary, new concepts will be devised. The aim of the methodology is to construct a conceptual framework which is used to explicate the hypothesis and which may, with future refinement, be used for the study of sound in digital game genres other than FPS.

Louis Dandrel, né en 1939, est musicien, compositeur et designer sonore. En 1991, il conçoit pour le grand public une « exposition de sons » intitulée « Sonolithe ». Son objectif est de faire évoluer les représentations et les rapports que l’individu peut avoir avec son environnement sonore. Après avoir fait traduire en français le célèbre ouvrage de R. Murray Schafer Le paysage sonore (1979), Louis Dandrel préface la seconde édition de 2010. Dans de nombreuses interviews et conférences il réaffirme l’influence décisive de Murray Schafer sur son travail. Partant de ce double constat qui devient une double hypothèse, à la fois pédagogique et musicologique, cette recherche tente d’abord de déterminer dans quelle mesure l’objet-exposition « Sonolithe » peut s’intégrer au cadre théorique de l’ « écologie sonore » tel qu’il est défini par R. Murray Schafer et ses successeurs. Dans un second temps, à partir de l’orientation pédagogique souhaitée par Louis Dandrel, cette étude examine l’objet-exposition comme un dispositif didactique possible. / Louis Dandrel was born in 1939. He is a musician, a composer and a sound designer. In 1991, he imagined a « sound exhibition » for the general public entitled « Sonolithe » in order to make people’s perceptions of the sound environment evolve. After being one actor of the translation of R. Murray Schafer’s famous book The soundscape (1979), Louis Dandrel wrote the preface of the second edition in 2010. In many interviews and conferences he reaffirms the decisive influence of Murray Schafer on his work. This thesis is based upon a double statement which becomes a double hypothesis, both musicological and pedagogical, so as to try and determine to what extent the exhibition-object « Sonolithe » can be integrated into an « acoustic ecology » theoretical framework, as defined by R. Murray Schafer and his followers. Secondly, this thesis tries to examine the exhibition-object as part of a possible didactical system, building on Louis Dandrel’s pedagogical positioning.

Electroacoustic music has a unique ability to connect the listener to places, space and stories both real and imaginary. Each work within the portfolio explores specific objects, spaces and places. The intrinsic sonic qualities are explored and a musical narrative takes the listener through a newly composed imaginary space. Six original compositions are presented in this portfolio. The titles of these works are as follows: Lamenting, 192, All Along the Bell Tower, Oz, The Thing About Listening is…. and A Bit Closer to Home. Narrative structures that simulate a journey are used as a guide for the listener through immersive, virtual soundworlds. These spoken word and musical narratives also serve as a structural tool for the composer. Imagined and real sonic layers within stories and soundscapes are analysed, deconstructed and manipulated. These works convey a message, story or sense of place to the listener, while revealing sonic qualities that are not normally the focus of listening. My aim as a composer is to enhance the daily listening experiences of the listener, as they become more aware and appreciative of the sounds around them, through the sounds and spaces they experience in my music.

No description available.

Design is the meeting of the processes that one employs and the intentions that one brings. Exploring an inductive methodology situates the design environmentally. The inherent dynamic and constructive processes, which arise from the qualities of methodological inquiries, are the basis for the inhabitation within place. An inductive process began by exploring the role of aural perception prior to contextual and design intentions. This resulted in a strong emphasis on experience and presence. Research into analogous disciplines resulted in an exploration of methods that facilitate the inductive operations of media, particularly noise. The provision of a contextual framework for observations provided order to method. A strategy was posited, where the development of constructs that addressed the entire range of environmental dimensions, from site to structure, could supply integrity to the situation of contextual forces; their tension and release. Hence, a general theory for the constructive inhabitation of place.

The world is urbanizing rapidly with more than half of the global population now living in cities. Improving urban environments for the well-being of the increasing number of urban citizens is becoming one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. Even though it is common that city planners have visions of a ’good urban milieu’, those visions are concerning visual aesthetics or practical matters. The qualitative perspective of sound, such as sonic diversity and acoustic ecology are neglected aspects in architectural design. Urban planners and politicians are therefore largely unaware of the importance of sounds for the intrinsic quality of a place. Whenever environmental acoustics is on the agenda, the topic is noise abatement or noise legislation – a quantitative attenuation of sounds. Some architects may involve acoustical aspects in their work but sound design or acoustic design has yet to develop to a distinct discipline and be incorporated in urban planning.My aim was to investigate to what extent the urban soundscape is likely to improve if modern architectural techniques merge with principles of acoustics. This is an important, yet unexplored, research area. My study explores and analyses the acoustical aspects in urban development and includes interviews with practitioners in the field of urban acoustics, situated in New York City. My conclusion is that to achieve a better understanding of the human living conditions in mega-cities, there is a need to include sonic components into the holistic sense of urban development.

abstract: Digital sound synthesis allows the creation of a great variety of sounds. Focusing on interesting or ecologically valid sounds for music, simulation, aesthetics, or other purposes limits the otherwise vast digital audio palette. Tools for creating such sounds vary from arbitrary methods of altering recordings to precise simulations of vibrating objects. In this work, methods of sound synthesis by re-sonification are considered. Re-sonification, herein, refers to the general process of analyzing, possibly transforming, and resynthesizing or reusing recorded sounds in meaningful ways, to convey information. Applied to soundscapes, re-sonification is presented as a means of conveying activity within an environment. Applied to the sounds of objects, this work examines modeling the perception of objects as well as their physical properties and the ability to simulate interactive events with such objects. To create soundscapes to re-sonify geographic environments, a method of automated soundscape design is presented. Using recorded sounds that are classified based on acoustic, social, semantic, and geographic information, this method produces stochastically generated soundscapes to re-sonify selected geographic areas. Drawing on prior knowledge, local sounds and those deemed similar comprise a locale's soundscape. In the context of re-sonifying events, this work examines processes for modeling and estimating the excitations of sounding objects. These include plucking, striking, rubbing, and any interaction that imparts energy into a system, affecting the resultant sound. A method of estimating a linear system's input, constrained to a signal-subspace, is presented and applied toward improving the estimation of percussive excitations for re-sonification. To work toward robust recording-based modeling and re-sonification of objects, new implementations of banded waveguide (BWG) models are proposed for object modeling and sound synthesis. Previous implementations of BWGs use arbitrary model parameters and may produce a range of simulations that do not match digital waveguide or modal models of the same design. Subject to linear excitations, some models proposed here behave identically to other equivalently designed physical models. Under nonlinear interactions, such as bowing, many of the proposed implementations exhibit improvements in the attack characteristics of synthesized sounds. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Electrical Engineering 2013

abstract: The study of acoustic ecology is concerned with the manner in which life interacts with its environment as mediated through sound. As such, a central focus is that of the soundscape: the acoustic environment as perceived by a listener. This dissertation examines the application of several computational tools in the realms of digital signal processing, multimedia information retrieval, and computer music synthesis to the analysis of the soundscape. Namely, these tools include a) an open source software library, Sirens, which can be used for the segmentation of long environmental field recordings into individual sonic events and compare these events in terms of acoustic content, b) a graph-based retrieval system that can use these measures of acoustic similarity and measures of semantic similarity using the lexical database WordNet to perform both text-based retrieval and automatic annotation of environmental sounds, and c) new techniques for the dynamic, realtime parametric morphing of multiple field recordings, informed by the geographic paths along which they were recorded. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2013

Urban acoustic ecology is an emerging field focused on furthering our understanding of how the sounds within urban development impact the surrounding soundscape and biodiversity. Human noise, otherwise known as anthrophonies, are known to negatively impact wildlife by impeding communication and lowering species richness. With urban population expected to grow profoundly within the next 30 years, it is critical to explore the acoustical relationship between the environment and wildlife for future management and urban development planning. I investigated how the physical landscape impacts the urban/peri-urban soundscape through acoustic indices within the greenspaces of Denton, Texas. Specifically, I found that the percentage of impervious surfaces have a significant negative impact on the coefficient of variation of the acoustic index ADI (Acoustic Diversity Index). ADI is used to calculate the occupancy of sounds within a frequency wave. Further, I investigated how the combination of landscape characteristics and acoustic indices predict avian species richness and rarity. My results show that richness and rarity was positively related to ADI; on the other hand, a soundscape with higher ADI (CV) scores, meaning consistent anthrophonies such as distance vehicle traffic, was related to higher richness and rarity. My research indicates that there is a relationship between the physical environment, ADI, and avian richness and rarity which showcases how acoustic monitoring can be a valuable tool for management and development protocols.

Η ακουστική οικολογία είναι το επιστημονικό πεδίο το οποίο μελετά την επίδραση διαφόρων παραγόντων, όπως η ανθρώπινη δραστηριότητα, σε συγκεκριμένα οικοσυστήματα μέσω επιλεγμένων ηχογραφήσεων των γεωγραφικών περιοχών των ηχοτοπίων. Εδώ παρουσιάζεται μελέτη αυτόματης ανάλυσης, αναγνώρισης και κατηγοριοποίησης από τέτοιες ηχογραφήσεις. Δοκιμάζονται διάφοροι αλγόριθμοι και επιλέγεται μέθοδος που βασίζεται στην επεξεργασία του ηχητικού φάσματος, μέσω των Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MfCC) του φάσματος του ηχητικού σήματος. Τα ομαδοποιημένα δεδομένα που προέκυψαν, μελετήθηκαν ως προς το ποσοστό επιτυχούς αναγνώρισης της προέλευσης των ήχων που διακρίνονται στις ηχογραφήσεις. Η κατηγοριοποίηση και ταξινόμηση αυτή έγινε με τη δοκιμή διαφόρων αλγορίθμων ταξινόμησης. Επιπλέον πραγματοποιείται σύγκριση των αλγορίθμων αυτών με βάση το ποσοστό επιτυχούς αναγνώρισης αλλά και της ταχύτητας ταξινόμησης των ηχογραφημένων δειγμάτων η οποία οδηγεί σε συμπεράσματα για τη βελτιστοποίηση της συγκεκριμένης διαδικασίας / Acoustic ecology is the scientific field which studies the effect of human activity and other factors to ecosystems via the recording of soundscapes which constitute a database of selected recordings of geographic regions. The parameters that are examined are based on the processing of the sound spectrum, they are named Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MfCC) and represent factors of the signal spectrum. The rate of the successful recognition of the origin of sounds distinguished in the set of the soundscape recordings is estimated. Various classification algorithms are tested for the sound data classification. Moreover a comparison among the algorithms is realised based both on the ratio of successful recognition and the classification speed of the recorded samples which leads to conclusions on the optimisation of this particular process.