Sustainable urban design requires human wellbeing to be prioritized, considering all human senses (Torigoe, 2002). Sound, which is often overlooked in the municipalities planning offices, affects health in both positive and negative manner. The general approach for handling sounds in cities are through quantitative measurements such as noise abatements and decibel measurements, while the qualitative visual and audial perception; also known as psychoacoustics, is disregarded (Raimbault & Dubois, 2005; Steele et al., 2020; Cerwén, 2016). Research also show that urbanisation decreases pleasant sounds to the human ear(Steele et al., 2020; Beatly, 2012), and some scholars argue that people are losing their skill to identify and name what they are hearing (Schafer, 1994 & Westerkamp, 1974). In this thesis the Western harbour area in Malmö, flagged as exemplary sustainable urban development model, has been using soundscape methodology of soundwalks to contribute to a better understanding of sound perception and the functions of the identified sounds. The Western harbour has previously had troubles getting BREEAM-certifications in the past due to noise(ÅF, 2013), and previous surveys by the Malmö municipality present that the wind is a large unpleasant factor to both residents and visitors’ perception of the area (Kristensson, 2013).The results show similarities to presented studies, for example with birdsong being identified as a pleasant sound whilst traffic being an unpleasant sound. Moreover, most identified sounds by the soundwalk respondents were loud and intense, indicating a lack of listening to less-intense, more quiet sounds. The thesis show that qualitative soundscape methodologies can highlight further dimensions of sound beyond decibel levels, positions sound as a central dimension of sense of place. The thesis provides suggestions for the municipality to have updated information and state what sound actions is being made in each area in the city to include sound and acoustic wellbeing as a central dimension of their sustainable urban development, in order to be able to reach their own goal of having all stakeholders working in the same direction. Along with the fact that the Swedish noise abatement law’s approach is preventative, but does not include the aspect of social change in a space after it is built (Kling, 2013; Malmö comprehensive plan, 2013; Dalman, 2013), since the city of Malmö have grown quickly and is still facing a rapid expansion in demographics (SCB, 2021), as Raimbault & Dubois (2005) argue, denser cities are more noisy.

The soundscape plays a key, if often overlooked, role in the construction of public urban space. Street music – a conscious deliberate propagation of sound in public space – opens an entryway into comprehending the role of sound in the city, and what it reveals about the city’s inhabitants. Ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels and Stockholm focuses on street musicians of all kinds, exploring how their music is shaped by their personal motivations, how their practices negotiate meaning in sound and in space, and how their rhythms shape, and are shaped by, the city. These explorations give reason to question R. Murray Schafer’s philosophies on soundscape studies, particularly in the urban context. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s notions of the production of space, and rhythmanalysis as an analytical tool, the urban soundscape is understood as an ongoing negotiation of individual actions, where dynamics of power, identity, and ideology become audible. Street musicians and their sound cultures feature not just as a topic worthy of study, but also as a guide of how and why to listen to and analyze the rhythms of the city.

Suite à un état de l'art détaillant la création et l'utilisation de l'espace sonore dans divers environnements urbains virtuels (soundmaps, jeux vidéo, réalité augmentée), il s'agira de déterminer une méthodologie et des techniques de conception pour les espaces sonores urbains virtuels du point de vue de l'immersion, de l'interface et de la dramaturgie.ces développements se feront dans le cadre du projet terra dynamica, tendant vers une utilisation plurielle de la ville virtuelle (sécurité et sureté, transports de surface, aménagement de l'urbanisme, services de proximité et citoyens, jeux). le principal objectif du doctorat sera de déterminer des réponses informatiques concrètes à la problématique suivante : comment, en fonction de leur utilisation anticipée, les espaces sonores urbains virtuels doivent-ils être structurés et avec quels contenus?la formalisation informatique des solutions étayées au fil du doctorat et la création du contenu sonore illustrant le projet seront basés sur l'analyse de données scientifiques provenant de domaines variés tels que la psychologie de la perception, l'architecture et l'urbanisme, l'acoustique, la recherche esthétique (musicale) ainsi que sur l'observation et le recueil de données audio-visuelles du territoire urbain, de manière à rendre compte tant de la richesse du concept d'espace sonore que de la multiplicité de ses déclinaisons dans le cadre de la ville virtuelle. / In video gaming and interactive media, the making of complex sound ambiences relies heavily on the allowed memory and computational resources. So a compromise solution is necessary regarding the choice of audio material and its treatment in order to reach immersive and credible real-time ambiences. Alternatively, the use of procedural audio techniques, i.e. the generation of audio content relatively to the data provided by the virtual scene, has increased in recent years. Procedural methodologies seem appropriate to sonify complex environments such as virtual cities.In this thesis we specifically focus on the creation of interactive urban sound ambiences. Our analysis of these ambiences is based on the Soundscape theory and on a state of art on game oriented urban interactive applications. We infer that the virtual urban soundscape is made of several perceptive auditory grounds including a background. As a first contribution we define the morphological and narrative properties of such a background. We then consider the urban background sound as a texture and propose, as a second contribution, to pinpoint, specify and prototype a granular synthesis tool dedicated to interactive urban sound backgrounds.The synthesizer prototype is created using the visual programming language Pure Data. On the basis of our state of the art, we include an urban ambiences recording methodology to feed the granular synthesis. Finally, two validation steps regarding the prototype are described: the integration to the virtual city simulation Terra Dynamica on the one side and a perceptive listening comparison test on the other.

La présente thèse traite de l'analyse de scènes extraites d'environnements sonores, résultat auditif du mélange de sources émettrices distinctes et concomitantes. Ouvrant le champ des sources et des recherches possibles au-delà des domaines plus spécifiques que sont la parole ou la musique, l'environnement sonore est un objet complexe. Son analyse, le processus par lequel le sujet lui donne sens, porte à la fois sur les données perçues et sur le contexte de perception de ces données.Tant dans le domaine de la perception que de l'apprentissage machine, toute expérience suppose un contrôle fin de l'expérimentateur sur les stimuli proposés. Néanmoins, la nature de l'environnement sonore nécessite de se placer dans un cadre écologique, c'est à dire de recourir à des données réelles, enregistrées, plutôt qu'à des stimuli de synthèse. Conscient de cette problématique, nous proposons un modèle permettant de simuler, à partir d'enregistrements de sons isolés, des scènes sonores dont nous maîtrisons les propriétés structurelles -- intensité, densité et diversité des sources. Appuyé sur les connaissances disponibles sur le système auditif humain, le modèle envisage la scène sonore comme un objet composite, une somme de sons sources.Nous investissons à l'aide de cet outil deux champs d'application. Le premier concerne la perception, et la notion d'agrément perçu dans des environnements urbains. L'usage de données simulées nous permet d'apprécier finement l'impact de chaque source sonore sur celui-ci. Le deuxième concerne la détection automatique d'événements sonores et propose une méthodologie d'évaluation des algorithmes mettant à l'épreuve leurs capacités de généralisation. / This thesis deals with environmental scene analysis, the auditory result of mixing separate but concurrent emitting sources. The sound environment is a complex object, which opens the field of possible research beyond the specific areas that are speech or music. For a person to make sense of its sonic environment, the involved process relies on both the perceived data and its context. For each experiment, one must be, as much as possible,in control of the evaluated stimuli, whether the field of investigation is perception or machine learning. Nevertheless, the sound environment needs to be studied in an ecological framework, using real recordings of sounds as stimuli rather than synthetic pure tones. We therefore propose a model of sound scenes allowing us to simulate complex sound environments from isolated sound recordings. The high level structural properties of the simulated scenes -- such as the type of sources, their sound levels or the event density -- are set by the experimenter. Based on knowledge of the human auditory system, the model abstracts the sound environment as a composite object, a sum of soundsources. The usefulness of the proposed model is assessed on two areas of investigation. The first is related to the soundscape perception issue, where the model is used to propose an innovative experimental protocol to study pleasantness perception of urban soundscape. The second tackles the major issue of evaluation in machine listening, for which we consider simulated data in order to powerfully assess the generalization capacities of automatic sound event detection systems.

Suite à un état de l'art détaillant la création et l'utilisation de l'espace sonore dans divers environnements urbains virtuels (soundmaps, jeux vidéo, réalité augmentée), il s'agira de déterminer une méthodologie et des techniques de conception pour les espaces sonores urbains virtuels du point de vue de l'immersion, de l'interface et de la dramaturgie.ces développements se feront dans le cadre du projet terra dynamica, tendant vers une utilisation plurielle de la ville virtuelle (sécurité et sureté, transports de surface, aménagement de l'urbanisme, services de proximité et citoyens, jeux). le principal objectif du doctorat sera de déterminer des réponses informatiques concrètes à la problématique suivante : comment, en fonction de leur utilisation anticipée, les espaces sonores urbains virtuels doivent-ils être structurés et avec quels contenus?la formalisation informatique des solutions étayées au fil du doctorat et la création du contenu sonore illustrant le projet seront basés sur l'analyse de données scientifiques provenant de domaines variés tels que la psychologie de la perception, l'architecture et l'urbanisme, l'acoustique, la recherche esthétique (musicale) ainsi que sur l'observation et le recueil de données audio-visuelles du territoire urbain, de manière à rendre compte tant de la richesse du concept d'espace sonore que de la multiplicité de ses déclinaisons dans le cadre de la ville virtuelle. / In video gaming and interactive media, the making of complex sound ambiences relies heavily on the allowed memory and computational resources. So a compromise solution is necessary regarding the choice of audio material and its treatment in order to reach immersive and credible real-time ambiences. Alternatively, the use of procedural audio techniques, i.e. the generation of audio content relatively to the data provided by the virtual scene, has increased in recent years. Procedural methodologies seem appropriate to sonify complex environments such as virtual cities.In this thesis we specifically focus on the creation of interactive urban sound ambiences. Our analysis of these ambiences is based on the Soundscape theory and on a state of art on game oriented urban interactive applications. We infer that the virtual urban soundscape is made of several perceptive auditory grounds including a background. As a first contribution we define the morphological and narrative properties of such a background. We then consider the urban background sound as a texture and propose, as a second contribution, to pinpoint, specify and prototype a granular synthesis tool dedicated to interactive urban sound backgrounds.The synthesizer prototype is created using the visual programming language Pure Data. On the basis of our state of the art, we include an urban ambiences recording methodology to feed the granular synthesis. Finally, two validation steps regarding the prototype are described: the integration to the virtual city simulation Terra Dynamica on the one side and a perceptive listening comparison test on the other.