The Routledge Handbook of Sound Design
Michael Filimowicz · Focal Press eBooks · 2024
This chapter considers the role of soundscape in sound design practice in light of renewed academic interest arising from the ISO 12913 - Soundscape research specification. Although the ISO specification is oriented towards the needs of urban development and planning, studies which deploy it can provide helpful insight into soundscape perception and hence inform sound design practice. Drawing on perceptual construct of soundscape described in ISO 12913 and also by the World Soundscape Project, I envisage the soundtrack as a complete acoustic environment and how that might function in an audiovisual context. To that end, two graphic data representation formats used in the specification (two-dimension graph and cluster diagram) are adapted to illustrate how sound design approaches might be better represented visually across a production cycle. The chapter also considers soundscape perception as embodied listening, a concept which is not only shaping discourses in sound studies but can also inform sound design practice in emerging practices such as virtual production.