soundscape means an acoustic environment, a virtual/emotional environment created using sound.
soundscape is pronounced /ˈsaʊndskeɪp/.
Why “soundscape” is a great word
The total acoustic environment of a place as perceived, experienced, or understood by people or animals in context. From sound (auditory sensation) + -scape (as in landscape, denoting a view or scene); first recorded in 1965–70 and popularized by Canadian composer and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer. Unlike "soundtrack" (which is a composed recording for media) or "noise" (which implies an unwanted disruption), a soundscape is the holistic sensory fabric of a lived-in world. It is the layered dawn chorus of a city park where traffic hums beneath birdsong, the resonant emptiness of a cathedral where footfalls echo against stone, or the particular silence of snow falling in a forest at night—the ambient score against which our private lives are set, a reminder that we do not merely hear our surroundings, we inhabit them acoustically.
Etymology
From sound + -scape.
noun
- An acoustic environment, a virtual/emotional environment created using sound.e.g.“Kleist’s drama is in that tradition and Mr. Bakewell was always in command of it. His soundscape of the field of Fehrbellin presented a tremendous panorama to the mind’s eye.” — 1958, British Broadcasting Corporation, The Listener, volume 59, page 475:
- An electroacoustic musical composition creating a sound portrait of a sound environment.
verb
- To establish or define an acoustic environment, either a virtual one created using sound or a physical one created architecturally to have specific effects on sound.e.g.“For quotations using this term, see Citations:soundscaped.”
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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