After the formation of the first team for the study of the Greek soundscapes, researchers from various disciplines have been involved in the exploration and the recording of qualitative attributes of the sonic environment. For many of them, the participation in field work for such purposes has been their introductory experience for the discovery of this unseen aspect of space. Hence, the need for the preparation of personnel prior the surveying campaigns has initially became the basis of a training session for the development of particular skills (listening, recording, measuring, logging and archiving) for capturing the needed data. The repetition of this training over the subsequent years has structured the outlines of a training workshop, named “Soundexplorers”.
The workshop was firstly conducted in 2014, during the third biannual conference of the Hellenic Society for Acoustic Ecology, under the title “Soundexplorers: Soundscape Correspondents” and a few months later was repeated with teachers from the primary education, during a dedicated training session, entitled “Sound and Environment in Education”, at the Environmental Education Centre of Kalamata, Greece. Since then, it has been performed, on an annual basis, with students at the School of Rural and Surveying Engineering, which are undertaking an optional project, named “Surveying and Cartographic Visualization of Attributes of the Sonic Environment”. During this project participants, besides the exploration of the sonic environment at the University Campus of Thessaloniki, are emphasizing on the thematic mapping of its attributes.
The aim of this training is the familiarization of participants with an applied methodology, which is based on the surveying, the analysis and the representation of attributes which are characterizing the sonic environment. The results from this methodology are related to a variety of topics and applications ranging from landscape ecology and environmental management to urban geography, mobility of individuals and soundscape representations.
References
Bassiouka, Afrodite, Karakosta, Marianna, Lazoglou, Miltiadis, Manika, Stella, Papachristou, Ioanna-Anna, Rista, Eleni and Papadimitriou, Kimon. “Mapping the sonic attributes: an acoustic approach for studying space.” Paper presented at First Conference on Environmental Management, Engineering, Planning and Economics, Skiathos, Greece, June 24-28, 2007.
Matsinos, John, Mazaris, Antonios D., Papadimitriou, Kimon, Mniestris, Andreas, Hatzigiannidis, George, Maioglou, Dimitris and Pantis, John D.. “Spatio-temporal variability in human and natural sounds in a rural landscape.” Landscape Ecology 23, 8 (2008): 945-959
Mniestris, Andreas and Etmektsoglou, Ioanna. “The Greek Soundscape Research Group and the Corfu Project.” Soundscape, the Journal of Acoustic Ecology 7 (2007):42
Papadimitriou, Kimon D., Mazaris, Antonios D., Kallimanis, Athanasios S. and Pantis, John D.. “Cartographic representation of the sonic environment.” Cartographic Journal 46, 2 (2009):126-135
- Background
- Overview
- Guidelines
- Summary