Our daily soundscapes tell a story about the condition of the natural world, if only we take a moment to listen. In today’s rapidly urbanizing environment, human noise pollution is encroaching on natural soundscapes, thus interfering with the partitioned acoustic intercommunication among wildlife. This immersive soundscape adapts this sonic history and encourages users to listen deeply to how the world is speaking to us.
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In the realm of ecoacoustics, soundscape provides a rich understanding of the health and biodiversity of an ecosystem. Yet, in our visually dominated world, our surrounding acoustic environment is easily overlooked despite the fact that many of our world’s natural soundscapes are facing extinction. In pristine environments, the acoustic niche hypothesis predicts that the vocalizations of various organisms will be neatly partitioned in bandwidth and timing so as to avoid competition. With the proliferation of human (anthrophonic) noise pollution, the encroaching anthrophony is rapidly devouring these pristine environments and disrupting the organized acoustic space. This interference both destroys the balance of an environment’s acoustic space, but additionally interrupts the ability for wildlife to communicate, thus decreasing their chances of survival.
This project utilizes spatial audio in Unity Engine to create an immersive soundscape which adapts the sonic history of a forest from the midwestern United States to highlight how rapidly these natural soundscapes are disappearing. This experience aims to encourage users to listen more deeply to their acoustic environments and the invasive proliferation of human noise pollution on natural soundscapes.
The Unity environment, in the form of a navigable first-person experience, is initially populated with bird vocalizations in communication with each other before slowly being superseded by anthrophonic noise such as busy city streets or airplanes. The user is free to explore the sound space and is also accompanied by minimal visuals of bobbing golden orbs, representative of the initially balanced and pristine acoustic environment. As the anthrophony arrives, a mist is introduced to the space, disrupting the user’s navigability and the overall clarity of the orbs in parallel to the effect disrupted acoustic space has for the orientation of species in their environment.
In our rapidly urbanizing and visually stimulated world, it’s important to take a step back and observe this message that our world is trying to convey. Are you listening?
Tags:#soundscape#3daudio#noisepollution