Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (review)

When R. Murray Schafer coined the term 'soundscape' in 1965 and initiated what became known as the World Soundscape Project, the future of this new field of study was uncertain. It was inevitable, however, that interdisciplinary research into the production and reception of sound would continue to attract multidisciplinary researchers. sonic experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, edited by two leading soundscape researchers, is a continuation of the work initiated by the World Soundscape Project in 1965.

sonic experience provides an alphabetical lexicon of eighty-two sonic effects that can be used as a guideline in describing and understanding the everyday experience of sound. Responding to the lack of 'generic concepts to describe all perceptible sound forms of the environment,' the research team at the Centre de recherche sur l'espace sonore et l'environment urbain (CRESSON), at the National School of Architecture of Grenoble have since the 1980s sought to create tools to be used inclusively to describe and analyse all of the sounds that we experience daily in all possible spaces. Some of these 'sonic effects' include 'Colouring,' 'Reverberation,' 'Phonotonie,' 'Phonomnesis,' and 'Ubiquity.'

This book, originally published in French in 1995 under the title À l'écoute de l'environment. Répertoire des effets sonores, was compiled by leading soundscape researchers at cresson. An Italian edition preceded the English edition in 2004 and its publication facilitated a wider readership of this seminal work. Andra McCartney, a soundscape scholar at Concordia University in Montreal, and David Paquette carefully prepared the translation of sonicexperience. Their updated translation, particularly the headings, was informed by both the original text and additional sources by Björn Hellström, R. Murray Schafer, and various sound practitioners and theorists. This edition is a blend of the original French ideas and concepts and the translators' additional resources. The book suffers from an awkwardness of form and meaning, resulting from the translation from French to English; frequently, English substitutes do not accurately express the meaning of the original text.

Jean-François Augoyard is an urban planner, philosopher, musicologist, and founder of CRESSON. Henry Torgue is an urban planner, sociologist, composer, and a researcher at CRESSON. The additional members of the multidisciplinary research team, which worked on this project over ten years, include architects, urban planners, engineers, philosophers, psychologists, geographers, and musicologists. The team selected sixteen sound effects to discuss in detail, subdividing them by disciplinary approach (i.e., musical aesthetics), while the remaining sixty-six concepts are discussed in more general abbreviated terms.

Often sonic experience is very scientific in its approach to sound studies and its description of the experience of sound. For this reason, it demands a prior knowledge of the physical characteristics of sound production and its components. To be an accessible guide to sound, the definitions require more examples by which the reader can visualize the sonic effect. The 'Thematic Reading List' at the conclusion of the book is a useful bibliography which offers additional resources in the area of sound study by category. The strength of sonic experience is that it discusses each sonic effect from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The reader is able to select the discipline from which to interpret the definition of each sound source and experience; thus a reader unfamiliar with physics or architecture can understand the sound source from the perspective of media or sociology.