Sounds in cause: Soundscape and evolution

Beyond the therm of landscape, that has often been defined as “a painting, drawing, or photograph depicting natural scenery,” the concept of soundscape should lack any aesthetic significance and be thought as a technical therm naming the whole sonic experience of animals having sense of hearing. In general, from a methodological point of view, approaches describing landscape as “a view of some natural place” does not seem to be useful, because artificial and natural are often indistinguishable. Soundscape does not need to be considered natural or artificial. For instance, it seems evident that in a city, most sources of sound objects in soundscapes are human activities; anyway, even in a city, sounds produced by non-human species can easily be found. Soundscapes are complex structures that can be considered in terms of evolution. They evolve sound sources adapt their sonic productions to sonic productions of other sound sources sharing the same environment. It happens in human and non-human soundscapes. This way of thinking underlies sounds in cause, a project that started building a database of soundscapes recorded following a strict methodology and now proposes an Internet2 Network of Laboratories and Stations for Permanent Listening to the Soundscape.