Cognitive Aspects of Soundscape Acknowledgment Using a Virtual Reality (VR) Tool

Within the World Soundscape Project, Robert Murray Schafer the Soundscape concept, inducing the capacity to restitute identity to the sonic environment through organizing its constitutive elements. Articulated to its social representations, construction of the perceived soundscape reveals a sonic identity structure, which is evaluable through its ambience cognitive structure characterization. To experiment this characterization principle, an immersive and interactive device, the Urban Participative HyperAmbiantopes (HAUP), is presented, thus allowing soundscapes reconstruction by using an hypertextual navigation mode within an immersive spherical view of the city. Soundscape reconstruction shares listening action between the two modalities of actual perception and imaginary reconstruction, implying a twin holistic and systemic codification mode of urban soundscape events. Soundscape can therefore be described as a combination of the previous sound sources, belonging to specified hierarchical meta-classes. Thereafter, hetero-chronical evolution of sound ambience acknowledgement enables sound identity reconstruction using virtual reality systems.