Definition-independent Formalization of Soundscapes: Towards a Formal Methodology
This work addresses a foundational issue for researchers in soundscape studies by enabling better integration and comparison across fields, though it is incremental as it builds on existing formalization efforts.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent definitions of soundscapes across disciplines, which complicates interdisciplinary communication and comparison, by proposing a formalization independent of specific definitions to capture heterogeneous data and ideologies, and demonstrates its application in land use type detection using frequency correlation matrices as an alternative to MFCCs.
Soundscapes have been studied by researchers from various disciplines, each with different perspectives, goals, approaches, and terminologies. Accordingly, depending on the field, the concept of a soundscape's components changes, consequently changing the basic definition. This results in complicating interdisciplinary communication and comparison of results. Especially when soundscape-unrelated research areas are involved. For this reason, we present a potential formalization that is independent of the underlying soundscape definition, with the goal of being able to capture the heterogeneous structure of the data as well as the different ideologies in one model. In an exemplary analysis of frequency correlation matrices for land use type detection as an alternative to features like MFCCs, we show a practical application of our presented formalization.