What is a soundscape? Why it's more than background noise

Close your eyes for ten seconds and listen. Maybe there's a fridge humming, traffic outside, someone typing, a bird. That collection of sounds is your acoustic environment. But it only becomes a soundscape once you add the most important ingredient: you.

When I started researching soundscapes for my final-year project at the University of Salford, I expected a simple definition. What I found was a word that has travelled through urban planning, acoustics, music and anthropology, and that means slightly different things to each of them. Here's the short tour.

Where does the word "soundscape" come from?

The term first appeared in 1967, in an article by the urban planner Michael Southworth called The Sonic Environment of Cities. It became popular ten years later thanks to the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, whose book The Tuning of the World (1977) described the soundscape as "a total appreciation of the sonic environment".

Schafer's idea was radical for its time: that we should listen to our cities, forests and homes as carefully as we listen to music, and take responsibility for how they sound.

So what's the official definition?

In 2014, the international standard ISO 12913-1 settled on a definition that researchers still use. A soundscape is the:

"acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in context."

Notice what that sentence does. It doesn't define a soundscape by decibels or frequencies. It defines it by perception and context. The same physical sound can produce two completely different soundscapes, depending on who is listening, where and why.

The standard also separates a few ideas that are easy to mix up:

Sound sources: what makes the sound, whether nature (birds, water, wind) or human activity (traffic, voices, machines).
Acoustic environment: all the sound that reaches you from every source, shaped by the space it travels through.
Soundscape: what you actually experience and make sense of.

Why do two people hear the same place differently?

Because perception isn't a microphone. Your brain filters, interprets and judges everything you hear, and researchers have found several things that shape that judgement:

Expectations. A study by Bruce and colleagues found that what we expect to hear in a place affects how good we think it sounds. Traffic in a city centre is normal; traffic in a nature reserve feels like an intrusion.
What you can see. Hong and Jeon found a strong link between what we see and how we rate a soundscape, and Brambilla and Gallo found that trees, tranquillity and natural features affect how pleasant a place feels.
The type of source. People tend to value natural sounds such as birdsong and running water, and to dislike road noise and other modern sounds (Guastavino, 2006). That's why water and bird sounds are often used to mask urban noise.
What you're doing. Researchers such as Herranz-Pascual and colleagues describe the soundscape as an interaction between the person, the place and the activity. Waves are lovely when you're reading on the beach. They're less lovely when you're trying to take a phone call.

Think of rain. In a tent on holiday it can be the most relaxing sound in the world. The same rain hitting a skylight at 3am before an early flight can feel like torture. Same source, different soundscape.

What is "soundscaping"?

Here's where it gets personal. In 2011, the researcher Mack Hagood coined the term soundscaping to describe something most of us now do every day: using headphones, especially noise-cancelling ones, to block out the world and replace it with sound we've chosen.

People have always shaped their soundscapes. They've closed doors, moved rooms or gone for a walk. What changed is that the power button on a pair of headphones became an on/off switch for the world around us. As Hagood puts it, it offers "an (imperfect) on-off interface with the soundscape".

That idea became the starting point of my own research: if we're all soundscaping anyway, which sounds actually help, and why? I explore that in Can background sounds help you concentrate?

Is a soundscape also a piece of music?

For composers and sound artists, yes. The Oxford English Dictionary includes both meanings: "the sounds which form an auditory environment" and a "musical composition consisting of a texture of sounds". Brona Martin describes soundscape composition as a relationship between the recorded material, the composer and the listener, all tied to a particular place.

As a sound engineer, I love that overlap. Every time you record a place, you make creative decisions about where the microphone goes, what you leave in and what you cut. A field recording is never just a neutral copy of reality. It's already a way of listening.

What does this mean for you?

Next time a place feels calm or stressful, try separating the layers. What are the sound sources? How is the space shaping them? And what are you bringing: your expectations, your mood, your task?

You can't always change the sounds around you. But understanding that a soundscape is partly built inside your head is the first step to designing a better one.