Characterizing urban sound environments

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Type
Ensemble de conférences, symposium, congrès
performance location
Ircam, Salle Igor-Stravinsky (Paris)
date
November 13, 2025

Studies about the Soundscape started in the sixties with the work of Murray Schafer originally developed in a musical frame. Debates during 50 years converge to a chaired definition of this concept in 2014. In this presentation, I will develop the work I did during these 25 last years about the sound environment which is the acoustical part of the Soundscape. I will focus on its characterization for an urban context, from perceptual and objective point of views. The idea is also to propose models of sound quality in order to better predict the pleasantness of a place, even of a route, for pedestrians in a city.

Bio: Catherine Lavandier is an emeritus professor at the CY Cergy Paris University in the ETIS laboratory. She is graduated from a civil engineering school, and got her Master and PhD thesis on the acoustic quality of concert halls. She defended her HDR (Habilitation to Direct Research) on the environmental sound quality. The goal of her researches is to understand how humans perceive their sound environment with a particular interest to urban context and to transportation noise (aircraft and railway noise annoyance).


Réunion du Groupement de Recherche "Information, Apprentissage, Signal, Image et ViSion" : Domaines émergents en traitement du signal audionumérique : éco-acoustique, environnements urbains, industriels et médicaux

Emerging topics in audio signal processing: ecoacoustics, urban acoustics, industrial acoustics, medical acoustics

Ethology, ecology, urban geography, industrial engineering, and biomedical engineering are all disciplines that value sound as information. Long limited to speech and music signals alone, audio signal processing is finding compelling applications for instrumentation in these disciplines. In turn, it is fueled by new challenges in fundamental research. This is evidenced, among other things, by increasingly autonomous and adaptive in situ acoustic sensors; a revival of statistical and geometric methods for time-frequency; and the invention of analysis and synthesis techniques based on unsupervised or minimally supervised learning.

It is in this context that we intend to provide a progress report on work on sounds other than speech and music. These « emerging topics » include, but are not limited to, ecoacoustics, urban acoustics, industrial acoustics, and medical acoustics. The invited speakers will provide an overview of the main issues inherent in these fields while striving to be accessible to the IASIS community as a whole. Furthermore, the call for talks and posters will allow for more specific areas of ongoing research to be addressed.

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