Analysing olfactory and auditory sensescapes in English cities: Sensory expectation and urban environmental perception

Bruce, Neil; Condie, Jenna; Henshaw, Victoria; Payne, Sarah R.

doi:10.4000/ambiances.560

Cited by 16 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…For auditory perception, ecological conditioning over the lifetime lies behind the default mode of causal (or connotative) listening (Schaeffer, 1966;Chion and Gorbman, 2009;Tuuri and Eerola, 2012;see Lindborg, 2019, for a discussion). In this regard, olfaction appears to work much in the same way as auditory perception (e.g., Bruce et al, 2015;Deroy and Spence, 2016;Xiao et al, 2020) in that both the attributed external source and its subjective affect can be verbalised (Lindborg, 2016). As with causal identification of sound sources, an evaluation of smell sources follows immediately and automatically upon source identification (Waskul and Vannini, 2008;Xiao et al, 2020, p. 11) and probably regardless of whether the identification was correct or not (Herz, 2016).…”

Section: Smell Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The terminology pertaining to olfactory stimuli is inconsistent in the literature. Terms such as 'odour' and 'smell' sometimes appear to be used interchangeably (e.g., Haviland-Jones and Wilson, 2010;Bruce et al, 2015) and regardless of their valence; however, 'malodour' is specifically negative, while no such negation can be attached to the word 'smell'. Likewise, Belgiorno et al (2013) define 'odour' as an "organoleptic attribute [property of liquids, air, and other substances, that is] perceptible by the olfactory organ" (p. 15), and elsewhere appear to use 'smell' with the same meaning.…”

Section: Smell Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A soundwalk focuses on the acoustic environment and a smellwalk focuses on the olfactory environment. All are methods for onsite data collection that allow researchers to systematically investigate how people experience, understand, and utilise spaces (Henshaw et al, 2009(Henshaw et al, , 2010Bruce et al, 2015;Koseoglu, 2016;McLean, 2017;Xiao et al, 2020). The methodology originates in soundscape studies (Schafer, 1977) and has been broadened out to consider multimodal aspects of environments (Bruce et al, 2015, p. 100;Quercia et al, 2015).…”

Section: Sensory Walkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Real and Imagined Smellscapes

Lindborg

Liew

2021

Front. Psychol.

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The smellscape is the olfactory environment as perceived and understood, consisting of odours and scents from multiple smell sources. To what extent can audiovisual information evoke the smells of a real, complex, and multimodal environment? To investigate smellscape imagination, we compared results from two studies. In the first, onsite participants (N = 15) made a sensory walk through seven locations of an open-air market. In the second, online participants (N = 53) made a virtual walk through the same locations reproduced with audio and video recordings. Responses in the form of free-form verbal annotations, ratings with semantic scales, and a ‘smell wheel’, were analysed for environmental quality, smell source type and strength, and hedonic tone. The degree of association between real and imagined smellscapes was measured through canonical correlation analysis. Hedonic tone, as expressed through frequency counts of keywords in free-form annotations was significantly associated, suggesting that smell sources might generally be correctly inferred from audiovisual information, when such imagination is required. On the other hand, onsite ratings of olfactory quality were not significantly associated with online ratings of audiovisual reproductions, when participants were not specifically asked to imagine smells. We discuss findings in the light of cross-modal association, categorisation, and memory recall of smells.

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Section: Smell Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Smell Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sensory Walkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Real and Imagined Smellscapes

Lindborg

Liew

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…Sensewalking which Mags Adams and Kye Askins describe as a varied method by which researchers might '…investigate and analyse how we understand, experience and utilise space' (Adams and Askins, 2009); and focuses upon one or more aspects of the sensory environment to move beyond the hegemony of visual senses (Henshaw, 2014). The method is centred on the multisensory experience of being in a location (Adams and Askins, 2009), involves a researcher walking alone, or with one or more participants through urban environments (Bruce et al,2015) and use the walk for enabling participants to define and interpret the mutual link in-between experience a place with their bodies and senses (Adams and Askins, 2009).The 'sensewalking' method benefiting from the multisensory experience of being in a defined area, performing the walk to focus on special sensory experiences or activating participants to emit individual bodily interactions with a place (Rubidge and Stones, 2009). The application of 'Sensewalking' of Istiklal Street has aimed to investigate the sensory experiences of the urban environment through 'a series of multisensory walks'.…”

Section: Today's Auditory Thresholds Of Istiklalmentioning

confidence: 99%

It is Time to Consider Sensory Urban Experiences: Looking into Today’s Istiklal Street, Istanbul Through the Thresholds of Auditory Experiences

Kartal

2020

JDBE

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In the latest years, the changing socio-cultural structure, economic and political movements, law and city regulations, innovative transportation and communication activities have resulted in a modification of the city of Istanbul. In this process, numerous intangible features of urban places in Istanbul have modified, gone, or changed; and unavoidably the ‘sensory urban experiences’ of Istiklal Street, which is one of the important urban places of Istanbul, have changed controversially. This study asserts that the ‘sensory urban experiences’ of Istiklal Street needs to be examined as much as possible to criticize the sensory reflections of the latest modifications in the area. This study focuses on the ‘auditory experiences’ of Istiklal Street to understand what has been lost and changed in terms of the auditory atmosphere of the area. Therefore, the method of ‘Sensewalking’, which is an efficient research tool to generate knowledge on the urban experiences beyond visual experiences, is used to catch the auditory experiences of the area. This study says that producing the knowledge on the sensory urban experiences beyond visual features is worthwhile, and this could open new ways for discussing the urban matters especially in the field of architecture, and urban studies.

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“…Along similar lines, Bruce et al (2009 , p. 6) argued that a user’s soundscape “becomes an issue when it does not conform to subjects ‘perceived’ sense of normality or interferes with information […] transfer,” thus not conforming to the users’ expectations. The complexity of expectations in relation to one’s experience has been explored extensively apropos music (see e.g., Huron, 2006 ) and only recently has it been researched explicitly in relation to soundscape ( Bruce et al, 2009 , 2015 ; Bruce and Davies, 2014 ). We build on the conclusions of the latter research avenue, particularly their preliminary findings on the effect of users’ expectations from the space and what they hear on their soundscape evaluations, as well as what users refer to as “expected activities” within the space, as influenced by their soundscapes ( Bruce and Davies, 2014 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Space Users’ Soundscape Evaluations in Relation to Their Activities. An Amsterdam-Based Study

et al. 2018

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Understanding the relationship between people and their soundscapes in an urban context of innumerable and diverse sensory stimulations is a difficult endeavor. What public space users hear and how they evaluate it in relation to their performed or intended activities can influence users’ engagement with their spaces as well as their assessment of suitability of public space for their needs or expectations. While the interaction between the auditory experience and activity is a topic gaining momentum in soundscape research, capturing the complexity of this relationship in context remains a multifaceted challenge. In this paper, we address this challenge by researching the user-soundscape relationships in relation to users’ activities. Building on previous soundscape studies, we explore the role and interaction of three potentially influencing factors in users’ soundscape evaluations: level of social interaction of users’ activities, familiarity and expectations, and we employ affordance theory to research the ways in which users bring their soundscapes into use. To this end, we employ a mixed methods design, combining quantitative, qualitative and spatial analyses to analyze how users of three public spaces in Amsterdam evaluate their soundscapes in relation to their activities. We documented the use of an urban park in Amsterdam through non-intrusive behavioral mapping to collect spatial data on observable categories of activities, and integrated our observations with on site questionnaires on ranked soundscape evaluations and free responses detailing users’ evaluations, collected at the same time from park users. One of our key findings is that solitary and socially interactive respondents evaluate their soundscapes differently in relation to their activities, with the latter offering higher suitability and lower disruption ratings than the former; this points to qualitatively different auditory experiences, analyzed further based on users’ open-ended justifications for their evaluations. We provide a methodological contribution (adding to existing soundscape evaluation methodologies), an empirical contribution (providing insight on how users explain their soundscape evaluations in relation to their activities) and a policy and design-related contribution, offering additional insight on a transferable methodology and process that practitioners can employ in their work on the built environment to address the multisensory experience of public spaces.

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Analysing olfactory and auditory sensescapes in English cities: Sensory expectation and urban environmental perception

Cited by 16 publications

References 11 publications

Real and Imagined Smellscapes

Real and Imagined Smellscapes

It is Time to Consider Sensory Urban Experiences: Looking into Today’s Istiklal Street, Istanbul Through the Thresholds of Auditory Experiences

Public Space Users’ Soundscape Evaluations in Relation to Their Activities. An Amsterdam-Based Study

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