Abstract
Echofriendly is an applied ethnomusicology project dedicated to improving the eco-acoustic quality of living and working places, the conservation of natural and anthropogenic soundscapes, and human knowledge and understanding of soundscapes. The project has three main objectives: 1) to develop an acoustemological model to apply to the qualitative description of soundscapes; 2) to implement a series of ICT services for collecting qualitative and quantitative data on natural and anthropogenic soundscapes, eco-acoustic quality of living and working environments, from an inter- cross-cultural and citizen science perspective; 3) to experiment with the latest frontier research opened by AI machine learning techniques for the automatic classification of soundscapes. The project fills a glaring gap in the state of the art of ecoacoustic studies by implementing an acoustemological model for the qualitative description of soundscapes from a cross-cultural and transcultural perspective. Echofriendly welcomes as well other perceptual dominances such as those shared among people with visual impairments, a group that relies on sound to understand and navigate their surroundings, with the aim of identifying access barriers generated by soundscapes. For the first time ever, we will integrate the perspective of ecoacoustics with that of sound anthropology and acoustemology, challenging the ethno- and sociocentric hard science approach to qualitative soundscape analysis ("decolonizing" soundscape analysis). Echofriendly builds a significant advance in soundscape analysis and restores centrality to sound anthropology research in the broad landscape of disciplines converging on sound ecology. Echofriendly is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary project involving ethnomusicology and sound anthropology, ICT, machine learning, ecoacoustics, and game studies. The project team is characterized by highly interdisciplinary skills, and, concurrently, by a strong cohesion of research interests. The members of the scientific sector Ethnomusicology and Musicology converge, with many years of research experience, on perspectives that have the soundscape as their primary subject; members of the sector ING-INF/05 (Information Processing Systems) are internationally recognized scholars in the field of multimodal analysis applied to music performance, social signal processing, sound and music computing. Echofriendly is a transformative innovation project that intervenes on the emerging strategic topic HUMAN WELLBEING. Our 19 targets and 4 milestones are entirely aimed at realizing the goals of CLUSTER CULTURE, CREATIVE AND INCLUSIVE SOCIETY - SUBCLUSTER 3, with a specific focus on preserving soundscapes and human knowledge about soundscapes as an integral component of cultural landscapes, customs, and traditions, and on improving the well-being of citizens in living and working environments.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Domenico Staiti
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento delle Arti
Coordinator:
Università degli Studi di TORINO(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 80.400,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
30/11/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
