High precision perception in the age of technology

In the modernist phase, from Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism (1914) to Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1941), modernist theorists, along with designers, saw their quest as a revival of humanism, like the Renaissance's revival of the imagined classical era. Humanism" was proclaimed because they sought to establish a new core value of "space" and "time" - a way for the individual human being to be perceived through space and time. Through spatio-temporal perception, the individual human being becomes the subject of physical space. "Perception" became the technical symbol of modernist "humanism". The individual human being in the true sense of the word was taken care of by targeted design through the medium of bodily perception.

Modernist designers focused their attention on the flow of time created by the perception of movement. The body performing in space gains a non-representational, direct experience of presence through instantaneous perceptual feedback. This sense of presence, as Marie-Laure Ryan, a digital media theorist, points out, is based on movement and a kind of interactive potentiality (the original meaning of virtuality), where the dynamic experience of moving through space and the bodily interaction with things come together to produce a sense of presence.

In contemporary times, the precision of perception is becoming a fundamental human condition due to the rapid evolution of technology. It is difficult to imagine reverting to a world of low precision, like HD video or smoother video game iterations of older versions. The precision of perception affects the precision of action, interaction, and even meaning construction. In contemporary times, in addition to the enhancement of the physical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell themselves, IoT technologies have greatly increased the possibility of interactive feedback, even allowing feedback from the physical world to take on a virtual subjectivity; information technology, spatio-temporal big data, and personal mobile devices allow us to communicate across spatio-temporal boundaries and with content in mind; AR technologies, biosensing, and wearable devices have extended AR technology, biosensing and wearable devices extend perception from the physical world to the digital world. The tremendous popularity of these technologies in recent years has created a world of never-before-seen high-precision perception. Technology is becoming part of our fundamental ability to perceive and act in the future, just as the concept of "search" has gone from a highly charged physical adventure to a menu of information at the swipe of a fingertip and the indexical relationship it brings between people and space.

High-precision perception, supported and even defined by technology, is a fundamental condition for future human existence. It brings increasing precision in cognition, action and communication, and the sense of precision, vividness, sensitivity and exclusivity that characterize high precision. They lead to changes in human perceptions, needs and values, which in turn profoundly change design from the use side. In this context, we can re-examine the concept of "soundscape" and its design.

What is a Soundscape

In June 1967, Michael F. Southworth, a master's student at MIT, chose a sequence of urban spaces in downtown Boston for his thesis, "The Sound Environment of Cities," to investigate the perceptual shape of soundscapes using empirical measurements and experiments. This thesis is one of the earliest known studies devoted to soundscapes, and it presents a series of ideas that are foundational to soundscapes: soundscapes are a form of perception; sound cannot be analyzed in isolation, but is heard as a function of many other environmental and psychological factors; good soundscapes need to be informative and allow for sound interaction; and soundscapes have great design potential. Parallel to this, but more widely influential, is composer and acoustic ecologist Murray Schafer and his World Soundscape Project. Schafer likens soundscapes to landscapes and sees them as the study of the effects of auditory fields on the physical responses or behavioral characteristics of the organisms that live in them.

Soundscapes play an important role in many fields such as music, environment, and health, and have their own different definitions. In any case, soundscapes have the following connotations: they are closely related to human hearing, and are therefore not only aesthetic, but also historical, geographical and cultural; they contain immersive experiences, and therefore involve a process of integrating the real or virtual body into the artistic world; they are perceived by hearing as environment, and therefore involve the construction of a spatio-temporal relationship.

Soundscape in the Age of High Precision Perception

As a form of perception, soundscape is based on auditory, immersive and field construction, is it real? Does it need to be real? Is the tension between it and the real its power? Is the purpose of "hearing" to confirm the "otherness" of the world, or to confirm the "I-ness" in turn? If we look at the matter of "listening" from the dimension of human civilization, we will find a hidden history of evolution. In the beginning, "listening" was the medium through which we discovered the world, reached out to it, and became part of it by listening, thus trembling, thus wondering, thus forgetting ourselves. Later, in the process of moving towards modernity, we came to understand "listening" as "sound", as a wave that can be measured, changed and created. We became masters of sound, and sound became a tool, a technical extension of the human being. And in the present and future, as mixed reality becomes more prevalent and the various technological mediums of the world become more of a continuum, perhaps we will find that sound will be the anchor point of the "real" that calls to the heart and mind, freeing the "I" from the infinite immersion and interaction of the "I" is liberated from the infinite immersion and interaction of the real and becomes aware of the self. The auditory is introspective, the soundscape is centripetal, and it temporarily creates a world around the "I". In turn, this world is not imaginary, it is constructed with a logic based on high-precision perception, it is direct, beyond words, and it helps us to become better actors in the world.

What is Soundscape Design
Soundscape is a kind of ambience, which partly has the characteristics of environment, but obviously cannot be perceived by our conventional definition of environment or space. To a certain extent, it is closer to the concept of "ambience" in traditional Chinese spatial culture, i.e., a "realm" that can be immersed in because of human involvement ("intention"). ". As high-precision perception with technical support is becoming a basic human condition, "quasi-environments" such as mood and soundscape are becoming more common design objects.
Traditionally, "environment" itself has a multi-dimensional connotation, but in the era of high-precision perception, the independence of each dimension of the environment is greatly enhanced, and their superposition on each other creates richer and more diverse possibilities. Just as in traditional gardens, a pavilion can have different names, and as the name changes, the context and human experience also change, which is a typical superposition of physical and content environments. And in contemporary architecture, the degree of fluidity with which the built environment responds to, supports, and expresses human behavior and needs likewise constitutes an important part of the human spatial experience. Therefore, we need to confront the fact that the multiplicity of environments requires new concepts to describe them, as well as to think about and discover the new role that "design" should assume.

I call this multiplicity of environments an "augmented environment", which has three parallel and mutually reinforcing dimensions. The first is the natural-man-made environment: this consists of both naturally created and artificially shaped physical environments. The second is the perceptual-interactive environment: it is perceived as an environment by human perception and human interaction with the physical environment, with human perceptual-motor function as the core. The third is the information-content environment: it is independent of the physical environment but is perceived as indicative information provided by the physical environment. The virtual environment can be regarded as a full version of the information-content environment, which projects an environment that can be immersed by the virtual body as the medium of information.

The superposition of these three environmental dimensions constitutes an "augmented environment". We often unconsciously experience multiple dimensions at the same time, and each dimension may become the dominant one in a given application. From the perspective of augmented environments, it requires working across many different dimensions, and therefore relies more on the intersection of multiple disciplines.

Soundscape design is the creative shaping of the auditory environment, including physical, perceptual and virtual environments. Contemporary soundscape design takes the human acoustic function as its core and creatively fuses the acoustic environment, acoustic information and acoustic technology into a new medium. This fusion also reflects the change in thinking and tools of contemporary design. It includes acoustic function: supported by life science, psychology and other disciplines, it revolves around how sound extends and develops human function, including acoustic biology, sound diagnosis, sound therapy, sound education, etc. Sound environment: supported by disciplines such as architecture, planning, and geography, it revolves around the application of sound in environments at multiple scales, including large-scale city scales: planning of sound landscapes, city sound maps, sound smart cities, sound healthy cities, etc.; neighborhood scales: campus sound landscapes, immersive historical and cultural neighborhoods, community public spaces, etc.; and micro-scale internal spaces of buildings, such as smart houses, smart learning spaces, monumental buildings and expo buildings for sound environment optimization, etc. Sound information: supported by disciplines such as art, journalism and communication, sociology, etc., around sound as a content carrier and sound IP shaping, including sound library of non-foreign heritage, sound restoration, sound branding, sound innovation of daily use scenes, etc. Sound technology: represented by electroacoustic technology, acoustic materials, speech technology, ultrasound technology, microelectronics technology, etc. As the application of sound to new technologies is often ahead of the development of technology, acoustics will have a great role in promoting new technologies.

In this framework, soundscape design is not limited to the creation of art, but the cross-fertilization of humanities and sound technology in the application scenarios of future cities and future human settlements. We believe that contemporary technology will certainly bring a new humanism, and sound will be the key bridge connecting technology and humanism.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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