Congruency of colour associations to urban soundscapes, restaurants, and electroacoustic soundscape compostions

Abstract

Soundscapes are the auditory parts of multimodal environments (physical or virtual). We propose that while they may have differing degree of design intent: from non-designed (e.g. pristine, natural, urban areas), via semi-designed (servicescapes, restaurants), to fully designed (film, games, concert music), people approach them with similar listening strategies (Tuuri & Eerola 2012). The ecological model of perception explains crossmodal interactions as biological adaptations. A sound from an identified source may elicit a predictable affective response, but an acoustically equivalent but unidentifiable sound might not (Västfjäll 2013). A richer understanding of soundscape perception could be gained by considering visual associations (e.g. Haverkamp 2009, Giannakis & Smith 2001) of different kinds, in addition to semantic scales (e.g. Axelsson et al. 2010).