MYSTICSPICE

The Positive Soundscapes Project was a unique research effort that sought to re-evaluate environmental sound. Headed by Mags Adams of University of University of Salford (UK) the project set out to give a rich and rigorous account of human perception of and response to soundscapes. To do this it used overlapping methods from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from the quantitative (e.g. acoustics) to the qualitative (e.g. social science) to the creative (e.g. sound art). Qualitative fieldwork (soundwalks and focus groups) determined that people conceptualised a soundscape into three components: sound sources (e.g. a market), sound descriptors (e.g. rumbling) and soundscape descriptors (e.g. hubbub). Lab-based listening tests along with the fieldwork have revealed that two key dimensions of the emotional response to a soundscape are calmness and vibrancy. In the lab these factors explain nearly 80% of the variance in listener response. Interview responses from real soundscapes...

I ndia can still surprise us—and for the better. We have all heard this statistic time and again: one in six humans in the world lives in India. But there’s also an array of plants and animals, reptiles and fishes that shares with us our living space. This is a cause for both celebration and concern. Can we retain this irreplaceable wealth of nature even as we aspire for a better future for our human selves? It’s not just our human population—with its plurality of faiths, languages and ethnic groups—that expresses India’s spectacular fecundity and diversity. We are the only country to have lions in the wild as well as tigers: they exist in nature, not in captivity. The snow leopard, that ghostly phantom of the mountain peaks photographed first in the mid-1970s, is found across five Himalayan provinces. To these add myriad forms of fish and amphibians, and only the second monkey species to have been recorded by scientists in Asia in a century—the Arunachal macaque. That’s just a small ...