Socio-cultural soundscape concepts to support policies for managing the acoustic environment

In the past half-century, considerable effort has been invested in the academic, technological, and political arenas to achieve an adequate acoustic environment. Various national and international policy guidance documents have made reasonable progress in establishing a framework for a common approach to minimizing environmental noise, such as documents from various national Environmental Protection Agencies, the World Health Organization, and the European Union. Although these documents have provided useful information for global application, they only address minimizing the negative side of the acoustic environment (i.e., noise), they focus primarily on acoustics issues at the national or international level, and they still have not adequately considered implementation issues related to socio-cultural differences. To deal with the practical problems that exist in the acoustic environment in the context of different cultures, continuing research and new policy guidance are needed to address different local situations and in a variety of cultural contexts. The Soundscape approach has been developing tools for describing the acoustic environment at the local level to address both the positive and negative aspects of the acoustic environment. In this paper, the evolving interdisciplinary aspect of the Socio-Cultural Soundscape will be discussed and key topics for future work will be recommended.