Sonic environmental aesthetics and landscape research

The environmental aesthetics literature has primarily focused on the aesthetic qualities and values of landscapes. Within this scholarship, there has been a modest but steady advancement towards explicitly attending to the aesthetic experience of landscape sounds. In this paper, I review the theoretical and applied sonic aesthetics literature pertinent to landscape research, and identify some existing weaknesses. In particular, I demonstrate that there is an ongoing tendency to limit discussions to what is sonically pleasing or displeasing within a given landscape, which, I argue, provides a limited point of entry through which to consider the full scope of landscape sounds. I then turn to offer some ways to address these weaknesses—notably through what I term the development of a ‘sensitive ear’, and through field recording strategies—in the hope that this will allow scholars to better enfold sonic environmental aesthetics within future theoretical and applied landscape research

Urban river design and aesthetics: A river restoration case study from the UK

This paper analyses the restoration of an urbanized section of the River Skerne where it flows through a suburb of Darlington, England; a project which was one of the first comprehensive urban river restorations undertaken in the UK. It is shown how aesthetic values were central to the identification of the River Skerne as a site for restoration, the production of restoration objectives, and a design vision of urban river renewal via restoration. Secondly, the means by which these aesthetic values were realized through the design and implementation of restoration techniques and management operations are described. Finally, it is demonstrated how the resulting aesthetic qualities and overall landscape character were intended to accomplish a set of interrelated policy goals

The Impact of Glassblowing on the Early-Roman Glass Industry (circa 50 B.C. – A.D. 79)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ancient glass was frequently treated as though it was a prestigious product, owned only by the elites of society. Research was primarily art-historical, and focused on select museum pieces. As archaeology developed, it became clear that glass vessels were used at many, if not most, Roman sites, from the late first century B.C. onward, and in many different social contexts, contradicting the idea that only the rich could afford them. Scholars began to explain the increased prevalence of glass by arguing that the invention of glassblowing (circa 50 B.C.) had increased production speed while lowering production costs, making glass vessels cheap and widely available across the social spectrum This thesis explores the role of blown glass by comparing the percentages and forms produced by older casting techniques in glass vessel assemblages from military sites, civilian sites, frontier settlements, and settings at the heart of the Roman world. It seeks to understand the social and economic status of blown glass and cast glass: why did cast glass persist after the invention of cheaper blown glass? Was cast and blown glass equally accessible to different levels of society? And to what extent can the invention of glassblowing bear responsibility for the rise in glass vessel use in the Roman world? By drawing comparisons between vessels from different production methods, and from different social and geographical contexts, this thesis begins to identify emerging patterns in glass use across Roman society and finds that both cast and blown vessels were used across all levels of society and that there was no strict divide between the use of casting for luxury wares and glassblowing for cheap utilitarian wares

Listening walks: a method of multiplicity

A listening walk is a mode of walking in which listening to the sounds of spaces is the focus. In this chapter, we look at the potential of listening walks to act as a research method and pedagogic tool. We emphasise its flexibility and adaptability for different purposes and research topics. To make this argument, we consider a listening walk led by one of the authors in Edinburgh, Scotland. We demonstrate that, while listening walks have been posited as a means of producing research data about perceived soundscape quality, they also provide us with an endlessly repeatable and adaptable method that can address a much broader range of research questions, and can be embedded within a variety of teaching settings

Sonic methods in geography

Research into sound—including both musical and nonmusical sound—amounts to a varied body of work that straddles numerous disciplines, including history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, musicology, and ecology. Scholarship focused on sound has also led to the formation of discrete subdisciplines, most notably sound studies, bioacoustics, and acoustic ecology. Much of this wealth of material considers the spatial properties of sounds and their reception (both by humans and nonhumans), yet geographers have been relatively slow to consider sound in a systematic manner, and explicitly geographical studies of sound remain few and far between, even if this has picked up since the 2000s, especially by cultural geographers (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Geography article “Geographies of Music, Sound, and Auditory Culture”). Much of the geographical scholarship on sound and music, which, broadly constituted, has been referred to as audio geography or sonic geography, has tended to rely upon already existing methods of data collection, analysis, and (re)presentation, including interviews, close textual readings, and written forms of dissemination. Of course, such methods remain invaluable, and they have their own particular sonorities, yet they also raise important questions that sound researchers are only just starting to grapple with. Principally, it has been questioned whether existing research methods need to be extended or complemented, or new ones initiated, so as to account for the diverse ways in which sounds produce spaces, and how spaces affect sounds and their reception at different scales, as well as helping to generate entirely new forms of data. This has been met by a range of responses that generally do not reject existing ways of undertaking research, but instead seek to complement them

Roles of aesthetic value in ecological restoration : cases from the United Kingdom

Ecological restoration has been identified as an increasingly important tool in environmental policy circles, from reversing species loss to mitigating climate change. While there has been a steady rise in the number of research projects that have investigated social and ecological values that underpin ecological restoration, scholarship has predominantly been carried out at the theoretical level, to the detriment of engaging with real-world ecological restoration projects. This has resulted in generalised and speculative accounts of ecological restoration values. This thesis seeks to address this research gap through a critical analysis of the roles of aesthetic values in the creation and implementation of restoration policy, using three different case studies of ecological restoration at the landscape level in the United Kingdom. I employ interdisciplinary research methods, including semi-structured interviews, interpretive policy analyses, still photography, and sound recording techniques, to better understand the multi-sensorial qualities of ecological restoration. I trace the role of aesthetic value from the initial development of restoration policy through to the management of the post-restoration landscape, considering along the way how aesthetic values are negotiated amongst other types of social and ecological values, how aesthetic values are measured, articulated, and projected onto the landscape by restoration policy makers, and the ways in which aesthetic values are applied through design and management strategies across each site. Throughout the thesis, I engage with a number of current research themes within the ecological restoration literature that intersect with aesthetic value, such as the use of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ species in landscape restoration, and the procedure through which landscape reference models are selected. I also address hitherto unasked spatial questions of ecological restoration, including an examination of the aesthetic relationships between a restoration site and adjacent landscapes, and the application of spatial practices to regulate certain forms of post-restoration landscape utility. I demonstrate that aesthetic values play a multitude of different roles throughout the restoration process, and ultimately show that as aesthetic values are captured and put to use to different ends through policy, they are inherently bound up with competing ethical visions of society-nature relationships

Listening walks: a method of multiplicity

A listening walk is a mode of walking in which listening to the sounds of spaces is the focus. In this chapter, we look at the potential of listening walks to act as a research method and pedagogic tool. We emphasise its flexibility and adaptability for different purposes and research topics. To make this argument, we consider a listening walk led by one of the authors in Edinburgh, Scotland. We demonstrate that, while listening walks have been posited as a means of producing research data about perceived soundscape quality, they also provide us with an endlessly repeatable and adaptable method that can address a much broader range of research questions, and can be embedded within a variety of teaching settings

The normativity of ecological restoration reference models: an analysis of Carrifran Wildwood, Scotland, and Walden Woods, United States

In this article, we explore how ecological restoration reference models are produced and what work they do within an ecological restoration project. By tracing the genesis of two restoration reference models - at Carrifran Wildwood, Scotland, and Walden Woods, United States - we suggest that reference models are more than simply scientific-technical guidelines for restoration activities, and that they can be usefully conceptualised as normative visions of desired future ecosystem states, due to the range of values they are based upon. As a result, we challenge the widespread notion that reference models represent arbitrarily chosen moments in time

Environmental aesthetics and rewilding

This paper explores the practice of rewilding and its implications for environmental aesthetic values, qualities and experiences. First, we consider the temporal dimensions of rewilding in regard to the emergence of particular aesthetic qualities over time, and our aesthetic appreciation of these. Second, we discuss how rewilding potentially brings about difficult aesthetic experiences, such as the unscenic and the ugly. Finally, we make progress in critically understanding how rewilding may be understood as a distinctive form of ecological restoration, while resisting the assimilation of rewilding into wilderness discourses