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'Semi-public' spaces
A broader meaning of public space or place includes also places where everybody can come if they pay, like a café, train, movie theater or brothel. A shop is an example of what is intermediate between the two meanings: everybody can enter and look around without obligation to buy, but activities unrelated to the purpose of the shop are not unlimitedly permitted.
The halls and streets (including skyways) in a shopping center may be declared a public place and may be open when the shops are closed. Similarly for halls, railway platforms and waiting rooms of public transport; sometimes a travelling ticket is required. A public library is a public place. A rest stop or truck stop is a public space.
For these semi-public spaces stricter rules may apply than outside, e.g. regarding dress code, trading, begging, advertising, propaganda, riding rollerskates, skateboards, a Segway, etc.
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Urban designers rarely have the degree of artistic liberty or control sometimes offered in design professions such as architecture. It also typically requires interdisciplinary input with balanced representation of multiple fields including engineering, ecology, local history, and transport planning.
...Throughout history, design of streets and deliberate configuration of public spaces with buildings have reflected contemporaneous social norms or philosophical and religious beliefs (see, e.g., Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Meridian Books, 1957). Yet the link between designed urban space and human mind appears to be bidirectional. Indeed, the reverse impact of urban structure upon human behaviour and upon thought is evidenced by both observational study and historical record.
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Max Weber (wiki)
Weber innovated the idea of a status group as a certain type of subculture. Status groups are based on things such as: race, ethnicity, religion, region, occupation, gender, sexual preference, etc. These groups live a certain lifestyle based on different values and norms. They are a culture within a culture, hence the label subculture. Weber also had the idea that people were motivated by their material and ideal interests, which include things such as preventing one from going to hell. Weber also explains that people use symbols to express their spirituality, and that symbols are used to express the spiritual side of real events, and that ideal interests are derived from symbols
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Cultural Change: Sociology suggests an alternative to both the unsatisfying it has always been that way view at one extreme and the unsociological individual genius view at the other. This alternative posits that culture and cultural works are collective, not individual, creations. We can best understand specific cultural objects... by seeing them not as unique to their creators but as the fruits of collective production, fundamentally social in their genesis. (p. 53) In short, Griswold argues that culture changes through the contextually dependent and socially situated actions of individuals; macro-level culture influences the individual who, in turn, can influence that same culture. The logic is a bit circular, but illustrates how culture can change over time yet remain somewhat constant.
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CULTURE
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Social Theory....the understanding of natural phenomena is predicated on the understanding of social phenomena, as the interpretation of natural phenomena is a social activity. Responding to such contentions, physicist Alan Sokal once quipped, "Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor)."
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Postmodernism; unity in diversity
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The conference addresses the ways in which sound and music, particularly as they are technologically mediated, have come to play a pivotal role in re-drawing the boundaries between the 'public' and 'private'. There is a growing awareness that acoustic strategies can be used by individuals and groups to demarcate space and project themselves within it, establishing new and often contested boundaries between the public and private. This tendency is striking in relation to physical and virtual spaces, on the one hand, and to social spaces, on the other. Music and sound are increasingly used to mark territory, place and social identities; they are employed both to humanise space and attract sociality, and to discourage human contact and block off sociality. Although some of these developments were apparent with analogue audio technologies, they have been greatly exacerbated by digitisation and by music's privileged relations with the internet, in which it leads other expressive artforms in the scale and intensity of its remediation. The conference therefore examines the manner in which musical and acoustical dynamics have become integral to the construction, imagination and negotiation of social and physical space.
Relatedly, the conference explores how the proliferation of sound technologies has resulted in a situation in which acoustic environments are increasingly malleable. To an unprecedented degree, music and sound are being employed to create a 'nesting' of the private and public, while audio technologies are used to effect a series of radical transformations of musical experience: children using sound technologies to create 'private' environments within the collective, 'private' domestic space of the home, articulating in this way cultural-generational tensions; soldiers using individual sound technologies inside tanks in battle to construct a sense of intimate, affective space and identity which fends off and occludes the public, ambient sounds of violent warfare; the mobile phone used to create a new genre of private-in-public communication; and real-time, embodied, intersubjective musical practices being replaced by virtual, disembodied music-making and virtually-distributed musical cognition.
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Alexander Trocchi 'There's in fact no permanence anywhere. There's only becoming'
Guy Debord 'The artistic life of a city directly impacts on the health of the city as a whole'.
(excerpts from S. Lowndes' Social Sculpture book)
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Janet Kardon 'Public ar tis the major arena in which democratic ideas and aesthetic elitism attempt to come to terms with each other (from Chris Crickmay's´'The Ordinary and the Decadent' essay, Decadent, edited by david Harding 710/HAR)
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Psychoacoustics (and limits of perception)
The human ear can nominally hear sounds in the range 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). This upper limit tends to decrease with age, most adults being unable to hear above 16 kHz. The ear itself does not respond to frequencies below 20 Hz, but these can be perceived via the body's sense of touch.A more rigorous exploration of the lower limits of audibility determines that the minimum threshold at which a sound can be heard is frequency dependent. By measuring this minimum intensity for testing tones of various frequencies, a frequency dependent absolute threshold of hearing (ATH) curve may be derived. Typically, the ear shows a peak of sensitivity (i.e., its lowest ATH) between 1 kHz and 5 kHz, though the threshold changes with age, with older ears showing decreased sensitivity above 2 kHz
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These senses, like touch, are generally considered, understood, and explained as functioning in a more physical way. Waves are disregarded for the simpler “particle explanation” only because we haven’t yet developed philosophies or machines that can “explain” their behavior to us.
All particulate matter exists as a result of waves, and exhibit or display themselves to us only as specific frequencies and mediums determine – hence, all things are waves.
All we perceive and experience are waves carrying information. These waves are conveniently disguised by the words light, matter, taste, God, etc. Our world is defined by our most limited perceptions, our five senses, and we must begin our move into deeper worlds of understanding.
What we perceive is a very small part of a much larger reality, and much exists that we do not perceive.
All waves stimulate a response whether we are aware of this response or not.
Waves exist as carriers of information, and we, as humans, are receivers. Once we can tap into these wavelengths with a new understanding, we can also be transmitters, using these waves much like we use telephones, and conscious knowledge of these waves and their sources will be established. A personal relationship can then be fostered with what we can call the source, or intelligence, of all that is.
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Telephone Booth syndrome 'one has to step into a booth, which makes one stand out uncomfortably, beacause of the separation from the crowd of people outside' from Bruce Nauman's book, p.21
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Ursula Meier's Home (film, 2008)
As well as disruption, danger, pollution and intrusion, the motorway variously represents isolation in the face of progress, individualism against authority and monolithic change and the sacrifice of a way of life to modernity. At the film’s close, the ordinariness of passing glances at the house will have a familiar ring for many and truly underlines these themes.
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Ambisonics is a series of recording and replay techniques using multichannel mixing technology that can be used live or in the studio. By encoding and decoding sound information on a number of channels, a 2-dimensional ("planar", or horizontal-only) or 3-dimensional ("periphonic[1]", or full-sphere) sound field can be presented
http://www.ambisonic.net/
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Again, just to be sure: Soundscape
A soundscape is a sound or combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment. The study of soundscape is the subject of acoustic ecology. The idea of soundscape refers to both the natural acoustic environment, consisting of natural sounds, including animal vocalizations and, for instance, the sounds of weather and other natural elements; and environmental sounds created by humans, through musical composition, sound design, and other ordinary human activities including conversation, work, and sounds of mechanical origin resulting from use of industrial technology. The disruption of these acoustic environments results in noise pollution.
The term "soundscape" can also refer to an audio recording or performance of sounds that create the sensation of experiencing a particular acoustic environment, or compositions created using the found sounds of an acoustic environment, either exclusively or in conjunction with musical performances.[1][2]
...Papers on noise pollution are increasingly taking a holistic, soundscape approach to noise control. Whereas acoustics tends to rely on lab measurements and individual acoustic characteristics of cars and so on, soundscape takes a top-down approach. Drawing on John Cage's ideas of the whole world as composition, soundscape researchers investigate people's attitudes to soundscapes as a whole rather than individual aspects - and look at how the entire environment can be changed to be more pleasing to the ear.
It has been suggested that people's opportunity to access quiet, natural places in urban areas can be enhanced by improving the ecological quality of urban green spaces through targeted planning and design and that in turn has psychological benefits.
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Acousic Ecology From its roots in the sonic sociology and radio art of Schafer and his colleagues, acoustic ecology has found expression in many different fields. While most have taken some inspiration from Schafer's writings, in recent years there have also been healthy divergences from the initial ideas. Among the expanded expressions of acoustic ecology are increasing attention to the sonic impacts of road and airport construction, widespread networks of "phonographers" exploring the world through sound[3], the broadening of bioacoustics (the use of sound by animals) to consider the subjective and objective responses of animals to human noise, including increasing use of the idea of "acoustic ecology" in the literature, and a popular in the effects of human noise on animals, with ocean noise capturing the most attention. Another important outcome of the evolution of acoustic ecology studies is soundscape composition.
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