| Resumo: | The sound environment is increasingly more relevant in contemporary culture. It is a ‘picture’ of a place, an X-ray of its character and activities, shapeless and amorphous, whilst full of meanings and subtleties. It is a transmission that is complementary to what a picture retains and transports. Therefore it is a unique, tangible impression of the place to which it belongs, and intrinsically, its history, and that of the people who inhabit it, and their relations. Murray Schafer termed this element as Soundscape. Although always a present element, it was only from the end of the Twentieth Century that it has been studied in a systematic way, initially in a more ecological and socio-cultural function approach, but slowly it has been seen as an artistic tool, both in direct use of the sounds as well as being an inspiration, and a starting point, for creation. The exploratory research project presented here aims to study the capture and analysis of the urban soundscape, with a special focus on its temporal evolution, and its application in the creative and artistic context. At the first stage, we try to understand how and, if possible, to capture and represent the most challenging part of this massive sound element, which is its constant changing on the time axis. Grasping its nuances on both small and large time scales. The second phase is to understand the pertinence of such information and its direct influence in the act of music and sonic creation. To achieve these goals a multidisciplinary approach based on two main pillars was necessary: Soundscape and Computer Music. These disciplines determine the scientific areas in which this research had to be focused. Due to the fact that this thesis has a relatively broad scope of interests, there is a survey of the state of the art relating to projects and approaches that relate to the interests of this investigation in different ways. In areas such as: Music Information Retrieval, Algorithmic Composition, Eco Composition, and Sound Maps. This survey confirms the contemporaneity, relevance and originality of the project, both scientifically and artistically. In order to evaluate the proposed approach to the soundscape, URB, an experimental system to capture, analyse and store the urban soundscape was developed and implemented. The system is based on current technology, but is affordable and robust. To ensure the sustainability of the project, development was based in open source technology, to ensure the possibility of the project expanding and shaping according to the interests and needs of specific places, populations, research centres and/or artistic interests. Three main goals have guided the development of this system: addressing the lack of temporal perspective of the sound representation of urban spaces; the design of a free and autonomous system that depends only on the users, which results in a public free access database; to facilitate and systematize the access to data on the sound characteristics of an urban soundscape for both ecological studies as well as for creative and artistic purposes. A server keeps a record of the collected data, which can either be read directly, through an application developed for this purpose, or through a visual interface with a time-line approach, but always allowing for the possibility of creating original access tools that best serve the user’s purposes. After implementing the system, through four listening points, and confirming its robustness, we advance to the system’s application in the development of artistic works. For this purpose a challenge was proposed to a number of artists with distinct aesthetic backgrounds and training. This challenge resulted in different works that were presented to the public in different formats and media, such as works for classical instrumental, electro-acoustic works, improvisational moments with real-time sonification of the soundscape, sonic installations and sculptures powered by the system presented. This practice leads to a fundamental reflection in this research. We describe the different approaches chosen by each creator and primarily assess the pertinence in the artistic result of using a continuous and discrete system of urban soundscape analysis, from a creator’s point of view as well as from a listener’s point of view. With this research we are able to present a functional approach to the lack of temporal perspective in the usual sound maps that focus on the geographic origin of the recordings. We conclude that soundscapes can provide useful data for artistic creation and we promote a direct connection between that kind of approach and the artists. Even before the works developed and the artist’s feedback, whilst not ignoring the different approaches and opinions, we can conclude that this approach seems to promote new and functional soundscape composition ideas, making URB a relevant resource to compose original soundscape based music. Also, through analysis of the pieces, we could point out patterns of the technical and artistic choices on how to deal with information from the soundscape data, both in deferred time and real-time.
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