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of view or perspective and is therefore tied to social loca- tion. And lastly, since social reality is negotiated, it is always dynamic: social reality is a process. Clearly, this theoretical understanding of qualitative approaches will help to also understand what is meant by local expertise.
Research guided through local expertise
Local experts are those people who live in the area under in- vestigation and provide their expertise to researchers and proj- ect designers through such processes as soundwalks and open interviews (Voigt and Shulte-Fortkamp, 2012). Soundwalks are participatory group sound and listening walks through the environment. During these exercises, soundscape analysts ob- serve and measure the perceptual responses of the participants to the acoustical, visual, aesthetic, geographic, social, and cul- tural modalities. Participation of local experts in soundwalks enables us, as researchers and practitioners, to collect and analyze acoustical as well as perceptive data. This enhances the investigator’s sensitivity for the particularities of the examined areas. As the multidimensional human perception cannot be easily reduced to singular values of physical unit, such as A- weighted decibels (Figure 4) there is an imperative to obtain higher order layers of local expert descriptions, which provide a path to the meaning of sounds - and what quality may make them perceived as noise, or conversely as a desired, even trea- sured resource. This emphasizes the importance of recognizing the composition of multiple sound sources. Based on earlier findings, the response to sound depends on the listener’s men- tal, social, and geographical relation with the sound source. Hiramatsu (2004) has proposed a method for comparing sonic environments on the basis of physical properties of and experiences and/or memories of sonic environments.
Figure 4 : Example of physical measurements of traffic sound – see instrument box and display on pole. Seocho-dong, Seoul (2009)
What are the inhabitants’ expectations?
The attitude and the listener’s expectations and experiences are significant parameters which may be used to comprehend the different perceptions and evaluations due to specific stimuli. People unconsciously gather the most important key features of the sonic environment, by experiencing this area in daily life. Mining these data on soundwalks and in interviews, and then combining them with the analysis of acoustical measure- ments via triangulation, sheds light on the phenomenon from different aspects.
The soundwalk as an access tool
to the sonic resource
The soundwalk, as one of the most important tools in the soundscape method, has variable procedures regarding the context, scientific issues, and approach (Fiebig et al. 2010). Over the past decades its focus has shifted from obtaining the researcher´s view to determining the people´s understanding of places. Mainly, the evaluation on rating scales and anno-
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