I became interested in the methods that are used by researchers when dealing with the soundscape. Urban planning, visual arts and architecture (notably) have provided us with an extensive set of tools to describe and analyse our landscape. The soundscape, however, remains only (very) partially “looked at”; furthermore, the way one describes and “objectifies” the sound environment has a significant impact on the consequent evaluation or analysis of that soundscape.

I therefore decided to use three approaches that were familar to me, and combine them in a case study to observe how their concepts and methodologies could interact. Another aspect of this work that was very important to me was to provide an English introduction to the extensive work done at CRESSON, in a way to encourage collaboration between researchers in this field.

Therefore, this thesis provides practical and theoretical explorations of several important themes in soundscape studies (or, if you prefer, sound ecology), including the methodologies used to frame, access and document the soundscape, the concepts that are intimately linked to these methods, and the various challenges one faces when trying to make people “talk about what they hear”.