Firenze Sound Map was born in 2009 as an independent project, envisioned and developed by Antonella Radicchi, in the frame of her doctoral studies.
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Notes on the tender* sound map of Firenze
Firenze Sound Map is an interactive and open source tool which has become a collective sound map through the involvement and the participation of the Florentine population, city users and tourists.
Firenze Sound Map is a tender* sound map and it has to be placed within the emotional geography that includes the beings that inhabit it and the forms of their passage through spaces, including the spaces of life (Bruno, 2002). According to Bruno, emotional cartography allows us to measure and represent that component of intimacy, that is strictly connected to the experience of daily life. Therefore, the “tender” sound map of Firenze aims to place the human beings at the very center of the theoretical discourse, reclaiming intimacy as a space for interpretation and placing (Sensuous) Urbanism and Soundscape Studies in the atlas of emotions.
Firenze Sound Map transmits information about Firenze’s spatial, acoustic and temporal aspects for the purpose of representing the soundscape through use of a digital platform and an interactive interface. Instead of using the traditional methods of mapmaking based upon a stationary and two-dimensional presentation of a given area, a sound map is an analytical tool capable of depicting a soundscape through sound to describe the specific characteristics of a place along with the social and emotional aspects linked to daily life. In fact, sound is an indication of the quality of life and reveals social habits, cultural characteristics, professional undertakings and even places where people meet: in short, all aspects linked to the identity of a given place that cannot be associated with shapes, kinds or quantities.
Firenze Sound Map is intended to expand the practice of deep listening, contributing to a better overall experience, in urban settings: soundscape is indeed indicative of social customs, cultural specificity, quality of life, emotions and moods of the human beings that inhabit the city, in short, all those aspects related to the identity of a place that cannot be attributed to physical forms, typologies, or numbers, and yet are no less important.
Firenze Sound Map constitutes a qualitative tool to be integrated to the quantitative methods generally adopted by the traditional acoustic planning where the sound environment is mainly explored from a quantitative standpoint, by the means of noise maps.
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If you are curious to learn more about it, below you will find links to articles written by Antonella and to a video about Firenze Sound Map, all strictly free and open J
Book [ITA]: Sull’immagine sonora della città
Essay: “Emotional geography and Soundscape Studies”
Essay, written with Valerio: “Sound maps, quiet areas and noise control strategies”
Video: Firenze Sound Map. An Emotional Journey through Florentine Soundscapes
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CREDITS
Idea and scientific editor: Antonella Radicchi (2009 - on)
Web content manager: Antonella Radicchi (2009 - on)
Web developer: Ermanno La Commare (2009-20016), Riccardo Conetta (2017-on).
From 2011 to 2015, Firenze Sound Map got the no profit institutional support of Tempo Reale, Center for Music Production and Research.
From 2013, Firenze Sound Map’s data are shared with the Opendata System of the Municipality of Firenze by the means of a specific dataset called “Immaterial cultural heritage”, which has been created according to the definition of Immaterial Cultural Heritage released by UNESCO in 2003.
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ANTONELLA RADICCHI SHORT BIO
Dr. Radicchi’s main area of expertise encompasses innovative urban design and planning, soundscape research, citizen science and mobile technology. In this regard, her ultimate goal is to design environmentally just and human scale cities.
Dr. Radicchi is a registered architect and she holds a Ph.D. in Urban Design and Territorial Planning, with doctoral studies conducted at MIT (Cambridge, USA) and at the University of Firenze (IT).
Dr. Radicchi is currently Ipodi-Marie Curie Fellow at TU Berlin Institute of City & Regional Planning, where she has envisioned and run two innovative soundscape projects, such as the “Hush City” app, a citizen science tool for empowering people to identify, map and evaluate quiet areas worldwide.
Her research and professional work on soundscape has been widely awarded.
Most notably: the HEAD-Genuit research grant to set up the Hush City Mobile Lab at TU Berlin, the Ipodi-Marie Curie Fellowship, the nomination as Falling Walls Young Innovator of the Year 2016 (finalist), the Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship, and the National Institute of Urbanism Award for the best Italian dissertation in urbanism, then published as a monograph. Her project, Toscana Sound Map, was commissioned for and exhibited at EXPO 2015 in Milan.
While combining professional and research practice, Dr. Radicchi has lectured extensively at the university level for ten years and participated in international conferences and symposiums. Dr. Radicchi also collaborates with the European Commission Executive Research Agency as an external expert evaluator and rapporteur in the framework of HORIZON 2020.
Full CV available here: http://www.antonellaradicchi.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Radicchi_2018_CV.pdf