Almo Farina — Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications

202 published claims from this book.

• A decibel value is meaningless without an attached reference level
• Acoustic codes carry messages robustly enough to survive partial signal loss
• Acoustic diversity does not measure biological diversity in birds
• Acoustic monitoring detects behavior changes before abundance statistics do.
• Acoustic niche partitioning operates through both spatial movement and temporal scheduling
• Added human and mechanical sounds worsen park beauty ratings most on beautiful scenes
• Air tours over the Grand Canyon generate half a billion dollars for southern Nevada
• Animal choruses concentrate when air is calm and noise minimal
• Animal long-distance calls evolve to match habitat acoustics
• Animals besides humans can solve the cocktail party problem.
• Anthropogenic sound grows dominant and damages animal and human health
• Antlion larvae hunt prey using vibrations ants produce in the sand
• Anuran males split single calls into male- and female-directed portions
• Apparent complexity masks hidden relational code rules
• Attractive spaces suffer more from traffic noise than unattractive ones do.
• Automated Gabor-transform identification succeeded on 67 bird species but struggled with low-frequency-dominated songs
• Automated vocalization identification still fails under masking from geophony and anthrophony
• Autonomous recording advanced but automatic sound identification remains unsolved
• Bark beetles combine long-range chemical with short-range acoustic signaling
• Bats retune echolocation calls lower and longer during humid seasons to offset absorption
• Bill size modulates avian song frequency and trill rate
• Biophony structure arises from four evolutionary pressure mechanisms
• Bird song masks noise better than water by adding meaning, not just energy
• Birds convert sound degradation directly into graded defensive behaviors
• Birds either shift song frequency up or abandon noisy areas to escape traffic masking
• Birds react to close conspecific songs and ignore distant degraded ones
• Birds sang from posts 18 percent higher between 1986 and 2010
• Blue tit dawn song output, not complexity, predicts female laying and clutch size.
• Body size constrains the frequencies animals can vocalize
• Buried geophones can identify large African mammal species by footfall spectral content
• Children’s voices raise perceived crowding in sparse parks but relieve it in crowded ones
• Chorus males actively slot calls into silent gaps to reduce overlap
• Choruses paradoxically add self-masking noise while each male seeks signal
• City priorities determine quality of urban life beyond mere physical works
• Climate shapes signal propagation through humidity and temperature-dependent sound absorption
• Communication models must include eavesdroppers as evolutionary actors
• Cultural background outweighs sound energy in perceived noise
• Dawn signals propagate twenty times more effectively than midday ones
• Dawn song functions as preventive territorial defense against intruders in winter wrens.
• Decibel-based annoyance measurement fails to capture urban sonic quality
• Dense multi-layered jungle vegetation makes hearing more efficient than sight
• Digital audio capture is governed by sampling rate and bit depth
• Distress calls must trade off warning others against betraying the caller’s own location
• Drought-stressed plants emit cell-collapse sounds bark beetles use to locate trees.
• Each degradation aspect traces to specific physical mechanisms in habitat
• Each habitat has a distinctive ambient noise spectral profile
• Each marine noise source occupies a characteristic frequency band at a measurable distance
• Each species occupies a distinct acoustic niche to avoid signal competition
• Eighty million Europeans are exposed to unacceptable noise doses
• Elephants produce seismic ground signals that travel farther than their airborne calls
• Environmental sounds remain identifiable even when severely spectrally filtered
• Everyday speech collapses sound into noise because sonic context is devalued
• Excess attenuation increases with frequency in vegetated habitats
• Expecting aircraft noise reduces how annoying visitors find it
• Fat reserves accumulated the prior day drive dawn and dusk chorus singing.
• Fecal glucocorticoids link snowmobile noise to stress in elk and wolves
• Female preference for leading calls drives males to time against rivals
• Fire-prone-habitat animals sense fires through infrared, smell, and smoke cues.
• Foreground and background sounds differ by listener position and informational role
• Foreground sound forms temporary sonotopes while background noise reflects landscape structure
• Forest birds favor pure tones around 2,200 Hz where attenuation is lowest
• Forest edges are sonic discontinuities segregating wind noise from animal sounds.
• Forest elephants shifted to nocturnal activity undetected by conventional censuses.
• Forest-dwelling birds can decode degraded songs down to a minimal core code
• Four hypotheses organize the study of animal acoustic signaling
• Four main procedures organize the soundscape research field
• Frog frequency shifts cannot restore signal reach and may cause local extinction
• Geophony from wind and anthrophony from traffic both suppress animal acoustic communication
• Global warming has shifted frog calling seasons earlier by ten to thirteen days
• Habitat structure drives the evolution of animal vocal signals
• Habitat-specific ambient noise can drive the evolution of animal signals
• Having access to a quiet site reduces noise annoyance without lowering physical sound.
• Hearing is ubiquitous and emotion-rich where vision is sectorial and information-rich
• Hearing-specialist fish evolved in quiet waters and suffer heavy masking in noisy ones
• Helicopter noise lowers scenic ratings even where helicopters mean rescue
• High-pitched bird species tolerate roadside noise better than low-pitched ones
• High-quality sonic ambience literally increases human acoustic perceptual capacity
• Higher bit depth reduces quantization noise by resolving more amplitude values
• Higher socioeconomic status correlates with higher noise sensitivity
• Human audible frequency range narrows dramatically with age
• Hybrid acoustic phenotypes that overlap parents cannot persist in lacewings
• Identical species populations can differ behaviorally due to local predator pressure
• Individual differences in noise annoyance stem from noise sensitivity
• Insects cannot exhibit the Lombard effect because stridulation is unmodulable
• Interrupted frogs widen note spacing but group chorusing raises interference sharply
• Judged pleasantness does not track the physical quality of a sound
• Landscape appreciation modulates how much noise annoys listeners
• Landscape fragmentation shrinks bird song repertoire in small habitat patches
• Leading sounds win localization when paired sounds onset close together
• Leaf veins filter vibratory signals toward the leaf apex as low-pass channels
• Leaf width and canopy leaf area drive sound scattering in dense vegetation
• Lombard effect describes raising vocal intensity when background noise is loud
• Loudness, measured in sones, depends inherently on frequency content
• Low-frequency urban noise that meters underestimate may harm health most
• Manatees respond to high ambient noise by feeding more and milling less
• Many vocal animals range the distance of competitors using degraded signal cues
• Medium-specific sound transmission across solids, liquids, and gas yields distinct sonic ecologies.
• Men exposed to traffic above 70 dB(A) face higher myocardial infarction risk
• Microphone configuration determines whether sound origin location can be recovered
• Misconduct raises felt crowding even when actual visitor density is identical
• Most park visitors regard natural quiet as essential to their well-being.
• Namib golden moles locate food clumps by sensing grass vibrations carried through sand
• Natural sounds raise crowding tolerance while technological sounds lower it
• Natural sounds relax humans physiologically more than human sounds do.
• Nested sonotopes, soundtopes, and sonotones map acoustic space hierarchically
• Noise annoyance cannot be captured by physical sound parameters alone.
• Noise is any factor degrading signal detection or discrimination
• Noise is best defined contextually as any sound that obstructs intended communication
• Noise is not unwanted sound but information-poor spectrum useful for site assessment
• Noise management in US parks dates back to a 1949 Truman executive order.
• Noise masks at least one of the three sound-source types
• Noise means unused sound that degrades communication across media
• Noise peaks rather than averaged doses drive human annoyance and harm
• Noise pollution inflicts a broad set of measurable health harms
• Noise pollution ranks near air pollution as a policy-relevant harm
• Noise-level reduction alone often fails to improve sonic environments perceived as unpleasant.
• Noise-sensitive people differ physiologically and psychologically from non-sensitive ones
• Nonhuman animal culture is demonstrably tied to landscape structure
• Ocean acidification physically amplifies how far sound travels in seawater
• Only Seewave and SoundscapeMeter offer free soundscape-specific metric algorithms
• Organisms adapt to natural noise but suffer stress from anthropogenic noise
• Outdoor noise most acutely causes insomnia and long-term ischemic heart disease
• Park noise sources fall into four intrusion categories
• Park sound management must limit audibility, not just sound level.
• Perceived sound predominance is measured by percentage of time heard times rated volume
• Physical sound measurement cannot capture the subjective semantic meaning of a sonic environment
• Pile-driving injures dolphin ears only within 100 m but alters behavior 50 km away
• Pleasant sounds can mask traffic noise only at low amplitudes
• Primary rainforest and forest edge habitats show sharply different spectral noise profiles
• Psychoacoustics quantifies physical sound signals into perceived auditory attributes
• Pure-tone notes exploit reverberation to travel farther in dense forest
• Quieter atmosphere at dawn boosts acoustic transmission, favoring chorus timing.
• Receiver attention state determines signal success
• Receiver noise errors are of two connected types
• Reducing physical noise does not automatically improve perceived urban comfort
• Removing older members erodes socially transmitted knowledge that groups depend on
• Rerouting traffic noise is local remediation, not holistic solution
• Reverberation favors low-frequency slow trills over fast high-frequency ones for long-range communication
• Road traffic reduces grassland bird density up to 3.5 km away
• Roughly a fifth of urban populations may be noise-sensitive
• Seeing a noise source raises the annoyance it causes.
• Simultaneous dawn singing makes male dyadic interaction hard to detect
• Slope orientation strongly shapes how far bird song travels and which direction singers face
• Small sonic doses benefit physiology while large doses harm and total silence degrades it
• Snakes evolved a lung-based auditory system found in no other land vertebrate
• Social and demographic factors shape how people evaluate urban sound levels
• Song repertoire changes can warn of fragmentation before genetic markers do
• Song Scope frog identification failed on roughly half of recordings
• Sonic maps by measured sound pressure fail to capture what a soundscape actually is
• Sonic processes are subjective and require a focal species to be identified.
• Sonification converts data relations into perceived acoustic relations
• Sound degradation has three measurable concurrent aspects en route through habitat
• Sound functions as an ecological resource organisms track for survival
• Sound perception is a constructive act mediated by memory, association, and social role
• Sound-source evaluation reflects personal culture more than physical acoustic properties
• Sounds and sonotopes qualify as renewable resources under Farina’s resource theory.
• Sounds originate from landscape structure and need three perspectives to describe
• Soundscape meaning operates at three semantic levels from sources to emergent descriptors
• Soundscape quality depends on wanted-versus-unwanted context, not decibel level
• Soundwalks restore human connection to nature eroded by urbanization
• Species relationships resist the automated monitoring that captures physical ecosystem processes
• Species shift calls to ultrasonic frequencies to escape constant noise masking
• Species time-share the acoustic space to minimize signal interference
• Spectral analysis cannot achieve fine time and frequency resolution simultaneously
• Starling singing alternates with feeding but blurs as breeding demands rise
• Subconscious sound processing treats noise as danger signals during sleep
• Sympatric species diverge their calls to prevent hybridization
• Technological noise alters animal behavior and threatens species like marine mammals.
• Termite species can be identified acoustically by their distinct vibrational signals
• The acoustic adaptation hypothesis finds only modest, inconsistent empirical support
• The human voice best indicates poor sonic quality at a natural site.
• The soundscape is a cognitive construct, not an objective physical reality
• The soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment
• The word soundscape is semantically paradoxical because sound cannot be seen.
• Traffic noise exceeds legal limits in most sampled Brazilian urban park points.
• Traffic noise permanently raises song tonality in red-winged blackbirds
• Traffic noise shifts frog calls to frequencies females do not prefer
• Trained listeners distinguish explosions from earthquakes by audified seismic data
• Tranquility can be predicted from noise level and natural-feature percentage.
• Trees may signal drought through cavitation sound audible to pest insects
• Tropical nighttime noise of 60-65 dB disrupts katydid mating entrainment
• Turbine noise forces ground squirrels to alter antipredator vigilance.
• Turbulence and reverberation degrade different signal dimensions independently
• Unlike sight, hearing cannot be voluntarily shut off.
• Urban noise adaptation can disrupt mating rhythms and increase predation risk
• Urban parks act as ecological traps when noise outweighs perceived therapeutic benefit
• Urban soundscape quality reduces to four perceptual descriptors
• Vegetation attenuation thresholds differ measurably across cover types and soil states
• Vegetation substrate type shapes the spectral character of wind noise
• Visitor sensitivity to aircraft noise varies enormously with visit context and expectations
• Visual urbanization context changes how natural but not anthropogenic sounds are judged.
• Vocal animal acoustic repertoires constitute social information split into public and private partitions
• Vocal dialects are adaptation’s starting point for acoustic divergence
• Vocal transmission distance depends more on singing height than frequency
• Water barriers reduce bird song sharing far more than equivalent land distance
• Waterfall frogs shifted calls above the frequency their body size predicts
• Whether a natural sound counts as noise depends on the perceiving species
• Whether a sound counts as noise depends on subjective interpretation, not acoustics
• Whistles beat trills in closed habitats while trills beat whistles in open ones
• WHO lists at least seven health harms from prolonged noise exposure
• Wind and rustling leaves are a major obstacle to recording biophonies
• Wind refraction and humidity structure alter sound propagation in air