“Urban Sounds”: an acoustical tour of Parma

The urban landscape is constantly changing: habits and customs of the people, transportation, residential areas and industrial ones change themselves. From “visual” point of view, the number of media that allow us to keep track of the changes (photo and video) increases but it’s not the same for the “acoustic” point of view. Almost all sounds and noises of an earlier eras have been lost. The idea behind this research, a collaboration between the Department of Industrial Engineering (University of Parma) and the municipal institution "Casa della Musica", is the sampling of the noise of the city, with state- of-art 3D audio recordings. The aim is dual: delivering to posterity an archive of recorded sound fields to document Parma in 2012 with advanced 3D surround recording techniques and creation of a “musical” Ambisonics composition for leading the audience through a virtual tour of the town.