A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
soundscape
The acoustic character of a place — its natural sounds, its silences, and the noise layered over them. Every extra 3 decibels of anthropogenic noise halves the range over which natural sounds can be heard.
Etymology
Sound from Old French soun, from Latin sonus (a sound, noise), from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to resound.” -scape from Old English -scæpe (as in landscape), denoting an expanse taken in as a whole — here, the whole of what a place sounds like.