De l'art sonore au paysage sonore : une démarche de recherche-création pour concevoir et évaluer des installations sonores dans l'espace public

Artistic expression through sound has always been a part of urban life, from street music to more recent sound installations. These forms of creation remind us that sound is not just a byproduct of the urban metabolism, but a resource with both negative and positive consequences. The soundscape approach seeks to address this complex reality through a human-centered approach to sound, from a design perspective. While this approach is well-established in research, the implementation of soundscape practices in urban design remains scarce. In particular, there seems to have been little attempt to provide methods derived from soundscape research to assist sound artists in the design of public space sound installations, and only a few studies have focused on the impact of such works on urban soundscapes. More research is needed to better understand the relationship between sound installation design and its effects on soundscape while providing artists with the resources to systematically assess the impact of their work before and after deployment. To help fill this gap, this dissertation investigates the auditory experience of public space users in the presence of sound art with mixed methods approaches combining surveys, acoustic measurements, and interviews, on-site or in laboratory settings. The first chapter of this dissertation focuses on a field study about the design and evaluation of four temporary sound installations deployed in a small urban public space in Montreal, Canada. All four sound installations improved the public space's soundscape, with communalities and specificities related to compositional and contextual factors. The second chapter presents a laboratory study to inform the design of a permanent sound installation that will be deployed in a larger public space in Paris, France, using a soundscape simulation tool designed for this purpose. Results validated the simulation tool and indicated three components relevant to evaluating sound installations: pleasantness, familiarity, and variety. Otherwise, the effects of the installation on familiarity and variety were stronger when composition sketches involved abstract sounds (sounds that were not clearly identifiable). The third chapter involves the laboratory evaluation of another permanent sound installation involving sounds evocative of the sea, currently deployed in a small urban public space in Montreal. Results indicate that some natural sounds can benefit the pre-existing soundscape, but a compromise has to be found between evocativeness and congruence: the most evocative sounds were also perceived as least pleasant because incongruent. This dissertation provides theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions. The studies allowed us to investigate the relationship between the nature of a composition and its impact on soundscape while questioning the addition of generic sound sources—such as birdsongs and water stream sounds—as a blanket solution. In addition, these studies led to the development of a replicable and flexible methodology for the design of public space sound installations, in the form of a four-stage research-creation collaboration framework. Methodological tools were proposed for each of these stages, including a sound-level analysis tool, a soundscape simulation tool, and a questionnaire instrument. Finally, the collaborations provided invaluable data to the sound artists in their creative process and constituted a way to promote their work to public stakeholders.