About twenty kilometres to the northwest, in Nuuksio, Espoo, a truly silent soundscape awaits the listener. She studied folk traditions and folk music at the University of Tampere and, towards the end of her studies, she focussed on studying soundscapes her master s thesis was on the soundscapes of libraries. Peltonen enjoyed studying the nocturnal soundscape of Helsinki. Although she originally comes from Raahe, a small town in northern Finland, she has lived in the Helsinki area for many years. Before this research project I had last studied the soundscape of a cowshed, so the jump was quite something, she says, with a laugh.
Soundscape research is quite a young discipline.
Urban soundscapes have been studied for instance in Manchester, Britain and Tampere, Finland. Soundscape research differs from traditional noise abatement and acoustic research in that it takes into account everything that can be heard around us. Pesonen finds studying the soundscapes of cities interesting, because there is a great variety of sounds in a city and there are a lot of listeners who all have their own way of relating to sounds. No wonder there are many problems. All sounds have their own stories and contents and that decides which sounds different people find pleasant or annoying.