The city at ear level - Qualifying the role of soft data in soundscape development and research

The ISO/TS 12913-series on Soundscape, has the potential to exert significant influence on urban life, impacting infrastructural development, sustainability practices, and overall quality of life. This paper underscores the imperative of exploring the city's soundscape at ear-level, emphasizing a perspective of sonic citizenship wherein the individual's lived experience takes precedence. Such a perspective focuses on an understanding of soundscapes as dynamic attuning relations, including how multisensory atmospheres shaped by non-acoustic factors influence our assessment of soundscapes. Citizens engage in negotiating, performing, and sharing responsibility for these soundscapes. We propose how urban interventions and experiments can help glean finer insights into people's lived experiences and capture such nuanced, often subconscious aspects when developing urban soundscapes. These initiatives aim to motivate and empower a diverse spectrum of citizens, to engage in co-creating the urban development process. We argue that fostering such participatory activities enhances awareness and underscores the urgency of high-quality soundscapes in collaboration with relevant authorities and urban stakeholders. Additionally, these interventions yield soft data elucidating cultural and social practices, enriching our understanding of the experiential dimensions of soundscapes and informing future urban development.