From Soundscape to Musicscape: Applying Soundscape Attributes to Cretan Folk Dances

The concept of musicscape has been used to describe relationships between music, place, culture, and human experience. Building on the perceptual principles of soundscape research and the ISO 12913 series, this study explores the applicability of ISO-derived perceptual attributes within a musicscape context, using Cretan folk dances as a case study. A corpus of representative Cretan folk dance recordings was evaluated through listening tests, in which participants assessed each excerpt using the eight perceptual attributes defined in ISO 12913-2 on continuous 0–100 scales. Statistical analyses, multivariate visualization, and machine-learning techniques were employed to examine perceptual patterns among the selected dance forms. The results revealed systematic variations in listener assessments across the repertoire, with combinations of soundscape-derived attributes providing perceptual representations that distinguished the examined Cretan folk dance forms. Higher-dimensional projections further illustrated relationships among recordings based on shared perceptual characteristics. These findings indicate that soundscape-derived perceptual attributes may provide a useful perspective for examining musicscape experiences and contribute to the exploration of perceptually informed approaches for the study of relationships between sound, culture, and human experience.