Introduced the concept that every place has its own sonic identity, and coined the term soundmark for sounds that define a location the way a landmark does. The distinction between hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes became a practical problem I ran into during recording, where Singapore's busy districts bleed everything into background noise.

Shifted my attention from the recording side to the listener's side. His concept of acoustic communication argues that sound mediates the relationship between a listener and their environment, and his three listening modes, especially background listening, gave me something specific to push against with the gesture-based interaction.

Offered a spatial framework for reading urban sound by breaking cities into acoustic categories like streets, underground spaces, and open sky. His argument that the acoustic character of a space shapes how people behave in it explained why Bugis Street and Kampong Glam feel completely different despite being two streets apart.

A review of VR in tourism from 1994 to 2018 that treats sound as a crucial element of virtual experiences and notes its role in recalling scenes afterward. The paper mostly focuses on visual systems, but its acknowledgment that sound supports memory gave me justification for centering the project on audio rather than treating it as an add-on.

Reviewed 1,652 articles on virtual tourism and found that sensory engagement can prompt mental imagery and quasi-trial experiences, meaning people start forming emotional connections to a place before visiting. This supported my choice to build a sound-based pre-travel experience rather than a purely visual one.

Ran an experiment with three levels of sensory information in VR tourism. The significant jump happened when auditory information was added on top of visual and tactile, producing stronger mental imagery and a clearer sense of presence. This was the first evidence I saw that sound is what separates a decent virtual tourism experience from a genuinely effective one.

Defined audio visualization as a way of representing the internal structure of sound visually, and broke down which audio features like waveform, pitch, and loudness can be mapped to visual qualities. Their discussion of synesthesia, where a high-pitched sound might feel bright, shaped how I mapped Singapore's urban sounds to particle behavior.

Treated audio visualization as a visual extension of music rather than decoration, with real-time response as a non-negotiable requirement. His argument that even a small lag between what is heard and what is seen breaks the connection is what convinced me to rebuild the web prototype as a native desktop application.

Introduced the concept of Interactive AudioVisual Objects that combine sound, visualization, and interface into one integrated unit, building on Chion's idea of synchresis. His finding that users valued the feeling of direct manipulation backed up the decision to use hand gestures rather than mouse clicks for interacting with the particles.

Established the framework of research through design, where knowledge lives inside the artifact rather than alongside it. This framework justified treating the prototype as the primary site of inquiry, and it was also the reason I pushed through the TouchDesigner to vibe coding pivot when the theory-only route stalled.