Dissertation

Week 5 ended with an outline of the dissertation and a few rough paragraphs. This week the outline had to become a document. I did not touch the native application code all week. The entire time went into writing the four sections that form the first half of the paper.

By Sunday night I had first drafts of Introduction, Background, Literature Review across three separate theoretical fields, and Research Objective. Ten references read and synthesised into the argument. Every section served a different purpose, and the decisions behind each one were different, so this entry walks through them one by one.

THE INTRODUCTION

The Introduction had to do one thing before it could do anything else. It had to convince a reader who has never thought about travel media that there is a real problem here. If the reader is not persuaded by the end of this section that the sound of a place matters and is being ignored, the rest of the paper does not land.

I built the section around two observations placed next to each other. First, travel media is overwhelmingly visual. Photos, videos, virtual tours, aerial footage. Second, Singapore has culturally distinct districts packed into walking distance of each other, and the sound between them changes faster than the streets do. Putting these two observations side by side makes the gap visible without having to argue for it. The reader sees it on their own.

The section closes with a direct statement of what this project is and who I built it for. Young travellers preparing to visit Singapore with a deeper curiosity than a checklist, and people who want to understand the city but cannot physically go. Naming those two audiences early also controls what the rest of the paper can and cannot claim. I am not designing for tourism professionals, I am not designing for VR enthusiasts, I am designing for these two groups specifically.

THE BACKGROUND

The Background section had to take the gap introduced in the first section and root it in a specific place. Generalised arguments about sound in travel media are easy to brush off. Specific streets are not.

So I walked the reader through a single afternoon in Bugis. The market at Bugis Street hits the moment you step in, crowd and vendors and music all at once. Two streets over in Kampong Glam the sound drops off noticeably. Sultan Mosque is right around the corner and during prayer times the call to prayer fills the surrounding area. Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple has its persistent bells and chanting carrying out into the street. Raffles Place a few stops away is a separate environment entirely, dominated by traffic hum and office crowds. All of this within a small area. None of it visible in any tourism website.

The second half of the Background reaches into the virtual tourism literature to make a second claim. Pre-trip experience has been shown to shape how people relate to a destination before they physically arrive, and sensory information plays a meaningful role in that shaping. This is the bridge into the Literature Review. The Background ends with the reader believing that sound carries information about a place and that pre-trip experience has research value. The Literature Review then takes those two beliefs and shows exactly who has studied what.

THREE THEORETICAL FRAMES

The Literature Review is where this week’s writing took the longest. It is also the section that changed my understanding of the project most. I structured it into three subsections, each covering a body of research, each ending at a specific gap that my work tries to fill. Three authors per subsection. Nine references in the review itself. Frayling on methodology sits separately, covered later in this entry.

Soundscape Studies

Three authors. Schafer gave me the vocabulary. Truax shifted my attention from the recording to the listener. LaBelle added the spatial framework I needed to explain why neighbouring Singapore districts sound completely different.

Schafer’s work is the anchor for this whole field. He coins “soundmark” from “landmark” and “sonic identity” for the distinctive combination of sounds that define a place. His hi-fi versus lo-fi distinction matters practically for my project, because most of Singapore’s busy districts are lo-fi, which is the reason recording something meaningful there is harder than it looks.

Truax moves the frame from the recording to the listener. His argument is that sound always mediates a relationship between a listener and their environment. He breaks listening into three modes · in-search, in-readiness, and background. Background listening is what most people do most of the time. My project tries to break that mode.

LaBelle does something the other two do not. He organises sound by spatial category rather than by source. Streets, underground spaces, the open sky. His point is that the acoustic character of a space shapes how people behave inside it. This is exactly what I needed to explain why Bugis Street market feels so different from Kampong Glam two streets away.

I ended this subsection by naming the gap explicitly. The three authors give me vocabulary, frame, and spatial structure. None of them addresses how any of this becomes an interactive experience.

Virtual Tourism

Three more authors. This field matters to my project because the whole premise of the work is that someone can experience a place without physically being there. The research exists. Most of it is visual. My task was to find the parts that take sound seriously and build my argument around those.

Beck, Rainoldi, and Egger reviewed VR tourism research from 1994 to 2018. Most of their review is about pre-trip marketing. The part that caught my attention is a smaller claim they make · that sound is a crucial element of the virtual experience, and that sound effects help people recall scenes they experienced virtually. The field does not act on this claim. My project does.

Verma, Warrier, Bolia, and Mehta surveyed 1,652 articles on virtual tourism. Their framing of “quasi-trial experiences” was useful for me. The idea is that sensory engagement lets people form emotional connections to a place without visiting it. For my two target audiences, that is exactly the mechanism I am trying to trigger.

Alyahya and McLean did the experiment I wished the rest of the field had done. Three groups · visual only, visual plus tactile, visual plus tactile plus audio. The largest jump between groups was the last one. Audio was what pushed the experience from decent to effective. Having an actual controlled experiment citing this saved the section from being purely theoretical.

I ended this subsection by naming the gap here too. Sound is identified as important in virtual tourism, but nobody has built an experience where sound is the primary medium rather than an enhancement on top of visuals.

Audio Visualization

The third field. How do you take sound and make it visible. Three authors, each working at a different scale, each leaving a different piece of the puzzle.

Zhang, Pan, and Zhou give the practical framework. Audio features like waveform, frequency, pitch, and loudness can each be mapped onto visual properties. They also touch on synaesthesia, the cross-sensory linking where a high pitch feels bright and a low drone feels heavier. This framework is how I think about translating Singapore’s different districts into different visual moods.

Bain’s MA thesis is written from the practitioner side. He built real-time visuals for live music and ran into most of the problems I eventually ran into. The most important point for me is that real-time response is not optional. If the visuals lag behind the audio, the whole illusion breaks. Bain gives me the academic basis for why the embodiment pillar of my project has to respond to the hand with no perceptible delay.

Correia is the closest reference point to what I am trying to build. His Interactive Audiovisual Objects combine sound, visualisation, and user interface into one integrated unit, drawing on Chion’s concept of synchresis, the immediate perceptual fusion that forms when something is seen and heard at the same time. Correia adds interactivity to that concept. The user does not just perceive the fusion, they also shape it.

I ended this subsection with the gap that runs through the whole review. None of these authors works with environmental sound. None of them represents a real place. Zhang and Bain work with music. Correia works with abstract audiovisual objects. My project takes their framework, their real-time principle, and their synchresis-with-interactivity, and applies them to something none of them addressed. A specific city.

FRAYLING AND THE METHOD

Christopher Frayling’s 1993 paper sits outside the three theoretical frames. It belongs to the Methods section, not the Literature Review, but I read it this week because the structure of the whole paper depends on it.

Frayling’s “research through design” gives me permission to treat the built artefact itself as the argument. The claim I am making, that a soundscape can become an interactive visual experience that communicates a sense of place, is not a claim I can prove by writing about it. I have to build the thing, watch what happens when someone uses it, and reflect on what I see. Frayling says this kind of work is legitimate research, and that the knowledge lives inside the artefact as much as alongside it in writing.

Including Frayling this week, even though his argument belongs to a later chapter, was a deliberate choice. It let me write the rest of the paper with the methodological frame already settled. Every later section can now assume that building counts as research, without having to defend that assumption every time.

THE RESEARCH OBJECTIVE

The final section I drafted this week was the Research Objective. It had to do one specific thing. Take the three literature gaps identified in the previous section and converge them into one question the project could answer.

The question, written down, reads like this · can a soundscape tell someone something real about a place once it becomes visible and interactive, or does it become a screensaver with audio attached. Phrasing the question this way matters. The two halves of the sentence correspond to the two possible outcomes of the project. If the first half is true, the project has value. If the second half is true, the project is aesthetically pleasing but does not communicate what I claim it communicates.

The rest of the Research Objective section breaks the question into parts the project can actually work on. Field recordings from specific districts, because Schafer’s sonic identity only exists in real audio. A visual system that achieves Correia’s synchresis, because if the particles feel detached from the sound the whole premise fails. A gesture layer that breaks Truax’s background listening, because the visitor has to physically reach into the visualisation to stay engaged. And an evaluation approach that accepts the limits of working alone without formal user testing yet.

Writing this section out loud, in the paper, changed how I looked at the project for the rest of the semester. Every decision after Week 6 gets measured against the question at the top of this section.