Kirsten van den Bosch - Soundscape research in residential facilities for people with intellectual disabilities

For the last two years, the department of Special Needs Education and Youth Care has closely worked together with the Artificial Intelligence department, developing an intervention based assessment procedure. With this procedure the quality of soundscapes within residential facilities for people with intellectual disabilities can be measured in terms of core affect. Up until now, research regarding people with intellectual disabilities has hardly focused on contextual factors such as their living environment. Least attention is being paid to the sonic environment (soundscape), while it seems highly relevant considering the high prevalence of visual impairments among these people. We hypothesize that the first role of sound is to establish audible safety. When a sonic environment does not provide positive indicators of safety, the persons within it will not feel safe which may lead to problem behavior. We suggest four types of sonic environments (boring, chaotic, lively, and calm) that differ in terms of perceived safety and affordances. These types are defined based on research connecting the appraisal of the environment to mood (core affect). These ideas particularly, but not exclusively, apply to people with intellectual disabilities and therefore, we propose that everybody will benefit from an environment that is actively reassuring in any perceivable way.