Musikiosk

In 2015, researchers from McGill University and ÉTS worked together with the Plateau Mont-Royal borough to install Musikiosk in the gazebo of Parc du Portugal, a small public park in Montreal. Musikiosk was a speaker system through which park users, with the help of an audio jack, could connect their personal devices to a small array of freely provided speakers installed in the gazebo and thus to share their own music with others.

Documenting their experiences through interviews and surveys, Musikiosk users expressed excitement in engaging with an urban park in novel ways by taking over their space acoustically and offering them an unconventional opportunity to interact with other park users. Through community outreach efforts and extensive planning, the Musikiosk team minimized the displacement of existing park users and managed the expectations and annoyance of neighbors.

This study kickstarted as a long series of projects in collaboration with Montreal city officials and other stakeholders.

For details, please contact: Daniel Steele, Catherine Guastavino

For media coverage on the project, check these links:

For the academic output, consult these publications and links:

Steele, D., Fraisse, V., Bild, E., & Guastavino, C. (2021). Bringing music to the park: The effect of Musikiosk on the quality of public experience. Applied Acoustics, 177, 107910.

Steele, D., Bild, E., Tarlao, C., & Guastavino, C. (2019). Soundtracking the public space: outcomes of the Musikiosk soundscape intervention. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(10), 1865.

Bild, E., Steele, D., Pfeffer, K., Bertolini, L., & Guastavino, C. (2018). Activity as a mediator between users and their auditory environment in an urban pocket park: a case study of Parc du Portugal (Montreal, Canada). In Handbook of Research on Perception-Driven Approaches to Urban Assessment and Design (pp. 100-125). IGI Global.

Bild, E., Tarlao, C., Guastavino, C., & Coler, M. (2016, August). Sharing music in public spaces: social insights from the Musikiosk project (Montreal, CA). In Inter-Noise and Noise-Con Congress and Conference Proceedings (Vol. 253, No. 5, pp. 3657-3666). Institute of Noise Control Engineering.

Steele, D., Bild, E., & Guastavino, C. (2016, August). Evaluation of an urban soundscape intervention with music: quantitative results from questionnaires. In Inter-Noise and Noise-Con Congress and Conference Proceedings (Vol. 253, No. 4, pp. 4627-4637). Institute of Noise Control Engineering.

Tarlao, C., Fernandez, P., & Guastavino, C. (2016, August). Comparing soundscape evaluations in French and English across three studies in Montreal. In INTER-NOISE and NOISE-CON Congress and Conference Proceedings (Vol. 253, No. 4, pp. 4701-4707). Institute of Noise Control Engineering.