An acoustic environment can preserve approximately the same measured level while changing its felt character. Five soundwalks through Milano-Bicocca's university district combine binaural recordings, psychoacoustic parameters, situated emotional evaluation and post-walk focus groups. Grecchi and colleagues find that sites with comparable A-weighted sound-pressure levels may receive different evaluations: water sounds may be experienced as less noisy, while environments dominated by traffic can be described as chaotic or monotonous according to the meaning assigned to the source. The method is not simply mixed-method enrichment. It synchronises technical description and collective interpretation around a journey through identifiable sites, allowing their failure to coincide to become an empirical result. The work joins acoustics, sociology, environmental perception and urban morphology. Soundwalks make movement part of the instrument without converting participant judgement into a calibration error. Their modest number and the specificity of one university district restrain generalisation. The strongest contribution is the visibility of semantic mediation between an environmental measurement and what listeners report having encountered.
