Soundscapes in the Urban Environment: Audiovisual Perception and Objective Control

Abstract

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) introduced the term “soundscape,” which defined the latter as “an acoustic environment perceived or understood by a person/people in context.” It proposed methods for quantitatively assessing human emotional reactions to a sound environment. In one of the methods, such reactions were represented as coordinates on the Pleasantness–Eventfulness plane. The pleasantness coordinate assessed how pleasant the environment was for the subject at the time of the examination, i.e., the properties of the subject, and the eventfulness coordinate assessed how eventful the environment was, i.e., the properties of the environment. The aim of this study was to verify the standard ISO method. Therefore, an audiovisual examination of the environment was carried out in different locations; pleasantness and eventfulness coordinates were calculated; acoustic and psychoacoustic characteristics of the environment were recorded and calculated, and the latter were then compared with the characteristics of soundscapes (or pleasantness and eventfulness coordinates). It was shown that a sound environment with physical characteristics higher than established sanitary standards may well be pleasant for a person. The results confirmed the validity, informativeness, and integrity of the method for assessing soundscapes, as well as its accessibility for nonprofessional experts. The characteristics of soundscapes can be used for engineering design of the sound environment of urban areas.