Understanding how the urban form contributes to noise is important for the successful acoustic design of cities. The amplification of sound is mainly due to the multiple reflections that occur between the high and parallel walls of urban canyons. This study explores the use of ray tracing at the urban scale through the measurement and simulation of three configurations. These are referred to as “1D”, “2D” and “3D”. Impulse response measurements performed at points located on the top of the façades show an increase of 6 dB for the “2D” case and 11 dB for the “3D” case. These results are consistent with ray tracing simulations. This kind of simulation is useful to determine the influence of the street aspect ratio on the sound level. Since specular reflections are related to geometry, a spatialized representation is proposed and discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.