Classification of soundscapes of urban public open spaces

Abstract

It is increasingly acknowledged by landscape architects and urban planners that the soundscape contributes significantly to the perception of urban public open spaces. Describing and classifying this impact, however, remains a challenge. This article presents a hierarchical method for classification that distinguishes between backgrounded and foregrounded, disruptive and supportive, and finally calming and stimulating soundscapes. This four-class classification is applied to a growing collection of immersive audiovisual recordings of sound environments from around the world that could be explored using virtual reality playback. To validate the proposed methodology, an experiment involving 40 participants and 50 soundscape stimuli collected in urban public open spaces worldwide was conducted. The experiment showed that (1) the virtual reality headset reproduction based on affordable spatial audio with 360degree video recordings was perceived as ecologically valid in terms of realism and immersion; (2) the proposed classification method results in well-separated classes; (3) membership to these classes could be explained by physical parameters, both regarding sound and vision. Moreover, models based on a limited number of acoustical indicators were constructed that could correctly classify a soundscape in each of the four proposed categories, with an accuracy exceeding 88% on an independent dataset.

Using Virtual Soundwalk Approach for Assessing Sound Art Soundscape Interventions in Public Spaces

“…The on-site collection of the data on the acoustic environment consisted of environmental noise measurements, three-dimensional audio recordings and panoramic pictures, intended for laboratory use, as recommended by the ISO/TS 12913-3: 2019 and applied in recent soundscape studies [39,[71][72][73]. The soundscape assessments were made in laboratory conditions.…”

“…The pictures taken at measurement points and presented to participants are shown in Figure 3. Following the method used by Sun et al [72] and having in mind the significance of the foliage visible to participants noted by Watts et al [75], the image area covered by pixels showing foliage was calculated, as shown in Figure 4. All pictures are featuring clearly noticeable foliage.…”

The Soundscape Indices (SSID) Protocol: A Method for Urban Soundscape Surveys—Questionnaires with Acoustical and Contextual Information

“…Part 3 of the ISO 12913 series builds on Part 2 and provides guidelines for analyzing data gathered using only those methods [6]. However, the range of possible methodological approaches to soundscape data collection is much broader and it includes, for instance, laboratory experiments [2,7,8], pseudo-randomized experience sampling [9], and even non-participatory studies [10]. The protocol described in this paper was designed having in mind the need for a relatively large soundscape dataset that could be used for design and modeling purposes, thus trying to expand the scope of soundwalks that typically deal with much smaller samples of participants [11].…”

The Soundscape Hackathon as a Methodology to Accelerate Co-Creation of the Urban Public Space

“…Not all environmental sounds are noisy or disturbing and should be avoided. Some sounds should be preserved or even accentuated, because a matching soundscape may support the identity and atmosphere (e.g., lively, calming) of the space [7][8][9][10].…”