Soundscape of Catalonia during the first COVID-19 lockdown: Preliminary results from the <em>Sons al Balcó</em> project

Abstract

Environmental noise affects the health and wellbeing of millions of people in Europe. Some of the health effects of noise exposure include new cases of ischemic heart disease, chronic annoyance, sleep disturbance and premature death. Our home soundscape, which involves negative (i.e. noise) but also positive sounds (i.e. restorative sounds), changed drastically during the first COVID-19 lockdown. In this context, the Sons al Balcó project is aimed at studying the effect that the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused on the perception of both positive and negative sounds in Catalonia. The hypothesis is that the decrease in outdoor noise, accompanied by a rise of a more positive soundscape would have a positive impact on the degree of annoyance in the population, increasing wellbeing. We performed a socio-acoustic survey targeting all the citizens of Catalonia. The survey included socio-demographic questions as well as questions about 1) the quality of the residential soundscape and 2) the individual positive and negative sound perception before and during the lockdown for a range of sound sources. Furthermore, the survey allowed the participants to upload videos of their residential soundscapes and to characterize several types of sounds present during the recordings. More than 350 participants answered the questionnaire. As a result, we depicted the first soundscape of Catalonia during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Future work will allow us to perform a comparison between both objective (sound and video) and subjective (questionnaires) measures, giving us the opportunity to compare aspects never previously studied.

Sons al Balcó: A Comparative Analysis of WASN-Based LAeq Measured Values with Perceptual Questionnaires in Barcelona during the COVID-19 Lockdown

“…The main questions asked to citizens were related to the comparison of their soundscape before the lockdown and during the lockdown, as can be found in [ 49 , 50 ]. Some of the more relevant are the following: How do you describe the soundscape of your home, before the lockdown and during the lockdown?…”

“…The main questions asked to citizens were related to the comparison of their soundscape before the lockdown and during the lockdown, as can be found in [49,50]. Some of the more relevant are the following: The researchers had the support of the X (formerly Twitter) accounts of both institutions involved in the Sons al Balcó project (ISGlobal and La Salle Campus Barcelona), and the dissemination of its own project X (formerly Twitter) account (@SonsalBalco).…”