The Soundscape Quality in Some Urban Parks in Milan, Italy

Abstract

Urban parks play an important role in preserving and promoting the health of citizens who are often exposed to noise pollution and the stress of daily life. The present study describes the main results obtained from a survey performed in five urban parks in Milan. Measurements of the acoustic environment were carried out in 29 sites together with interviews with 231 users on certain aspects of the parks not limited to merely sound. Acoustic data show that the surveyed parks mostly do not comply with the noise limit issued by the Italian legislation on protected areas. The unweighted 1/3-octave spectrum centre of gravity G and LA50 perform satisfactorily in discriminating among the acoustic environments. Such clear distinction was not observed in the subjective ratings on the perceived quality of the soundscape, likely due to the influence by non-acoustic factors that act as mediators in the assessment. This hypothesis is supported by the collected data on the perceived quality of quietness, which was rated worse than that of the soundscape. Comparing acoustic data with ratings, the perceived quality of the total environment was found to be less dependent on LAeq than soundscape and quietness.

Ten questions on the soundscapes of the built environment

“…Over the years, researchers have sought correlations between physical and perceptual data (e.g., Lercher & Schulte-Fortkamp, 2003;Brambilla, Gallo, & Zambon, 2013;Rychtáriková & Vermeir, 2013). However, such correlations are not necessarily useful per se.…”

Caracterización de la variabilidad acústica del parque de “El Retiro” (Madrid): zonificación y percepción por parte de la población

“…No existe una metodología o pauta común para este tipo de estudios (Sueur and Farina, 2015). Así, en algunas ocasiones se emplean tiempos de menos de 10 minutos (Brambilla et al, 2013a;Torija et al, 2013), mientras que en otras se mide durante días de forma continua (Ambrose and Burson, 2004). Los datos del sonómetro fueron recogidos en modo "SLOW", registrando un nivel de presión sonora por segundo, y con la ponderación de dB(A).…”

“…Los vehículos de mantenimiento, seguridad y maquinaría utilizada en jardinería, fueron considerados por la mayor parte de los encuestados como neutrales o molestos, una vez más haciendo referencia a que a pesar de ser ruidosos, son necesarios para una buena conservación de El Retiro. La preferencia de los sonidos naturales sobre los artificiales o antropogénicos, se ha estudiado abundan- temente en la literatura y existen abundantes ejemplos en línea con los resultados obtenidos de este trabajo (Brambilla et al, 2013a;Iglesias Merchan et al, 2014;Yang and Kang, 2005). Finalmente, los usuarios de El Retiro consideraron que el nivel de molestia debido al ruido durante la visita fue bajo en más del 75% de los casos.…”

Urban soundscape maps modelled with geo-referenced data

“…Furthermore Brocolini showed that non-linear ANN models do not improve the explained variance in a significant way compared to linear regression models [35]. So, sometimes linear regressions are preferred [17,22,36]. In this study linear regressions have been chosen.…”