Non-auditory factors affecting urban soundscape evaluation

TLDR

The study aims to characterize urban spaces that combine landscape, acoustics, and lighting, and to investigate how people perceive these soundscapes using quantitative and qualitative methods. The authors conducted a questionnaire survey and soundwalk, measuring acoustic comfort, visual image, day lighting, and olfactory perceptions with an 11‑point scale, and performed a semantic differential test and open‑ended descriptions to analyze soundscape perception. Results show that urban soundscapes are defined by soundmarks and dominated by acoustic comfort, visual images, and day lighting, while reverberance does not consistently influence preference and could be replaced by physical measurements; qualitative analysis identified spatial impressions such as openness and density as key contexts.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to characterize urban spaces, which combine landscape, acoustics, and lighting, and to investigate people’s perceptions of urban soundscapes through quantitative and qualitative analyses. A general questionnaire survey and soundwalk were performed to investigate soundscape perception in urban spaces. Non-auditory factors (visual image, day lighting, and olfactory perceptions), as well as acoustic comfort, were selected as the main contexts that affect soundscape perception, and context preferences and overall impressions were evaluated using an 11-point numerical scale. For qualitative analysis, a semantic differential test was performed in the form of a social survey, and subjects were also asked to describe their impressions during a soundwalk. The results showed that urban soundscapes can be characterized by soundmarks, and soundscape perceptions are dominated by acoustic comfort, visual images, and day lighting, whereas reverberance in urban spaces does not yield consistent preference judgments. It is posited that the subjective evaluation of reverberance can be replaced by physical measurements. The categories extracted from the qualitative analysis revealed that spatial impressions such as openness and density emerged as some of the contexts of soundscape perception.