Soundwalk approach to identify urban soundscapes individually

TLDR

Soundwalk methods have been used to study participants’ responses to visual and acoustic environments, with prior work examining type, evaluation position, measurement, and subjective assessment. This study proposes an individual soundwalk procedure to evaluate urban soundscapes. The procedure asks subjects to walk and select positions where they perceive positive or negative soundscape characteristics, and was validated in a case study comparing its results to a group soundwalk with 30 participants (15 architects and 15 acousticians). The individual soundwalk identified 196 positions grouped into four categories dominated by acoustic comfort, visual imagery, and openness, revealed differences between architects and acousticians, and demonstrated that the method captures diverse subjective responses and perceived soundscape elements.

Abstract

This study proposes a soundwalk procedure for evaluating urban soundscapes. Previous studies, which adopted soundwalk methodologies for investigating participants' responses to visual and acoustic environments, were analyzed considering type, evaluation position, measurement, and subjective assessment. An individual soundwalk procedure was then developed based on asking individual subjects to walk and select evaluation positions where they perceived any positive or negative characteristics of the urban soundscape. A case study was performed in urban spaces and the results were compared with those of the group soundwalk to validate the individual soundwalk procedure. Thirty subjects (15 architects and 15 acousticians) participated in the soundwalk. During the soundwalk, the subjects selected a total of 196 positions, and those were classified into 4 groups. It was found that soundscape perceptions were dominated by acoustic comfort, visual images, and openness. It was also revealed that perceived elements of the acoustic environment and visual image differed across classified soundscape groups, and there was a difference between architects and acousticians in terms of how they described their impressions of the soundscape elements. The results show that the individual soundwalk procedure has advantages for measuring diverse subjective responses and for obtaining the perceived elements of the urban soundscape.