Measurement, Design and Management of Indoor Soundscapes: Applications to Different Building Uses

Dear Colleagues,

Post-occupancy assessments of buildings consistently show that privacy problems and exposure to uncomfortable noise levels and annoying sound stimuli are among the main sources of environmental dissatisfaction in the built environment. The acoustic quality of spaces can in turn affect people’s health, wellbeing and quality of life, and this is even more true inside buildings, where we spend most of our time.

Understanding how noise can be annoying and sounds can be desirable for building occupants requires a perceptual characterisation of the sound environment. To achieve this, soundscape research has evolved as a framework that integrates psychological, (psycho)acoustic, physiological and social factors to explore how people perceive and experience the acoustic environment. Sound is managed and differentiated according to people’ perception and employed as a design “resource” to shape healthy and supportive acoustic environments that are positively perceived by their users.

While assessment tools are more established and standardised in the field of urban planning (ISO 12913 series), the development of frameworks to address indoor soundscapes is more recent and still ongoing. Research is invited that establishes methodologies and tools to measure and characterise the indoor soundscape, taking into account the different uses of buildings and related needs and expectations by building occupants, including aurally diverse occupants; develops and tests materials and technologies to release positive sounds in indoor built environments; and understands negative and positive impacts on people’s comfort, task performance, health and wellbeing, depending on building use.

This Special Issue aims to collect contributions related to inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to characterising the quality of indoor acoustic environments related to (but not limited to) residential, school, office, care facilities and performance environments; impacts of technologies implemented in the built environment on its soundscape (e.g., building ventilation); impact of acoustic and non-acoustic factors on human perception of the sound environment; relationship between sound type and speech perception, cognitive and health effects; new methodologies for predicting and modelling indoor acoustic environments; methods of communicating and representing indoor soundscapes; acoustic zoning and perception-based active soundscapes; and relationship between sound, space and behaviour in the built environment. Contributions are welcome from a variety of disciplines, employing both qualitative and quantitative approaches, including soundscape studies, architecture, noise control engineering, environmental design, social sciences, urban planning, spatial analysis, environmental psychology, epidemiology and public health.

Dr. Simone Torresin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• indoor soundscape
• architectural acoustics
• room acoustics
• environmental acoustics
• indoor environmental quality
• environmental health
• salutogenic design
• acoustic comfort
• cognitive performance
• speech perception
• quality of life (QoL)
• quality of experience (QoE)