Search Results (46)

Spatial openness affects the subjective evaluation of soundscape, landscape, and thermal perceptions, leading to various restoration effects and recreational behaviors. However, the literature lacks studies investigating the effects of multisensory interactions under different levels of spatial openness in plazas on users’ behaviors in urban greenways. Thus, this study contributes to the enhancement of recreational experiences and the environmental design of urban greenways by examining the interaction between multisensory evaluations and recreational behaviors in greenway plazas with different levels of spatial openness. Three types of plazas (enclosed, semi-enclosed, open) were selected along an urban greenway to analyze interactions through in situ measurements, questionnaires, and behavior observation. The results showed that people rated the environment as the quietest and coolest in enclosed plazas, although the sound pressure level of these plazas was the highest. Furthermore, the visual evaluation (VE) was mostly correlated with acoustic evaluation (AE) in plazas with high openness, while the correlation effect between AE and thermal evaluation (TE) was only significant in enclosed plazas. In other words, AE was the key factor targeting the improvement in comfort in greenway plazas. Secondly, improving AE was more effective for stimulating the frequency of interactive activities in enclosed plazas, compared to improving TE. However, AE had a negative effect on the time that people were willing to spend on interactive activities in semi-enclosed plazas. Finally, these findings provide corresponding strategies for creating comfortable audio, visual, and thermal environments in greenway plazas with different levels of openness, as well as strategies for enhancing the recreational experiences of visitors. Full article

The quality of the soundscape in historical districts is receiving increasing attention from urban governments due to its significant potential to highlight historical characteristics and enhance the acoustic environment of urban areas. However, there is still a lack of research on the relationship between natural and cultural soundscapes as they interact in historic areas. Using the historical area of Wuhou Shrine Museum in Chengdu as a case study, this study analyzed the differences in sound levels, sound source recognition, and subjective perception between two distinct spatial types: the historical street and adjacent urban forest. Additionally, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to explore the impact of sound source recognition and sound levels on subjective perception. The results reveal the following: (1) The soundscape interaction between the historical street and the adjacent urban forest exhibits a conflicting relationship, with cultural and natural soundscapes struggling to coexist harmoniously. (2) Within the historical region, L₁₀ has the strongest effect on subjective evaluation, while L₉₀ has the weakest. (3) Quietness is not always positively correlated with comfort and pleasure, indicating that a tranquil environment does not necessarily enhance pleasantness. These findings provide differentiated soundscape optimization strategies tailored to historical areas. Full article

This study explores the influence of the urban soundscape on pedestrian perception and walking experience in the historic and lower parts of Béjaïa, Algeria. More precisely, the analysis investigates how variations in soundscape configuration relate to perceived comfort, safety, and walking pleasantness across five morphologically distinct urban zones. A mixed-method approach combining quantitative tools (LAeq acoustic measurements) and qualitative methods (soundwalks, sound diaries, and mental maps) was applied in accordance with ISO 12913. The study involved 50 participants for the sound diaries and 58 for the soundwalks. Results show that natural and social sounds enhance perceived comfort and safety, while mechanical noise is associated with discomfort and avoidance behaviors. In the morning, moderate to strong correlations were observed between sound comfort and visual perception (ρ = 0.58, p = 0.001, 95% CI [0.27; 0.80]), as well as between sound comfort and walking pleasantness (ρ = 0.40, p = 0.033, 95% CI [0.05; 0.67]). The study highlights the need to integrate soundscape considerations into urban planning and heritage conservation strategies. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic’s rapid shift to working from home has fundamentally challenged residential acoustic design, which traditionally prioritises rest and relaxation rather than sustained concentration. However, a clear gap exists in understanding how acoustic needs and the subjective evaluation of soundscape appropriateness (SA) differ between these conflicting activities within the same domestic space. Addressing this gap, this study reveals critical differences in how people experience and evaluate home soundscapes during work versus relaxation activities in the same residential spaces. Through an online survey of 247 Chinese participants during lockdown, we assessed soundscape perception attributes, the perceived saliencies of various sound types, and soundscape appropriateness (SA) ratings while working and relaxing at home. Our findings demonstrate that working at home creates a more demanding acoustic context: participants perceived indoor soundscapes as significantly less comfortable and less full of content when working compared to relaxing (p < 0.001), with natural sounds becoming less noticeable (−13.3%) and distracting household sounds more prominent (+7.5%). Structural equation modelling revealed distinct influence mechanisms: while comfort significantly mediates SA enhancement in both activities, the effect is stronger during relaxation (R² = 0.18). Critically, outdoor man-made noise, building-service noise, and neighbour sounds all negatively impact SA during work, with neighbour sounds showing the largest detrimental effect (total effect size = −0.17), whereas only neighbour sounds and outdoor man-made noise significantly disrupt relaxation activities. Additionally, natural sounds act as a positive factor during relaxation. These results expose a fundamental mismatch: existing residential acoustic environments, designed primarily for rest, fail to support the cognitive demands of work activities. This study provides evidence-based insights for acoustic design interventions, emphasising the need for activity-specific soundscape considerations in residential spaces. As hybrid work arrangements become the norm post-pandemic, our findings highlight the urgency of reimagining residential acoustic design to accommodate both focused work and restorative relaxation within the same home. Full article

Streetscapes play a critical role in restorative landscapes, offering opportunities for promoting public well-being. Previous studies have predominantly examined the influence of visual and auditory stimuli on perceived restorativeness independently. There is a limited understanding of their interactive effects. In this research, 360 participants completed a series of experiments considering four distinct street types, including visual comfort assessment, acoustic environment assessment, and perceived restorativeness. They were assigned to a control group and one of three experimental groups, each receiving specific enhancement: visual stimuli, auditory stimuli, or a combination of audiovisual stimuli. The findings revealed that the experimental groups reported a greater sense of restorativeness compared to the control group. Notably, auditory stimuli demonstrated a more pronounced restorative effect than visual stimuli, while limited differences were found between auditory and audiovisual stimuli. The differences in experimental outcomes among the four street types are compared and discussed, highlighting context-specific guidelines for enhancing streetscape restorativeness. The research findings highlight enhancing the masking effect of soundscape in street environmental design. The study adds a novel multi-sensory approach to the current body of research on restorative landscapes, providing significant insights for the planning and design of streetscapes. Full article

The user’s experience is critical in spatial design, particularly in outdoor spaces like university campuses, where the physical environment significantly influences students’ relaxation and stress relief. This study investigates the combined impact of thermal, luminous, and auditory environments on students’ perceptions within recreational areas at Bordj Bou Arreridj University Campus. A mixed-method approach combined field surveys and on-site measurements across eleven locations within three distinct spatial configurations. The findings from this study indicate that the auditory environment had the most substantial influence on overall perceptions, surpassing luminous and thermal factors. The open courtyard (Area 1) was perceived as less comfortable due to excessive heat and noise exposure. The shaded zone (Area 2) was identified as the most vulnerable, experiencing significant thermal stress and noise disturbances. In contrast, the secluded patio (Area 3) achieved the highest comfort rating and was perceived as the most cheerful and suitable space. Correlation analysis revealed significant interrelationships between physical and perceptual dimensions, highlighting the critical role of factors such as wind velocity, sky view factor, and illuminance in shaping thermal, luminous, and acoustic perceptions. A fuzzy logic model was developed to predict user perceptions of comfort, suitability, and mood based on measured environmental parameters to address the complexity of multisensory interactions. This study highlights the importance of integrating multisensory evaluations into spatial design to optimize the quality of outdoor environments. Full article

This paper evaluated the acoustic characteristics of electric vehicles (EVs) using both psychoacoustic and soundscape methodologies by analyzing three key psychoacoustic parameters: loudness, roughness, and sharpness. Through correlation analysis between perceived values and objective parameters, we identified specific sound sources requiring improvement, including vehicle body acoustics, wheel noise, and acceleration-related sounds. The relationship between comfort perception and acoustic parameters showed varying correlations: loudness (0.0411), roughness (2.3452), and sharpness (0.9821). Notably, the overall correlation coefficient of 0.5 suggests that psychoacoustic parameters alone cannot fully explain human comfort perception in EVs. The analysis of sound propagation revealed elevated vibration levels specifically in the driver’s seat area compared to other vehicle regions, identifying key targets for improvement. The research identified significant acoustic events at three key frequencies (50 Hz, 250 Hz, and 450 Hz), requiring in-depth analysis to determine their sources and understand their effects on the vehicle’s NVH characteristics. The study successfully validated its results by demonstrating that a combined approach using both psychoacoustic and soundscape parameters provides a more comprehensive understanding of passenger acoustic perception. This integrated methodology effectively identified specific areas needing acoustic refinement, including: frame vibration noise during rough road operation; tire-generated noise; and acceleration-related sound emissions. Full article

Traditional villages in the Hakka region of Guangdong Province have attracted significant attention for their unique cultural heritage and traditional lifestyles. Their favourable audio-visual environments offer immersive and realistic experiences for both residents and visitors. Thus, we selected four representative villages and used semantic segmentation to extract the core visual elements (sky, vegetation, construction, and dynamic) from visual landscape images. Audio-visual interaction experiments and subjective surveys were conducted to investigate the participants’ evaluations of the visual landscape and soundscape to explore the mechanisms of audio-visual interaction. The results revealed that different audio-visual combinations significantly influenced the participants’ visual landscape satisfaction, acoustic comfort, and audio-visual harmony evaluations. Specifically, visual images of natural spaces with a high proportion of sky (24.54%) and vegetation (72.56%), matched with natural sounds (with a sound pressure level of approximately 55 dB) such as birdsong, wind, and flowing water, received excellent ratings for both visual landscape satisfaction and acoustic comfort evaluations. Moreover, the findings further revealed that coordination between visual and audio materials was crucial for enhancing the participants’ perceptions and assessments, highlighting the importance of audio-visual coordination in creating harmonious environments. These findings provide recommendations for spatial planning, landscape design, and soundscape optimisation in traditional villages. Full article

As the primary setting for students’ daily life and learning, university campuses are facing a growing concern about the impact of increased stress on students’ emotional well-being. The sound environment plays a critical role in affecting students’ mental health, learning efficiency, and overall well-being. However, research on the influence of campus soundscapes on students’ emotions is limited, and the mechanisms behind these effects remain to be explored. This study, using the Qishan Campus of Fuzhou University as a case, investigates the impact of campus soundscapes on students’ emotional perception and restorative effects. Four typical functional areas (academic zone (ACZ), residential zone (RDZ), recreational zone (RCZ), and administrative zone (ADZ)) were selected to analyze the effects of natural and artificial sounds on students’ emotions and physiological states. Based on EEG, eye tracking, sound level measurements, and questionnaire surveys, a one-way repeated measures ANOVA was used to assess students’ emotional arousal, valence, and physiological restoration under different soundscape conditions. The results showed that natural sounds, such as the sound of wind-blown leaves and flowing water, significantly improved students’ emotions and restorative effects, while artificial noises like construction sounds and traffic noise had negative impacts. Additionally, subjective perceptions of soundscape restoration were positively correlated with arousal, valence, and acoustic comfort, and negatively correlated with gaze frequency and pupil size. The findings provide a theoretical foundation for optimizing campus soundscape design and highlight the importance of natural sounds in enhancing students’ mental health and academic environment. Full article

With advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT), diverse and high-resolution data sources, such as environmental sensors and user-generated inputs from mobile devices, have become available to model and estimate citizens’ acoustic comfort in urban environments. These IoT-enabled data sources offer scalable insights in real time into both objective parameters (e.g., noise levels and environmental conditions) and subjective perceptions (e.g., personal comfort and soundscape experiences), which were previously challenging to capture comprehensively by using traditional methods. Despite this, there remains a lack of a clear framework explicitly presenting the role of these diverse inputs in determining acoustic comfort. This paper contributes by (1) exploring the relationship between attributes governing the physical aspect of the built environment (sensory data) and the end-users’ characteristics/inputs/sensations (such as their acoustic comfort level) and how these attributes can correlate/connect; (2) developing a CityGML-based framework that leverages semantic 3D city models to integrate and represent both objective sensory data and subjective social inputs, enhancing data-driven decision making at the city level; and (3) introducing a novel approach to crowdsourcing citizen inputs to assess perceived acoustic comfort indicators, which inform predictive modeling efforts. Our solution is based on CityGML’s capacity to store and explain 3D city-related shapes with their semantic characteristics, which are essential for city-level operations such as spatial data mining and thematic queries. To do so, a crowdsourcing method was used, and 20 perceptive indicators were identified from the existing literature to evaluate people’s perceived acoustic attributes and types of sound sources and their relations to the perceived soundscape comfort. Three regression models—K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and XGBoost—were trained on the collected data to predict acoustic comfort at bus stops in Montréal based on physical and psychological attributes of travellers. In the best-performing scenario, which incorporated psychological attributes and measured noise levels, the models achieved a normalized mean squared error (NMSE) as low as 0.0181, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.0890, and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.1349. These findings highlight the effectiveness of integrating subjective and objective data sources to accurately predict acoustic comfort in urban environments. Full article

This paper presents a novel approach to sustainable urban revitalization. Care Spaces are defined, and an area selected for revitalization is described. Transformation of city space is of fundamental importance for everyday life, its comfort as regards the functional aspect as well as the psychological and cultural ones. The presented projects are in accord with 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the conception of Baukultur. Both approaches tend to create well designed environment that support health and well-being of people and other living creatures while taking into account cultural aspects in design and construction. Focusing on the combination of soundscape analysis with design elements. To monitor the soundscape, a custom database of urban sound recordings was constructed, and key analytical methods such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), feature extraction, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and permutation of feature importance were applied. The effectiveness of these algorithms was confirmed through field investigations. Full article

Because soundscapes affect human health and comfort, methodologies for evaluating them through physiological responses have attracted considerable attention. In this study, we proposed a novel method for evaluating visual attention by using eye-tracking technology to objectively assess soundscape perception. The study incorporated questionnaire surveys and physiological measurements focusing on visual attention responses. Results from the questionnaire indicated that perceptions of vehicles and the sky were 6% and 26% more sensitive, respectively, whereas perceptions of vegetation, based on physiological responses, were approximately 3% to 50% more sensitive. The soundscape quality prediction model indicates that the proposed methodology can complement conventional questionnaire-based models and provide a nuanced interpretation of eventfulness relationships. Additionally, the visual attention quantification technique enhanced the restoration responses of questionnaire-based methods by 1–2%. The results of this study are significant because the study introduces a novel methodology for quantifying visual attention, which can be used as a supplementary tool for physiological responses in soundscape research. The proposed method can uncover novel mechanisms of human perception of soundscapes that may not be captured by questionnaires, providing insights for future research in soundscape evaluation through physiological measurements. Full article

Public open spaces make crucial contributions to the livability of communities and promote physical and mental health. Soundscapes play an important role in the overall physical comfort of public open spaces. However, owing to insufficient studies of high-density situations, soundscapes are ignored in public open spaces in high-density residential areas. This paper presents a case study of a soundscape in the overseas Chinese town (OCT) of Shenzhen, China. Through in situ observation, four distinct soundscapes were easily identified by performing soundscape conceptualization according to the ISO. In terms of the four identified soundscape areas, subjective evaluations of acoustic comfort and annoyance and their influencing factors were thoroughly explored. The results reveal that the natural soundscape had the best evaluations, whereas the artificial one did not have the worst result. It is interesting to note that acoustic factors do not always significantly influence a soundscape’s evaluation. A non-acoustic factor such as the spatial function may play a role as it is related to the context of an individual perceiving an acoustic environment. This study provides first-hand empirical evidence for understanding soundscapes and the influencing factors present in high-density residential public open spaces. The results provide useful knowledge for enhancing soundscape quality in such spaces. Full article

There is an increasing interest in accurately evaluating urban soundscapes to reflect citizens’ subjective perceptions of acoustic comfort. Various indices have been proposed in the literature to achieve this purpose. However, many of these methods necessitate specialized equipment or extensive data collection. This study introduces an enhanced predictor for dwelling acoustic comfort, utilizing cost-effective data consisting of a 30-s audio clip and location information. The proposed predictor incorporates two rating systems: a binary evaluation and an acoustic comfort index called ACI. The training and evaluation data are obtained from the “Sons al Balcó” citizen science project. To characterize the sound events, gammatone cepstral coefficients are used for automatic sound event detection with a convolutional neural network. To enhance the predictor’s performance, this study proposes incorporating objective noise levels from public IoT-based wireless acoustic sensor networks, particularly in densely populated areas like Barcelona. The results indicate that adding noise levels from a public network successfully enhances the accuracy of the acoustic comfort prediction for both rating systems, reaching up to 85% accuracy. Full article

Existing studies have focused mainly on the environmental quality of scenic spots, such as sufficient oxygen content in the air and a high concentration of negative oxygen ions. The perceptions of soundscape in scenic areas are generally good, but there are few reports on the quantitative evaluation of soundscape quality in scenic areas. In this study, we analysed existing methods for evaluating the soundscape of a landscape, evaluated the soundscape comfort of scenic spots, analysed and refined the natural environmental factors affecting the soundscape, and proposed for the first time to use physical environmental indicators such as the air temperature difference, relative humidity, natural illuminance ratio and wind speed as environmental evaluation variables. A quantitative method was used to calculate the soundscape comfort index (SSI) of the landscape. The physical environmental indicators related to famous scenic spots in China, namely, Qingcheng mountain field testing and a subjective soundscape of tourist satisfaction survey, were used to calculate the corresponding soundscape comfort index values, and a quantitative analysis of soundscape comfort and differences in temperature, relative humidity, the illumination ratio, and the correlation between the equivalent sound level A was performed. The measured values of the temperature difference and light ratio were significantly correlated with the soundscape comfort index. The distribution of sound landscape comfort was given by a GIS map, and soundscape comfort was evaluated scientifically. The correlations between soundscape comfort and landscape patch number (PN), landscape patch density (PD), diversity index (Shannon), and landscape shape index (LSI) were quantitatively analysed, which confirmed that the perception of soundscape comfort was affected by landscape space to different degrees. This study has scientific significance and application value for the soundscape evaluation of scenic areas and has significance for soundscape evaluation and design strategies for urban landscapes. Full article