A Taxonomy Proposal for the Assessment of the Changes in Soundscape Resulting from the COVID-19 Lockdown

Carlos Ribeiro,César Asensio,Guillermo De Arcas,Patricio Muñoz,Luis Gascó,Arnaud Can,Gaetano Licitra,Catherine Lavandier,Peter Lercher,Pierre Aumond,Jean-Marc Wunderli

doi:10.3390/ijerph17124205

Abstract

Many countries around the world have chosen lockdown and restrictions on people’s mobility as the main strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. These actions have significantly affected environmental noise and modified urban soundscapes, opening up an unprecedented opportunity for research in the field. In order to enable these investigations to be carried out in a more harmonized and consistent manner, this paper makes a proposal for a set of indicators that will enable to address the challenge from a number of different approaches. It proposes a minimum set of basic energetic indicators, and the taxonomy that will allow their communication and reporting. In addition, an extended set of descriptors is outlined which better enables the application of more novel approaches to the evaluation of the effect of this new soundscape on people’s subjective perception.

Highlights

The year 2020 will be known as the year of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19)pandemic
In order to achieve these objectives, in this communication we propose a minimum set of common descriptors, which will make it possible to assess noise pollution in each location, and to appraise the noise reduction that the measures against COVID-19 imply
This paper focuses on indicators for physical characterization of noise, since an important part of the analysis will probably deal with the pre-post comparison based on the noise monitoring systems implemented in cities and airports

Summary

Introduction

The year 2020 will be known as the year of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Through sound recording and automatic audio tagging of recordings, the Silent-Cities Project aims to create a database of audio files that allows to study, among other things, the relationship between natural and human-generated sounds in different levels of economic activity [12]. Related to this topic, Acoucité has developed a questionnaire oriented towards assessing population feelings about the changes in the noise environment since lockdown [13]. This data structure arises as a necessity for the comparison of noise studies related to COVID-19 effects, it should be valid for the assessment of noise in the future, with minor changes both in exceptional and everyday circumstances

Noise Descriptors and Taxonomy for Physical Characterization

Measurement Data Structure

Data to Report

Data Collection

Extended Indicators

Conclusions