Abstract
Housing complex residents in urban areas are not only confronted with typical noise sources, but also everyday life sounds, e.g., in the yards. Therefore, they might benefit from the increasing interest in soundscape design and acoustic comfort improvement. Three laboratory experiments (with repeated-measures complete block designs) are reported here, in which effects of several variables on short-term acoustic comfort were investigated. A virtual reference inner yard in the ODEON software environment was systematically modified by absorbers on building facades, whereby single-channel recordings were spatialized for a 2D playback in laboratory. Facade absorption was found, generally, to increase acoustic comfort. Too much absorption, however, was not found to be helpful. In the absence of any absorbers on the facade, absorbing balcony ceilings tended to improve acoustic comfort, however, non-significantly. Pleasant and unpleasant sounds were associated with comfort and discomfort, accordingly. This should encourage architects and acousticians to create comfortable inner yard sound environments, where pleasant and unpleasant sound occurrence probabilities are designed to be high and low, respectively. Furthermore, significant differences were observed between acoustic comfort at distinct observer positions, which could be exploited when designing inner yards.
Highlights
Urban living in areas with a high population density is affected by classic noise sources, such as road traffic, railways, and aircraft noise, as well as by surrounding everyday life sounds.Conventional environmental and construction acoustics deal with noise assessment and noise control with the goal to reduce the noise immission at the living space of the residents [1,2,3]
Short-term acoustic comfort depends on the absorption coefficient
Three laboratory experiments were reported which investigated short-term acoustic comfort and discomfort in housing complexes when relatively pleasant and unpleasant everyday life sound sources were present in virtual inner yards
Summary
Conventional environmental and construction acoustics deal with noise assessment and noise control with the goal to reduce the noise immission at the living space of the residents [1,2,3]. Beyond the topic of noise immission, there has been an increasing interest in soundscape design with the aim to improve the soundscape and acoustic comfort [4,5,6,7,8]. Despite some overlap between both topics, the main goal of soundscape design and acoustic comfort improvement is to reduce relatively unpleasant sounds (such as noise), and to design and enable a relatively pleasant sound environment. Residents of housing complexes might benefit from the latter, e.g., by controlled absorptions and reflections of the facade. Whereas sound absorbing materials have been frequently used to improve acoustic comfort in closed rooms [9,10,11], little is known about the influences of sound absorbers on the (outside) facade to improve acoustic comfort for residents of housing complexes with shared inner yards
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
