Abstract
The recent development and deployment of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASN) present new ways to address urban acoustic challenges in a smart city context. A focus on improving quality of life forms the core of smart-city design paradigms and cannot be limited to simply measuring objective environmental factors, but should also consider the perceptual, psychological and health impacts on citizens. This study therefore makes use of short (1–2.7 s) recordings sourced from a WASN in Milan which were grouped into various environmental sound source types and given an annoyance rating via an online survey with N=100 participants. A multilevel psychoacoustic model was found to achieve an overall R2=0.64 which incorporates Sharpness as a fixed effect regardless of the sound source type and Roughness, Impulsiveness and Tonality as random effects whose coefficients vary depending on the sound source. These results present a promising step toward implementing an on-sensor annoyance model which incorporates psychoacoustic features and sound source type, and is ultimately not dependent on sound level.
Highlights
Noise has been proven to have a wide impact on the social and economic aspects of citizens’ lifes [1] and is regarded as one of the primary environmental health issues referenced in the new environmental noise guidelines [2]
The results show that annoyance is largely determined by noise disturbance and the noisiness perceived by citizens
An online listening experiment was conducted with 100 participants to assess the noise annoyance induced by short recordings of individual environmental noise sources gathered via a wireless acoustic sensors network in Milan
Summary
Noise has been proven to have a wide impact on the social and economic aspects of citizens’ lifes [1] and is regarded as one of the primary environmental health issues referenced in the new environmental noise guidelines [2]. Over the past few years, several research teams have analyzed the causes and the impact of this noise, revealing that it causes more than 48,000 new cases of ischemic heart disease and around 12,000 deaths in Europe each year [2]. It leads to chronic high annoyance for more than 22 million people, and sleep disturbance for more than 6.5 million people [3]. Railway noise has proven to cause annoyance due to its huge variety of sounds, e.g., rail breaks, whistles, squeels and vibrations [8,9].
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