Abstract
Sound pleasantness or annoyance perceived in urban soundscapes is a major concern in environmental acoustics. Binaural psychoacoustic parameters are helpful to describe generic acoustic environments, as it is stated within the ISO 12913 framework. In this paper, the application of a Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network (WASN) to evaluate the spatial distribution and the evolution of urban acoustic environments is described. Two experiments are presented using an indoor and an outdoor deployment of a WASN with several nodes using an Internet of Things (IoT) environment to collect audio data and calculate meaningful parameters such as the sound pressure level, binaural loudness and binaural sharpness. A chunk of audio is recorded in each node periodically with a microphone array and the binaural rendering is conducted by exploiting the estimated directional characteristics of the incoming sound by means of DOA estimation. Each node computes the parameters in a different location and sends the values to a cloud-based broker structure that allows spatial statistical analysis through Kriging techniques. A cross-validation analysis is also performed to confirm the usefulness of the proposed system.
Highlights
Noise has become a big problem in big cities
The implementation of a Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network (WASN) to evaluate a simplified version of the psycho-acoustic annoyance based on an Internet of Things (IoT) framework considers different steps: (a) the hardware and software implementation of the nodes for the computation of psycho-acoustic parameters, (b) the IoT framework configuration and (c) the cross-validation and spatial statistical analysis
The binaural sharpness calculation is implemented in order to evaluate a simplified version of the psycho-acoustic annoyance
Summary
Noise has become a big problem in big cities. It has been shown that affects human behavior, health and even children’s cognition [1]. Only local measurements in a grid are taken and on the other, it is expensive due to the measuring equipment and personnel costs. These studies have been performed observing objective parameters, the evaluation of the equivalent sound pressure level [4]. Previous works have shown that the evaluation of psychoacoustic parameters, such as loudness and sharpness, fits better to the assessment of noise subjective annoyance [5,6]. Psychoacoustic research has been widely studied and standards for evaluating subjective annoyance and calculating psychoacoustic parameters have been created [7,8]
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