Abstract
The main research question addressed in this article is to find out to what extent it is possible to predict statistical noise levels such as L5 and L95 on an urban public square, based on the information about the square’s functionality, the activities going on, and the architecture of the surrounding buildings. The same information is also exploited to auralize the soundscape on the virtual square, in order to assess the disturbance perceived by people of the traffic noise by means of laboratory listening tests, which are based on binaural sound recordings acquired in situ and incorporated in simulations to evoke typical acoustical situations. Auralizations were carried out by two calculation algorithms (ray-tracing and image source method) and two acoustic scenarios (an anechoic situation and a virtually reconstructed square in Odeon®). The statistical noise levels, calculated from the auralized soundscapes, compare well with measurements in situ. The listening test results also show that there are significant differences in people’s perception of traffic noise, depending on their origin.
Highlights
Virtual sound synthesis has already been applied in various applications [1] (Bianchini and Cipriani1998)
This difference might be caused by the Lombard effect [34], e.g., the reflex of groups of people, which is related to changes of the characteristics of speech due to a noisy background, in particular in terms of an increase of the vocal intensity, the fundamental frequency, and the word duration
In this study it was verified to what extent statistical values of noise can be used in urban soundscape prediction, for a particular city square scenario
Summary
Virtual sound synthesis has already been applied in various applications [1] (Bianchini and Cipriani1998). In view of applications of virtual acoustics for soundscape assessment in the framework of urban planning [12,13,14,15], one question is how realistic virtual acoustics succeeds to mimic the soundscape in an urban public place, and how adequate appreciations of the sonic environment can be made on the basis of laboratory listening tests, in comparison with surveys. Most of the studies about soundscapes deal with both objective and subjective aspects. Subjective aspects have been investigated through surveys in situ or by listening tests based on monaural or binaural recordings [18,19,20]
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