Abstract
The soundscape approach has become common practice in urban sound design. ISO12913 provides methods for assessing it within context. One of the proposed approaches is grounded in the affect that the sound environment may trigger. In addition we have proposed that in everyday situations—that is when persons are not instructed to listen to the sound environment—saliency and attention should be considered and explain the existence of non-influential sound environments. However, the underlying mechanism causing a soundscape to be calming, stimulating, or disruptive are not completely explained by classical psycho-acoustic. We argue that complexity could be the missing factor. Complexity at the sensorial level has been suggested many years ago and it is now common in bio-acoustics. However, semantic complexity determined by the understanding of the interplay between sounds, has seldomly been considered. Yet, in an urban context, several auditory streams will likely co-exist. This conceptual idea is complemented by a measurement method relying on sound recognition by artificial intelligence to quantify the variation in likelihood over time of multiple sounds. Complexity indicators such as entropy and spectral slope can be calculated on this likelihood trend. It can be shown that they are related to effects of environmental sound.
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