Which acoustic dimensions could act as mediators between urban greenspace and human health?

Abstract

The beneficial effects of urban greenspace on human health and well-being are widely recognized, but the underlying mechanisms are incompletely understood. The acoustic environment (AE) is often proposed as a detrimental factor and emerging evidence suggests that it may also represent a beneficial resource. If different dimensions of the AE were to represent a mediator between greenspace and human health, they would need to be associated with both. We present results investigating the first prerequisite: the associations between acoustic dimensions and urban greenspace. We use audio recordings from SALVE, randomly sampled at 730 locations four times per year (n=2,746) in Bochum, Germany. The AE is quantified by 122 eco- and psychoacoustic indices, sound pressure levels and complex network measures. Greenspace is defined as the percentage of green area in a 300 m-buffer around each recording location, grouped into quintiles. We apply dimensionality reduction and present descriptive statistics to analyze the associations between identified acoustic dimensions and urban green area. In addition to the "sound volume", we find that biophonic sounds, the Acoustic Richness, the Impulsiveness, the Roughness, and the "acoustic dominance" show a consistently decreasing/increasing trend across the five quintiles of urban green area.