Assessment of the relation between psychoacoustic parameters and the subjective perception of urban soundscapes

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2017-05, Vol.141 (5), p.3622-3622
• Main Authors: de la Prida, Daniel, Pedrero, Antonio, Díaz, César, Navacerrada, María Ángeles
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4987778

Since soundscapes are strongly related to the human perception, the sound pressure level does not seem to be a sufficient representative of a soundscape by itself. Therefore, the characterization of a soundscape might be improved by using psychoacoustic parameters. A study has been conducted and the relationship between psychoacoustic parameters and the subjective perception has been analyzed, for a collection of urban spaces. For that purpose, several locations at the city of Madrid have been selected, based on their main use and geometrical features. Then, binaural recordings have been made for several days and different seasons, which allow to observe the relevance of the behavioral differences for the same locations under different conditions. Psychoacoustic parameters, as well as sound pressure level, have been calculated for both the complete recordings and selected parts of them. A semantic differential listening test have been carried out to look for correlations between the calculated parameters and the subjective perception of a panel of participants. Finally, an automatic clustering is presented for the collection of locations. The adequacy of the proposed clustering method is evaluated by comparing the clusters to the psychoacoustic parameters and the subjective responses of the listening test.