Classifying urban public spaces according to their soundscape

Cities are composed of many types of outdoor spaces, each with their distinct soundscape. Some of these soundscapes can be extraordinary, others are often less memorable. However, most locations in a city are not visited with the purpose of experiencing the soundscape. Consequently, the soundscape will not necessarily attract attention. Existing methods based on the circumplex model of affect classify soundscapes according to the pleasure and arousal they evoke, but do not fully take into account the goals and expectations of the listener. Therefore, in earlier work, a top-level hierarchical classification method was developed, which distinguishes between spaces based on the degree to which the soundscape creates awareness of the acoustical environment, matches expectations and arouses the listener. This paper presents the results of an immersive laboratory experiment, designed to validate this classification method. The experiment involved 40 participants and 50 audiovisual recordings drawn from the Urban Soundscapes of the World database. It is shown that the proposed classification method results in clearly distinct classes, and that membership to these classes can be explained well by physical parameters, extracted from the acoustical environment as well as the visual scene

Classification of soundscapes of urban public open spaces

It is increasingly acknowledged by landscape architects and urban planners that the soundscape contributes significantly to the perception of urban public open spaces. Describing and classifying this impact, however, remains a challenge. This article presents a hierarchical method for classification that distinguishes between backgrounded and foregrounded, disruptive and supportive, and finally calming and stimulating soundscapes. This four-class classification is applied to a growing collection of immersive audio-visual recordings of sound environments from around the world that could be explored using virtual reality playback. To validate the proposed methodology, an experiment involving 40 participants and 50 soundscape stimuli collected in urban public open spaces worldwide was conducted. The experiment showed that (1) the virtual reality headset reproduction based on affordable spatial audio with 360-degree video recordings was perceived as ecologically valid in terms of realism and immersion; (2) the proposed classification method results in well-separated classes; (3) membership to these classes could be explained by physical parameters, both regarding sound and vision. Moreover, models based on a limited number of acoustical indicators were constructed that could correctly classify a soundscape in each of the four proposed categories, with an accuracy exceeding 88% on an independent dataset