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