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Acoustic and Vibration exposure and comfort inside urban and extra-urban transportation systems
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Perspective of the soundscape approach as a tool for urban design
No full textIn the last decade many improvements and large applications of noise control techniques have been observed, as well as enforcement and implementation of noise legislation at national and international levels. Notwithstanding, noise in urban areas has not decreased as expected and reductions in noise levels do not necessarily lead to a better acoustic comfort in urban areas. This has increased the concern of stakeholders (population, politicians, decision makers, ...) and their awareness of the harmful effects of noise. The soundscape approach, concentrating on the way that people consciously perceive their environment(namely the interactions between people and sounds), might open novel perspectives and provide further insights towards fighting noise. In this approach, complementary to the noise control engineering techniques, the participation of people is fundamental along with their involvement that complies with the requirements issued by the European directive on the assessment and management of environmental noise. This paper provides an overview of some experimental studies carried out in the field and laboratory, dealing with urban areas of Naples and Rome with particular feature(historical sites, outdoor markets, pedestrian areas, tourist attractions). Noise measurements and interviews of people by questionnaires have been used to investigate the sonic environment and its influence on the recognition and quality of a urban site by the users. A laboratory procedure based on virtual scenarios accompanied by visual and audio stimuli is presented and its potential as urban design tool is discussed
Responses to noise in urban parks and in rural quiet areas.
No full textNowadays the protection of quiet areas is an issue of increasing importance, as also recognized in the European Directive 2002/49/EC on the environmental noise [1]. Dealing with the demanded protection of quiet areas, it is important to characterize the soundscape of these environments properly, taking into account the multidimensionality of the individual perception which includes the effects of non-acoustic factors on subjective evaluation, such as visual impression and matching the personal expectation of the environment with the actual experience.
This paper describes two experimental investigations carried out recently in Italy. The first deals with noise surveys and collection of subjective appraisals of three urban parks in Naples and the second consists of laboratory listening tests where sounds recorded binaurally in countryside parks have been mixed with sounds from some
type of sources at different signal-to-noise ratios and played back by headphones to a group of subjects. The results obtained show that the subject’s expectation to hear a sound in a specific environment, that is its congruence with the environment where it is heard, influences the corresponding annoyance. In particular, the more the sound is congruent with the expectation of the park, the less is the evoked annoyance and, conversely, the more is its acceptability. Furthermore, the acceptability of the sound increases with decreasing of its level and detectability of non natural sounds
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