Perceptual evaluation of the citizen’s acoustic environment from classic noise monitoring

ABSTRACT

Noise is one of the main environmental pollutants and it is becoming a growing public health concern due to its impact on the quality of life in urban areas. In order to monitor critical locations, Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks are being deployed, mainly in European and American cities. These networks focus primarily on measuring noise levels associated with road traffic. However, a number of different sounds are also present in urban areas and if our overall aim is to improve the quality of life of city inhabitants, then these additional sounds should be considered in accordance with the soundscape approach. This think piece proposes a step forward in the analysis of citizens’ perception of noise annoyance. We want to analyse the degree of annoyance caused by different sounds and study how this is related to psychoacoustic parameters. To this end, we propose to assess the acoustic environment by conducting perceptual tests on data gathered in a noise monitoring network. The proposed methodology is presented and discussed, and several open questions are posed to the research community.

KEYWORDS:

• Annoyance
• noise
• citizen

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès

Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès is the Director of Research of La Salle Campus Barcelona. She holds a PhD in communications signal processing in Ramon Llull University (2012). She also holds a Humanities Degree in Universitat Obeta de Catalunya (2011). Her research interests are focused in acoustic event detection and soundscape signal processing, as well as communications signal processing. She has more than 30 indexed journals publications, and more than 80 contributions to conferences.

Marc Freixes

Marc Freixes is a lecturer and researcher on audio and speech processing within the research Group in Media Technology, at La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull. He holds a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the same institution, a degree in Music performance from the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya and an MSc in Sound and Music Computing from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is finishing his PhD and has authored and co-authored several articles in international journals and conferences.

Ferran Orga

Ferran Orga holds a Master in Telecommunications Engineering from the Ramon Llull University, La Salle Campus Barcelona, 2015. He began to work on the programmable logic and the control system of an ionospheric communications modem that would become his master's thesis and first published works. Currently a doctoral researcher in acoustic event detection and analysis and electronics lecturer at the same university.

Maria Foraster

Maria Foraster is a researcher at ISGlobal. Her work focusses on studying the effects of traffic-related exposures over the life-span, with a special focus on the effects of transportation noise on cardiometabolic diseases in adults and on children’s health.

Alexandra Labairu-Trenchs

Alexandra Labairu-Trenchs started her studies on Telecommunication Systems Engineering at La Salle Universitat Ramon Llull in 2014, where she graduated in 2018. From February 2018 until June of 2019 she worked as an IT Risk consultant at EY. In order to complement her engineering degree, on September 2019 she started an MSc in Management at the Bocconi University where she is currently studying.