Urban soundscape

Abstract

This paper summarises a series of integrated approaches to urban soundscape evaluation, simulation and prediction, with a particular attention to urban open public spaces. The soundscape evaluation focuses on the effects of various acoustical, environmental, social, demographical, psychological, cultural and behavioural factors, as well as the main factors that characterise the soundscape, and the investigations are mainly based on the soundscape surveys in Europe and China. The simulation models, which are proposed for the calculation of the sound fields of micro-scale urban areas, include energy-based image source methods, ray-tracing, radiosity model, a combined ray-tracing and radiosity model, as well as techniques for urban acoustic animation/aura-lisation. By using the simulation models, the basic characteristics of sound fields and the effects of architectural changes and urban design options are examined. Finally, by using the artificial neural networks method as well as the ordinal logistic regression techniques, a prediction tool for soundscape quality is developed, with known design conditions, such as the physical features of a space and the social, demographical and behavioural characterises of the users, as the inputs.