Constant exposure to traffic noise pollution can have significant impact on human health and well being. Occupants of high-rise buildings along noisy traffic arteries are severely affected. In an attempt to contribute to noise protection design of prospective high-rise buildings, traffic noise measurements and prediction using the CRTN (calculation of road traffic noise) model, were made along the façade of a high-rise building in central Athens. The aim was to test the accuracy of this model in predicting the vertical distribution (mapping) of traffic noise along such building façades, under the local urban characteristics of the Mediterranean capital. The predicted and measured noise levels were found to be highly coherent with each other, and their vertical distribution pattern, by and large, confirmed findings from earlier studies. Nevertheless, the predicted values had a tendency of underestimation, with a mean difference −2.2 dB(A) with reference to measured values. It is considered that this underestimation is associated mainly with a newly proposed feature of urban morphology, namely (local) geo-morphology. By and large, it can be inferred that the CRTN model is a useful tool, suitable for the prediction of traffic noise along high-rise building façades during their planning and design stage. The results represent a further step towards more general application of this model, as well as a contribution to the use of this model considering a wider number of urban features.
The validity of current physical room acoustic criteria developed by various authors in the laboratory has been tested for the first time under the environmental complexity of live concerts. Six independent subjective factors emerged from evaluations on semantic rating scales, namely body, clarity, tonal quality, proximity, spaciousness, and intimacy. In a correlation analysis between subjective factors and measured values of physical room acoustic parameters, the factors clarity and intimacy were not found to be related with any of the physical parameters. The factor body correlated with the ratio of 80-ms Late-to-Early energy, tonal quality with the texture of the impulse response decay, and proximity with the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio and distance from platform. Each of the factors body, tonal quality, and proximity were also found to be the effect of an additional objective influence which remained unidentified [A. G. Sotiropoulou, Ph.D. thesis, University of London (1982)]. These results show that there is redundancy in current physical room acoustic criteria, and that the list of physical criteria which account for good acoustics is still incomplete. [Thanks go to Dr. David B. Fleming for invaluable advice.]
It has been common in recent years to use recorded music in the investigation of subjective qualities of concert hall acoustics. The object of this paper is to compare experimental results from recorded music evaluations and live concert evaluations. A list of 54 opposite labels describing acoustic qualities of concert halls were used at the poles of bipolar rating scales in the evaluation of studio recordings. The raw judgments were analyzed by factor analysis and five independent factors were produced, namely body, clarity, tonal quality, extent, and proximity. The validity of these results was then tested in the environmental complexity of live concert conditions. To this end 27 scales were evolved to represent the previously obtained factors and were used at three live concert evaluations. Four to five independent factors were produced depending on the concert situation. Four of these factors, namely body, clarity, tonal quality, and proximity had also previously emerged; two factors which emerged only in the live concerts were spaciousness and intimacy [A. G. Sotiropoulou et al., Proc. Inst. Acoust., Edinburgh (1982)]. These results show that there are independent sets of acoustic qualities (factors) common to the studio recordings used in this study and to live concerts.
Ways of presenting technological acoustic knowledge so as to awaken artistic sensibility to architectural students are explored, with emphasis on the acoustics of auditoria. The search is based on recent examples from modern architecture, where forms express in a highly artistic way the acoustical functions being served. There are also accounted, contemporary ideas about intrinsic communalities between musical composition (musical sound effect) and the architectural space, as well as the possibilities emerging from the introduction of modern psychometric methods to the research of audio and visual environmental perception. An audio visual example is employed to demonstrate the intrinsic relationships between musical composition and its visual aesthetic context.
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