A principal components model of soundscape perception

Abstract

There is a need for a model that identifies underlying dimensions of soundscape perception, and which may guide measurement and improvement of soundscape quality. With the purpose to develop such a model, a listening experiment was conducted. One hundred listeners measured 50 excerpts of binaural recordings of urban outdoor soundscapes on 116 attribute scales. The average attribute scale values were subjected to principal components analysis, resulting in three components: Pleasantness, eventfulness, and familiarity, explaining 50, 18 and 6% of the total variance, respectively. The principal-component scores were correlated with physical soundscape properties, including categories of dominant sounds and acoustic variables. Soundscape excerpts dominated by technological sounds were found to be unpleasant, whereas soundscape excerpts dominated by natural sounds were pleasant, and soundscape excerpts dominated by human sounds were eventful. These relationships remained after controlling for the overall soundscape loudness (Zwicker's N(10)), which shows that 'informational' properties are substantial contributors to the perception of soundscape. The proposed principal components model provides a framework for future soundscape research and practice. In particular, it suggests which basic dimensions are necessary to measure, how to measure them by a defined set of attribute scales, and how to promote high-quality soundscapes.

Perception of soundscapes: An interdisciplinary approach

“…The vibrancy component is the semantic differential scale of vibrancy. These would seem to agree reasonably well with Kang's first two components, relaxation and dynamics [8] and also with the dimensions of pleasantness and eventfulness found by Axelsson et al [10].…”

“…They named the dimensions, emotional evaluation and strength (42%), activity (14%), and clarity (10%). Axelsson et al have also used a principal component analysis (PCA) to characterise the response of 100 listeners to 50 soundscapes on 116 semantic scales [10]. They produced a three-dimensional space with factors pleasantness, eventfulness and familiarity explaining 50%, 18% and 6% of the variance respectively.…”

Soundscape mapping in environmental noise management and urban planning: case studies in two UK cities

“…In all cases, a scale of no fixed answers was used in order to avoid bias or rounded answers. Participants had to put in a mark on a 10-cm continuous scale assessing eight perceptual attributes namely: "pleasant", "chaotic", "exciting", "uneventful", "calm", "unpleasant", "eventful" and "monotonous" following the soundscape model suggested by [39]. The marking scale ranged from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree".…”

The Personal Viewpoint on the Meaning of Tranquility Affects the Appraisal of the Urban Park Soundscape

“…The soundscape of urban environments has been thoroughly investigated during recent years [6][7][8]. Even though the soundscape of urban parks only represents a small subset of all existing soundscape types, its context has been reasonably well described [9][10][11].…”