Acoustic, Visual and Spatial Indicators for the Description of the Soundscape of Waterfront Areas with and without Road Traffic Flow

Abstract

High flows of road traffic noise in urban agglomerations can negatively affect the livability of squares and parks located at the neighborhood, district and city levels, therefore pushing anyone who wants to enjoy calmer, quieter areas to move to non-urban parks. Due to the distances between these areas, it is not possible to go as regularly as would be necessary to satisfy any needs. Even if cities are densely populated, the presence of a sea or riverfront offers the possibility of large restorative places, or at least with potential features for being the natural core of an urban nucleus after a renewal intervention. This study evaluates the soundscape of the Naples waterfront, presenting an overview of the most significant visual, acoustic and spatial factors related to the pedestrian areas, as well as areas open to road traffic and others where the road traffic is limited. The factors were chosen with feature selection methods and artificial neural networks. The results show how certain factors, such as the perimeter between the water and promenade, the visibility of the sea or the density of green areas, can affect the perception of the soundscape quality in the areas with road traffic. In the pedestrian areas, acoustic factors, such as loudness or the A-weighted sound level exceeded for 10% of the measurement duration (LA10), influence the perceived quality of the soundscape.

Perceived Environmental Aesthetic Qualities Scale (PEAQS) – A self-report tool for the evaluation of green-blue spaces

“…Our starting point is that aesthetic qualities of environments are perceived. They are multisensory and context-dependent (Brady, 2003;Hauru, 2015;Hauru, Koskinen, Kotze, & Lehvävirta, 2014;Mesimäki et al, 2017;Nasar, 1988), and the information received by one or more of the senses may impact how the information received by the rest of the senses is processed (Lugten, Kang, Karacaoglu, Steemers, & White, 2018;Puyana Romero, Maffei, Brambilla, & Ciaburro, 2016;Van Renterghem, 2018) . They are also experienced within a place (i.e.…”

The Influence of Audio-Visual Interactions on Psychological Responses of Young People in Urban Green Areas: A Case Study in Two Parks in China

“…Previous studies adopted soundwalk methodologies for investigating the visual, acoustic or audio-visual environments on participants’ experience, especially acoustic perception in soundscape field [31,32]. Nevertheless, in this study, a new method named audio-visual walk (AV-walk) was used to obtain data on audio-visual contexts, audio-visual experiences, and psychological responses to explore the influence of audio-visual interactions on psychological responses of participants.…”

A Comparison between Numerical Simulation Models for the Prediction of Acoustic Behavior of Giant Reeds Shredded

“…In recent years, machine learning-based algorithms have been used to deal with problems of a different nature [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Specifically, neural networks are a very powerful set of algorithms that allow to tackle problems in the field of classification, and of regression.…”