Auditory masking of wanted and unwanted sounds in a city park

Effects of natural sounds on the perception of road traffic noise

“…In the present study, the loudness of the fountain and bird sounds was not assessed, so it was not possible to check if the results are symmetric in the type of sound. It has to be noted that the fountain sound stimuli used in the present study, and consequently their temporal and spectral characteristics, differ from those used in the study by Nilsson et al, 1 and that also the subjective evaluation method used here is different. As is noted by Nilsson et al,…”

“…1 However, significant results were only found for freeway and major road traffic noise, i.e., those cases in which the traffic noise has low temporal variability. Adding bird sound had the same effect only for the freeway noise; surprisingly in the other cases, the bird sound had a higher SNR.…”

“…An alternative approach to improve the quality of the soundscape in well defined spaces such as urban parks, which has gained scholarly interest, is to introduce wanted sounds to mask or distract attention away from unwanted sounds. 1,2 From perceptual tests, it was found that the sound of water features (streams, fountains, etc.) would be the most effective natural sound to mask road traffic noise.…”

“…7 However, it is not clear in which situation the addition of sounds also improves the overall soundscape quality. Next to this, most studies only considered the road traffic noise with small fluctuations in sound level, 1,3,5 which is not always realistic for urban environments. This paper describes a listening experiment in which binaural recordings of different types of road traffic noise are combined with the sound of a fountain and of birds at different sound levels.…”

The influence of crowd density on the sound environment of commercial pedestrian streets

“…For sound factors, it has been demonstrated that for sounds with multiple tonal components, the perceptual process is different from that of single tonal component because the attention of subjects is not automatically focused (Bodden and Heinrichs, 2001). Several special sound sources can also be evaluated higher by users, even if the sound level is generally low (Farina et al, 2011;Nilsson, 2010;Jeon et al, 2012;). In terms of spatial characteristics, Kang (2001) indicated that a suitable reverberation time, e.g., 1-2 s, can make street music more enjoyable.…”