Research on the soundscape of Zabrze as part of the PBL project
As part of the PBL project, students and researchers at the Silesian University of Technology developed an application on the soundscape of Zabrze. The interdisciplinary team's research consisted of measuring and recording sounds at selected 60 points in the city and acoustic tests on 93 people.
Those surveyed indicated that, in terms of sound, parks were the most pleasant, while churches were the least pleasant.
The PBL project entitled. "Designing the acoustic component of a smart city using soundscape concepts and mobile technologies" was carried out in the past academic year by an interdisciplinary team consisting of students and researchers from the Faculty of Organization and Management and the Faculty of Applied Mathematics. The supervisor was Waldemar Paszkowski, Ph.D., from the Department of Production Engineering at the Faculty of Organization and Management.
- The concept of soundscapes, which is being developed in environmental acoustic research, includes various aspects and factors related to sound perception. Assessment of the quality of life of a place used by people can be studied through the prism of stimulus perception. In particular, the subjective evaluation of sound in an urban environment can be expressed by answering the question: whether it is pleasant or not to be in a particular place," said Dr Paszkowski.
The research problem concerned the development of a way to support the soundscape design of urban spaces, with a particular focus on the auditory interaction of the recipients to the occurring acoustic stimuli.
The problem was solved by means of two experiments:
- in an outdoor environment: by means of recording and processing the acoustic signal using specialized measuring equipment at selected points in the city,
- in a closed room: by means of evaluation of the acoustic signal using a listening booth (Fig.1) and the psychoacoustic test method.
Sound measurements and recording were carried out at selected 60 points in the city, using ambisonic (spatial) recording mode. This mode was also maintained while playing sounds in the presence of test persons in a closed room.
The tests were conducted individually on 93 people aged 21-50, using a seven-point sound rating scale (where a value of 7 corresponded to a rating for the most pleasant sound). Selected results from the test are shown in Figure 2.
The end result was the development of a mobile device application that allows users to identify and evaluate the soundscape for selected points on the map of the city of Zabrze.
In the adopted solution, the visualization part of the application is a set of points located on a map background representing the locations of the measurements.
On the other hand, the descriptive part of the constructed layer contains a set of attributes characterizing aspects related to the site, acoustic measurements and sound evaluation (i.e., recorded equivalent sound level LAeq, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure at the time of measurements, photo of the site, recorded sound file, average value of auditory impressions evaluation from psychoacoustic tests).
The information obtained in terms of subjective assessment and thus the significance of the impact of sources can be used in design work related to urban planning and development, the use of noise barriers or the shaping of the acoustic climate of urban spaces.
The study was a pilot research.
The results of the project were presented at the 11th session of the World Urban Forum in Katowice, Poland, in late June.
The project involved PhD Marcin Sobota, PhD Artur Kuboszek, PhD Marcin Dąbrowski, Sebastian Giełżecki, Kamil Kowalczyk, Grzegorz Koperwas, Wiktoria Paulus, Agata Fąfara, Agnieszka Majda. PBL's main supervisor: PhD Waldemar Paszkowski.
