Human Dimension of the Soundscape: From Individuals to Society - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 112

hormonal secretions are effects of massive exposure to noise. In populations living
near an airport, serious effects can be observed such as apathy, decreased secretion
of hormones, depression of the immune system, and also decreased social contact.
The increase of blood pressure is an important effect that represents some uncer-
tainty because other factors such as diet, smoking, and heredity have a great
influence.
The effects of noise exposure on the urban society are of growing concern, but
the major problem to control and possibly to reduce such exposure largely depends
on methods that can measure in efficient and realistic ways the noise dose important
for our physiological and social system.
The effect of annoyance is only in part caused by noise exposure, but other
factors such as landscape appreciation may play an important role, as already
described. A positive evaluation of the landscape can improve or can reduce the
effects of annoyance. Three components are important in soundscape evaluations:
the context, the focus of attention, and personal knowledge/experience; this means
that both the environscape and psychscape are important. Finally, annoyance is
reduced or is perceived as more important according to the level of appreciation of
the surroundings.

5.5 A Soundscape Semantic

Soundscape categorization has been obtained using objective acoustical parameters
such as sound pressure level, roughness and fluctuation strength, sharpness, and
binaural parameters (Rychtarikova and Vermeir 2013 ).
When the noise is considered simply as a quantity of energy (and measured as
sound pressure level), we exclude the psychological and social factors. But a more
qualitative approach to describe how noise is interpreted by the human mind in its
semantic components seems more appropriate. In fact, the semantic methods allow
connecting people's feelings with a linguistic and psychophysical approach and
allows us to consider the soundscape an emotional perceptual space. As a direct
consequence, the difference between noise and sound becomes of an

emotional type.
A complex multidisciplinary approach to a semantic of soundscape, recently
proposed by Davies et al. ( 2013 ), recognized at least three semantic levels: sound
sources, sound descriptors, and soundscape descriptors.
Source sources refer to physical entities that can be originated by multiple agents
(e.g., traffic) or components (e.g., brakes). The sound descriptors refer to the
description of sounds either as nouns (roar, crash) or as adjectives (bipping,
flapping) and phrases (different language).
Finally, soundscape descriptors refer to the emergent sound from indistinct
agents (cacophony, hubbub, constant, temporal) (Fig. 5.3 ).