Human Dimension of the Soundscape: From Individuals to Society - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 114

principal components of sound evaluation: calmness and vibrancy, and with the
combination of these two axes other attributes of the soundscape can be distributed.
Payne ( 2013 ) has presented a perceived restorativeness soundscape scale (PRSS)
designed to assess perceptions of the potential of a soundscape to offer psychologi-
cal restoration.

5.6 Elements of Psychoacoustics

Psychoacoustics is a field of research that focuses on the use of the psychological
measurements of sound, meaning what people perceive from a sound. The
psychoacoustic studies consider either the human reaction to noise or the physic
character of noise. This approach presents more advantages than the psychological
methods because measures are collected that are independent by visitor self-reports
of noise exposure.
This sound quality evaluation finds many applications in everyday life, because
our life (mostly spent in urban contexts) is immersed in a growing plethora of
artificial and technological sounds.
The perceptual quality of sounds are considered auditory attributes:
psychoacoustical research aims to find the quantitative relationships between the
physical attributes of sounds and their perceived properties.
The physical attributes are evaluated by analyzing the sound signals, and the
psychoacoustical research focuses on auditory attributes such as loudness, pitch,
duration, and sharpness.
Measuring auditory attributes means “providing quantities representative of
what a user perceives” (Susini et al. 2012 ). Among the different approaches, the
judgment on a multiple semantic scale represents a fruitful scale that uses a single
semantic descriptor (unipolar scale) or a pair of antonymic descriptors (bipolar
scale).
Psychoacoustic techniques use the semantic differential (SD), which is
represented by a scale of judgment labeled with two opposite descriptors
(good-bad, poor-rich); such labels are called semantic descriptors. A multidimen-
sional scaling technique (MDS) is an innovative approach (Susini et al. 2012 ) based
on dissimilarity ratings.
The use of different semantic scales concurs to create a semantic profile . In
sound evaluation the use of different perceptional dimensions allows exploring in
detail the relationship between sound attributes and their effects in different aspects
of human life, and this can range from perceptual dimension to cognitive and
emotional aspects.
Psychoacoustical models provide tools for measuring the sensations that sounds
produce in the listeners. Loudness, sharpness, roughness, and fluctuation strength
are four models used to estimate the quality of sound (Ferguson et al. 2006 ),
although the complexity of a soundscape reduces the potentiality of the

psychoacoustic approach as illustrated by Jennings and Cain ( 2013 ) in Fig. 5.4 .