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Fig. 5.5
Ordination of 50 soundscape excerpts of binaural recordings of urban outdoor
soundscapes on 116 attribute scales according to pleasantness and eventfulness.
Filled squares
human sounds,
filled circles
technological sounds,
open squares
natural sounds,
open circles
no
dominant sound-category (Reproduced with permission from Axelsson et al.
2010
)
complex experiments confirm that soundscape perception can be described in terms
of three basic components: pleasantness, eventfulness, and familiarity.
Pleasantness explains the 50 % of variance in soundscape measures creating an
ordination between pleasant and unpleasant on a continuum. Eventfulness explains
16 % of the variance, ordering the soundscape in an eventful-uneventful contin-
uum. Familiarity expresses 8 % of the variance according to a familiar-unfamiliar
continuum. This indicator is considered less significant in the sonic assessment and
was perceived as similar among the different categories of respondents. However,
this factor could be important in cases of intercultural comparison and could be
more efficiently applied in touristic cities.
Other possible classifications of the soundscape regard the emergent attributes of
exciting and calming. Exciting mixes together high arousal with pleasure, and
calming mixes low arousal with pleasure. Technological sounds were found affect-
ing the pleasantness negatively after the control of the overall intensity. Analysis of
the natural sounds does not reflect a direct relationship with pleasantness. For
instance, a far background noise that has a low-frequency spectrum is difficult to
be masked by natural sounds that are generally, as for bird songs, acting at higher
frequencies. Human sounds are considered more eventful than natural sounds and
this fact should be considered for future soundscape planning. Human sounds such
as from playgrounds or a cafeteria increase the eventfulness of a pleasant sonic
environment.
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