Human Dimension of the Soundscape: From Individuals to Society - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 130

Table 5.6 Urban sites in Seoul City and sound pressure levels at each site ( L eq , dBA)

Main
function

Sound
sources SPL a SPL a

Site Sound sources Site Main function

1 Commercial,

office

Traffic, footsteps,
music from
buildings,
surrounding
speech

72.1 (3.1) 6 Office, cultural

(historic
building)

Traffic,
footsteps,
speech

66.9 (2.5)

2 Commercial,

office

Traffic, footsteps,
construction,
music from
buildings,
surrounding
speech

68.7 (2.8) 7 Relaxation,

office

Traffic,
footsteps,
speech,
water
(stream)

65.2 (2.0)

3 Square,

office

Traffic, water
(fountain),
construction,
children

68.9 (3.0) 8 Commercial,

office

Traffic,
footsteps,
water
(stream),
music
from
buildings

69.0 (2.0)

4 Square,

office,
cultural

Traffic, water
(fountain),
surrounding
speech

75.5 (4.2) 9 Relaxation Wind, birds,

children,
traffic

52.2 (1.2)

5 Commercial Traffic, footsteps,

music from
buildings

63.3 (1.8) 10 Relaxation,

recreation

Wind, birds,
speech,
traffic

61.0 (2.2)

Source: Reproduced with permission from Jeon et al. ( 2011 )
a

Numbers in parentheses represent standard deviation of sound levels

For every couple of statements seven degrees were scored: extremely, quite,
slightly, neither, lightly, quite, extremely
4. Individual information was articulated as

Gender and age
House type: apartment/row house/detached house/other
Number of visits to urban spaces (0-10)
Your sensitivity to noise (0-19 scores).

The use of a questionnaire and of soundwalks allowed collecting important
details about the composition of a soundscape. The urban soundscape can be
characterized by soundmarks where acoustic comfort, visual images, and day
lighting dominate the soundscape survey. Reverberation does not discriminate,
but this factor can be easily replaced by physical measurements. Openness and
density seem important visual characters.
An experiment was conducted by Viollon et al ( 2002 ) on a group of subjects who
were requested to rate eight urban sound environments (recordings) at the same
time with five visual settings (four color slides showing a different degree of
urbanization

and a control without slides, with two sound scales