Sonic Patterns I: The Noise - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 174

6.24 The Cognitive Component in Noise Evaluation
The soundscape term that appears in the literature in a inflationary way after the first
use by Schafer ( 1977 ) is not an objectively existing reality but the result of
cognitive processes, resulting in a culturally affected context connected to human
perception (Genuit and Fiebig 2006 ).
The evaluation of a soundscape, defined also as “ perception of the acoustic
environment as perceived by people in that place, in context” , is based on the
discriminant of wanted or unwanted sound into a specific context and not simply by
the metric of sound level. Unpleasant-pleasant, uneventful-eventful, chaotic-quiet,
and boring-exciting are some terms used to describe the sonic context according to
the personal attitude and sensitivity of the subject.
In fact, the common acoustical and psycho-acoustical metrics are not related to
personal evaluation of sound quality, as resulted from experimentation carried out
in Hong Kong by Lam et al. ( 2010 ).
In research conducted in the urban area of Rotterdam, found no correlation
between annoyance from various sound sources and the pleasantness of these
sound sources.
In parks, a discrimination was found for music (both annoying and pleasant),
airplane (pleasant), water (pleasant), animals (pleasant), city sounds (pleasant),
road traffic (annoying), people (annoying), and scooters (annoying).
In natural areas the sound discriminative sources were people, children, and
water. Water and birds were discriminative for annoyance. Construction noise in
the parks was surprisingly of little interest to the subjects interviewed, which fact
remains unexplained.
An example of psychological conditioning has been reported by Schuemer-
Kohrs et al. ( 1998 ) comparing noises perceived by train traffic and noises perceived
by highway traffic. These authors carried out 16,000 interviews after having
selected eight areas in which train and traffic noise were equally distributed. The
results confirmed that people were more tolerant toward train noise than toward
road traffic noise. The authors warn that the investigation was conducted along a
railway with fewer than 260 trains in 24 h, with a speed not greater than 200 km/
h and with a proportion of freight traffic not exceeding 67 %. Different results could
be expected with high-speed trains and modern intense passenger and freight traffic.
In urban areas, the natural remnants or the artificial natural places are very much
appreciated and the relationship between soundscape quality and tranquility is very
strong.
In fact, natural components receive high appreciation when the context is urban,
but these features are neglected in natural areas because they are abundant and
diffuse or a higher profile of natural integrity is required for explicit appreciation. In
other words, in natural systems the integrity is absolutely necessary to appreciate
quality and tranquility.
The soundscape strongly reflects people's expectations according to the individ-
ual profile, experience, and cultural background. Thus, the soundscape rating will