Recent Developments in the Standardization of Soundscape

The assessment of acoustic environments by means of the soundscape approach gains in significance, which is illustrated by the vast amount of scientific studies and experiments recently conducted. First steps are taken to standardize parts of the soundscape approach, namely the definition of soundscape and its conceptual framework and the data collection. The definition of soundscape and its conceptual framework is already provided in the ISO 12913-1 standard. Standardizing parts of the soundscape data collection process is recently under way. Those standardization efforts seem mandatory, since due to the broad diversity of methods applied to collect data, the comparability of the outcomes of soundscape investigations is rather limited impeding to gain deeper insights into the mechanism of perceiving and experiencing acoustic environments in context. Moreover, missing standards in the context of soundscape might hinder local authorities and municipalities so far to apply soundscape techniques for the investigation of urban areas. The paper will illustrate the recent achievements in the standardization of soundscape with special focus on data collection - how to measure soundscapes according to the upcoming technical specification. Moreover, challenges in standardizing parts of the data collection for soundscape investigations will be discussed.