Urban environment soundscape evaluation: Milan case study of noise events perceptions by citizens

As one of the main urban environmental pollutants, noise is becoming a real public health concern due to its impact on citizen's wellbeing. Real-operation noise monitoring can help policy makers in improving the quality of urban environments. To this end, Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASNs) have been deployed in crowded city centers in both America and Europe. The main application of WASNs is to measure the noise levels from road traffic. Yet, other types of sounds can be found in urban areas, which may also affect citizen's health. Here, we aim to evaluate the citizen's degree of annoyance caused by different urban sounds considering their psychoacoustic characteristics, namely loudness and sharpness. To this end, we have designed several off-line listening tests using a urban acoustic event dataset collected by WASNs in Milan. The dataset includes ten common urban noises such as dog barking, sirens, horns, bells, trains, brakes, people talking, among others. Participants have been asked to rate the degree of annoyance and the level of agreement with other adjectives such as loud, shrilling, disturbing, sharp or pleasent. The test responses from one hundred volunteers allow us to gather valuable information about people's perceptions of common urban noises.