Manchester Soundscape Experiment Online 2020: an overview

This paper presents results from the Manchester Soundscape Experiment Online 2020. It consisted of a virtual reality (VR) experiment online where participants rated 12 different scenarios with questions. The selected locations were Piccadilly Gardens, Market Street, Peel Park, and a bus stop. Each site was visited and recorded with a 360 camera and soundfield microphone on three crowd densities (empty, medium, and busy). Audio stimuli were converted from first-order ambisonic recordings to head-tracked binaural using Facebook Spatial Workstation software. The questions included the eight soundscape attributes from ISO 12913, three emotional self-assessment manikins, and demographic information. A total of 63 nationalities composed the group of 158 participants. Results from Piccadilly Gardens demonstrated that the eventful and vibrant scales significantly increased with the number of people in the scene. This tendency also happened at Market Street and Peel Park on the arousal emotional state. The other sites had these increases but were not as significant. Future research will include verifying these findings in laboratory conditions alongside measurements of brain activity via electroencephalogram.