Associations between acoustic indices and the evaluation of the urban soundscape according to ISO 12913

The development of high-quality acoustic environments (AE) is crucial for the transformation of cities into sustainable and health-promoting places. In recent years, the soundscape approach (ISO 12913) has gained attention for quantifying the AE using a standardised questionnaire for soundwalk participants. This way, several qualities of the AE can be analysed. However, soundwalks are costly and limited to a select number of sites. To scale up the assessment of the urban AE, the use of acoustic indices, which could reflect different qualities of a soundscape, represents a promising approach. Therefore, we present an analyses of the association between acoustic indices and affective soundscape qualities. We use soundscape data from the Be-MoVe project in Essen, Germany. In total, 35 soundwalks with 143 participations were conducted and data were collected from 858 questionnaires for 22 listening stations, each with a three-minute audio recording. These recordings are used to calculate ecoacoustic indices and complex network measures based on frequency correlation matrices, as these have shown promising results in previous studies. We present results from descriptive statistics as well as multi-level regression analyses modelling the relationship between self-rated affective qualities of AE and acoustic indices, taking into account spatial variability between different urban locations.