An attempt on the globalization of the soundscape studies for the evaluation of the urban sound planning

Abstract

Soundscape itself has been recently defined in the ISO 12913 as the "acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in context". As a term derived from landscape, soundscape is the designation of any human-audible sounding environment. Schafer categorized the main themes of a soundscape as keynotes, signals and soundmarks (sounds by which one can identify a place). A wide-frame study that aims to develop an applied soundscape approach for the evaluation, conservation and rehabilitation of acoustical comfort in urban areas (selected in Turkey) documented that there was a direct relationship between the satisfaction from soundmark and the sound environment, and therefore sound environment could be assessed depending on the soundmark. Depending on this, in order to enrich this approach by various field applications, this study was realized to try out the viability of the approach on soundscapes in different cultural urban areas (selected in Italy). On the other hand in various soundscape studies it is mentioned that perceived sound quality may be affected by the cultural differences. Therefore this study is also an attempt on the globalization of the soundscape studies