A principal components model of soundscape perception

There is a need for a model that identifies underlying dimensions of soundscape perception, and which may guide measurement and improvement of soundscape quality. With the purpose to develop such a model, a listening experiment was conducted. One hundred listeners measured 50 excerpts of binaural recordings of urban outdoor soundscapes on 116 attribute scales. The average attribute scale values were subjected to principal components analysis, resulting in three components: Pleasantness, eventfulness, and familiarity, explaining 50, 18 and 6% of the total variance, respectively. The principal-component scores were correlated with physical soundscape properties, including categories of dominant sounds and…

• SF
  Stiftelsen för Miljöstrategisk Forskning
• SF
  Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning
• V
  VINNOVA
• SF
  Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas