SALVE+
This study project was conducted by the Institute for Urban Public Health (InUPH) at the University Hospital Essen in cooperation with the Institute for Fluid Mechanics and Technical Acoustics at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) from February 2022 to June 2024.
Future sustainable urban development requires high urban density. To ensure acceptance for this, urban spaces must be designed to be acoustically pleasant. This requires an improved qualitative and quantitative understanding of the relationships between urban acoustic quality, urban spatial structures, and human health. A multidimensional approach is necessary, taking into account the physical-acoustic, sensory, and cognitive-psychological dimensions. For this purpose, the project focused on two research fields and their approaches to quantifying the acoustic environment: soundscape ecology/eco-acoustics and psychoacoustics. Both approaches offer the advantage of comprehensively and efficiently characterizing the acoustic environment and its properties through various acoustic metrics and describing the acoustic quality of urban spaces beyond the noise perspective. This includes describing the similarities and differences between psychoacoustic and eco-acoustic indices, thereby identifying possible connections between these two approaches for the first time.
Milestones / Achievements
The results achieved in the project provide valuable insights into the applicability of eco- and psycho-acoustic parameters for characterizing urban spaces and lay the foundation for future research and applications. A significant step for advancing research in the field of urban acoustics is the development of the dataset created in the project. This dataset can serve as a basis for further research questions and enables other researchers to build on the insights gained. Regarding sound source identification, the analyses have shown that many acoustic indices have a strong relationship to the existing built environment. From this, a connection between the indices and the existing sound sources can be derived, at least partially. The strong relationship between acoustic indices and the built environment also allows for high-resolution modeling of the acoustic environment. Initial results using machine learning methods show promising approaches to estimating acoustic properties based on land use maps and other urban characteristics. Moreover, this approach enables the prediction and analysis of all acoustic properties that sufficiently correlate with the built environment.
Another important finding of the study is the possibility of reducing the set of acoustic indices for describing the urban environment to 11 acoustic clusters. This provides a more efficient method for investigating and describing the acoustic properties of urban areas and can serve as a guideline for future research work.
In January 2025, the HEAD-Genuit Foundation received a follow-up application titled “sonic.shift – Effects of Sustainable Urban Development Measures on the Acoustic Environment.” This project aims to build on the results of SALVE+ regarding the urban soundscape.
