Urban Ambience: sound matters

Architectural/urban ambience can be defined as “the experienced physical and psychological qualities of the built environment, based on the assumption that comfort and satisfaction, the absence of these, results from the human perception and cognition of an urban (or architectural) space”. The results will come through the interaction with several inputs like air quality, temperature, luminance and sound. Taking into account that ambience is just one feature of habitability, and that habitability is a relevant aspect of sustainability, factors that influence our architectural or urban ambience are matter of study. Sound is one of them, because it has become one of the main cause of environmental discomfort.

An important study has been done by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ which released a National Transportation Noise Map, that details the soundscape throughout the country, based on highway and aviation noise. Soundscape is about relationships between the ear, human beings, sound environments, and society (Kang & Zhang 2007). A typical map of a specific area, would be like the following which corresponds to the city of New York:

The information shown in the picture, reveals that the areas close to airports (painted in blue) have high levels of noise, so this is an important tool to evaluate population exposure to sound over healthy standards. Several studies demonstrate that road an airport noise is related to cardiovascular illnesses and poor learning in children at schools. Other usefulness of the map, is that provides a framework based on quantitative data for helping policy makers to prioritize noise-related transportation investments. Thus, if soundscape maps were massified, they would be a useful tool for public health issues and city developments. Regrettably, maybe not all the countries have access to data and resources for making this mapping.