Sound preferences of the dense urban environment: Soundscape of Cairo

A questionnaire study was conducted to investigate the soundscape preferences of the sonic environment in Cairo. Participants, who were Cairo residents, were questioned about their appraisal of familiar urban soundscapes in a close- and open-ended format questionnaire.Psycholinguistic data analysis of verbal descriptions expressed by respondents was conducted to identify the relevance of semantic categories of environmental sounds and quantitative soundscape aspects for the urban sonic environment of Cairo. Results confirmed a direct relevance of the linguistic semantic auditory judgment and of the outputs of the quantitative close-ended questions. Cairenes were also found to express their sonic environment linguistically based on physical properties rather than semantic features and values.Analyzing the relative annoyance increase (RAI) of the close-ended part, overall positive RAI values for all sound categories reveal how sensitive to noise Cairo residents are. Results further showed that at an RAI value of approximately 27%, sound category perception transforms from positive to negative.