The development and application of the emotional dimensions of a soundscape

People have emotional reactions to the built environment, and the sonic environment is one of the major contributing factors of people’s experiences of places. It is useful for decision makers such as planners, architects, engineers and designers to understand the link between the soundscapes of built environments, and their resultant emotional reactions within users of those environments. This understanding can allow these decision makers to make better informed decisions about built environment design, and achieve the desired positive emotional responses from users. The issue under question, and the subject of this paper, was to understand and define the emotional dimensions of a soundscape, and then to explore how the resultant dimensional space could have a practical application in decision making. Through data generated through the Positive Soundscapes Project, a Principal Component Analysis was conducted to decompose descriptors of the urban soundscape into two independent emotional dimensions. It was found that the two independent emotional dimensions of a soundscape relate to its “Calmness” and “Vibrancy”, and these could be positioned to describe a 2-Dimensional (2-D) perceptual space. Listening evaluations were then conducted to explore how perceptions of different types of urban soundscape could be plotted with the 2D emotional perceptual space, and to illustrate how (i) introducing design interventions can change the position of soundscapes within this space and (ii) how metrics such as dB(A) do not necessarily correlate with calmness and vibrancy scores. Through illustrative examples, we suggest how such a 2-D perceptual space might have a practical use in the planning process, primarily as a means for presenting users’ perceptions of soundscapes in a simple, visual, and easy to compare manner, and for setting targets for current and future soundscape design. We conclude with recommendations for further work required to fully develop these emotional dimensions and the 2-D perceptual space into a useful tool.