Assessments of Urban Soundscapes: Case Studies in Seoul, South Korea

Soundscape Data Collection And Analysis

The soundscape research and design process start with collecting soundscape data. Soundscape emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach for better understanding the perceived sound environments within specific spatial contexts. Soundscape is not directly related to acoustic indicators but is instead about the interrelationship between non-acoustic factors including the personal (e.g., attitudes to noise sources), the social-cultural (e.g., expectations of places or types of places) and the situational (e.g., visual properties, time of the day, or meteorological conditions). Thus, soundscape data includes perceptual, physical, and socio-cultural factors. Through the soundscape design process, soundscape data collection and analysis is important to understanding existing soundscapes in locations and to developing a predictive model of soundscapes. The typical methods for soundscape data collection are soundwalks, social surveys, laboratory experiments, behavioral observations, and narrative interviews (Aletta, Kang, & Axelsson, 2016). This section describes a soundwalk (Jeon et al., 2013) and a social survey (Hong & Jeon, 2015), which are both widely adopted approaches in soundscape studies due to their utility and flexibility.