Dependency of Soundscape Assessment From User Activities
It is good practice to design architectural spaces to maximize user comfort during activities expected to take place there. This general attention is supported by guidelines on “well-designed places” (UK GOV, 2014), or studies stressing out the impact on places on health (Frumkin, 2003). The interaction with natural environments can improve cognitive functioning (Berman, Jonides, and Kaplan, 2008), and the physiological role of soundscapes on this restorative potential (Medvedev, Sheperd, & Hautus, 2015) recently started being explored.
When inhabiting spaces, humans do not always intentionally listen to the entirety of the surrounding soundscape, for example filtering out some sounds to focus attention on specific tasks (Ghozi et al., 2015). Foale (2014) researched this topic by asking participants to keep a sound diary, creating a summary of their listening activities, according to their everyday schedule.
Attention can be selective and affect the perceived quality of a soundscape. Meng and Kang (2013) found that those waiting for somebody in a shopping mall perceived the environment as louder than those shopping, walking or passing by, and judged their acoustic comfort as lower. They also found a similar influence of human behaviors on the judgement of sound-related outdoor activities (Meng & Kang, 2016).
Hong and Jeon (2015) defined the relative weight of seven factors on the users’ judgements of four different areas (commercial, residential, business, recreational). Judgements depended on the different importance attributed for each case to sound sources (human, natural, traffic), to the harmony of the environment, pleasantness, eventfulness and visual quality.
‘Harmony of the environment’ can influence the perceived quality of a soundscape. Xiao and Aletta (2016) specified that for a library user, this concept of being appropriate for the environment may differ from the overall quality, and depends on the activities performed by the user, such as the intention to interact and communicate, read and think, or be adaptive.