A Taxonomy Proposal for the Assessment of the Changes in Soundscape Resulting from the COVID-19 Lockdown

A Taxonomy Proposal for the Assessment of the Changes in Soundscape Resulting from the COVID-19 Lockdown

Peter Lercher, Jean Marc Wunderli, Gaetano Licitra, Patricio Munoz, Carlos Ribeiro, Pierre Aumond, Arnaud Can, Catherine Lavandier, Guillermo De Arcas, Cesar Asensio, Luis Gasco

Many countries around the world have chosen lockdown and restrictions on people’s mobility as the main strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. These actions have significantly affected environmental noise and modified urban soundscapes, opening up an unprecedented opportunity for research in the field. In order to enable these investigations to be carried out in a more harmonized and consistent manner, this paper makes a proposal for a set of indicators that will enable to address the challenge from a number of different approaches. It proposes a minimum set of basic energetic indicators, and the taxonomy that will allow their communication and reporting. In addition, an extended set of descriptors is outlined which better enables the application of more novel approaches to the evaluation of the effect of this new soundscape on people's subjective perception.

2020

indicators, Noise, metrics, descriptors, soundscape, COVID-19

DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17124205

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

MDPI AG

Medicine