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The mobility and activity restrictions imposed in Spain due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant improvement in the urban noise pollution that could be objectively measured in those cities with acoustic sensor networks deployed. This significant change in the urban soundscapes was also perceived by citizens who positively appraised this new acoustic scenario. In this work, authors present a comparative analysis between different noise indices provided by 70 sound sensors deployed in Barcelona, both during and before the lockdown, and the results of a perceptual test conducted in the framework of the project Sons al Balcó during the lockdown, which received more than one hundred contributions in Barcelona alone. The analysis has been performed by clustering the objective and subjective data according to the predominant noise sources in the location of the sensors and differentiating road traffic in heavy, moderate and low-traffic areas. The study brings out strong alignments between a decline in noise indices, acoustic satisfaction improvement and changes in the predominant noise sources, supporting the idea that objective calibrated data can be useful to make a qualitative approximation to the subjective perception of urban soundscapes when further information is not available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lockdown in Spain due to COVID-19 caused a strong decrease in the urban noise levels observed in most cities, clearly followed in the case that these cities had acoustic sensor networks deployed. This fact had an impact on people's lives, who, at that time, were mainly locked at home due to health reasons. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the subjective vision of the citizens participating in a data-collecting campaign during the COVID-19 lockdown in Girona, a Catalan city, named 'Sons al Balcó'. The alignment of the subjective data gathered was too scarce to conduct final conclusions, but already giving a bias of the results indicates that the objective L A e q measurements, which showed a clear decrease in noise in the streets during the lockdown, were supported by the fact that new sounds found during the lockdown were not very annoying. Former existing noise sources, such as road traffic noise or leisure noise, are depicted as annoying but their decrease during the lockdown improved the soundscape of many homes. This paper's goal is to show the possibility of gathering both objective and calibrated data with perceptive approximation for the first time in 'Sons al Balcó', and how this supports our conclusions, in survey with a limited number of participants conducted during the 2020 lockdown period in Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]