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Results of an online survey conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown among 848 home workers living in London (United Kingdom) and in Italy are reported with a focus on (1) the impacts of building services on the perception of the acoustic environment while working and relaxing at home and (2) the factors associated with window opening behaviour. The analyses showed no significant difference in soundscape appropriateness for relaxation depending on the heating, ventilation and cooling system typologies, and in soundscape appropriateness for working from home (WFH) based on the ventilation strategy. Higher soundscape appropriateness for WFH was associated with houses equipped only with radiant floors for heating in Italy and with air-cooling systems in London. In London, air systems resulted in higher perceived dominance of noise from building services compared to other systems. Overall, rooms with less dominant sounds from building services were evaluated as more appropriate for working and relaxing. The dominance of sky or buildings from the window view, outdoor noisiness, noise sensitivity, age and gender were not significantly associated with participants’ window opening behaviour while WFH. Differently, participants viewing more vegetation from windows in Italy were more likely (odds ratio: 1.279) to keep the window open while WFH.

Sound surrounds us every day, whether we are inside buildings or moving around our cities. But what is “sound” and what is “noise?” What effects can arise from exposure to one or the other? This article will introduce the complex and fascinating world of sound, highlighting the opportunities that acoustic scientists have to reduce noise pollution and to design cities and buildings that sound good to our ears, to improve people’s health and wellbeing.

Sexual well-being is a fundamental facet of the overall well-being of individuals and implies the ability to have safe and pleasurable sexual experiences, beyond the absence of disease or disturbance. The extent to which people can achieve sexual well-being depends, among other aspects, on whether they live in an environment that promotes and support it. The present study focuses on the unexplored impacts of the perceived acoustic environment (i.e., the soundscape) on human sexual activity carried out in domestic settings. Verbal descriptions have been gathered from open-ended questions included in a survey administered to 848 respondents living in London (UK) and in Italy in January 2021 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Thematic analysis was used to extract a framework detailing the positive and negative impacts of the acoustic environment on sexual activity. The results show the mechanisms by which the acoustic features of the environment can impact on the sexual experience in terms of privacy, distraction, disruption or support, up to trigger coping strategies (e.g., controlling windows, playing music) and behavioural changes (e.g., lowering the volume of the voice) that can in turn limit or enhance the freedom of sexual behaviour, affect or foster sexual well-being.

Discussion paper on importance on considering noise pollution within the sustainability discourse by using the soundscape framework.

Listening effort describes the allocation of attentional and cognitive resources for successful listening. In adverse conditions, the mental demands for listening increase, interfering with other cognitive functions. This is especially relevant in learning spaces, where complex tasks that recruit more cognitive resources (e.g. memorization of information and comprehension) are performed by the students. This study focuses on the case of university classrooms and investigates the effects of different types of masking noise on both speech intelligibility and listening effort. Speech-in-noise tests in the Italian language were presented to 25 young adults with normal hearing (13 native and 12 non-native listeners) within an existing university classroom located in Bozen-Bolzano (Italy). The tests were presented in three listening conditions (quiet, stationary noise, and fluctuating noise), grouping the listeners around two locations within the classroom. The task performance was assessed using both speech intelligibility and two proxy measures of listening effort: response time and subjective ratings of effort. Longer response times and higher subjective ratings were taken to reflect increased listening effort. Results in noisy conditions were compared to the quiet condition. A disadvantage in task accuracy performance was found for non-native compared to native listeners; concerning response time, it was found that when the target signal is masked by a fluctuating noise, additional processing time is requested to non-native listeners compared to their native peers. The interaction was not pointed out by subjective ratings, supporting the hypothesis of a different sensitivity to listening conditions of the two proxy measures of listening effort.

The focus of the building industry and research is shifting from delivering satisfactory spaces to going beyond what is merely acceptable with a wave of new research and practice dedicated to exploring how the built environment can support task performance and enhance people&rsquo, s health and well-being. The present study addresses the role of acoustics in this paradigm shift. Indoor soundscape research has recently emerged as an approach that brings a perceptual perspective on building and room acoustics in order to shape built environments that &ldquo, sound good&rdquo, according to building occupants&rsquo, preference and needs. This paper establishes an initial discussion over some of the open questions in this field of research that is still in an embryonic stage. A thematic analysis of structured interviews with a panel of experts offered a range of perspectives on the characterization, management, and design of indoor soundscapes and health-related outcomes. The discussion pointed out the importance of both perceptual and multisensory research and integrated participatory design practices to enable a holistic view regarding the complex building&ndash, user interrelations and the design of just cities. Soundscape methodologies tailored to the peculiarities of indoor soundscapes can help to measure and predict the human perceptual response to the acoustic stimuli in context, thus reducing the risk of mismatches between expected and real building experiences. This perceptual perspective is expected to widen the scientific evidence for the negative and positive impacts of the acoustic environment on human health, well-being, and quality of life. This will support prioritizing the role of acoustics in building design and challenge many current design practices that are based on a noise control approach.

Models of perceived affective quality of soundscapes have been recently included into standards to guide the measurement and improvement of urban soundscapes. Such models have been developed in outdoor contexts and their validity in indoor built environments is unclear. A laboratory listening test was performed in a mock-up living room with a window sight, in order to develop an indoor soundscape model for residential buildings. During the test, 35 participants were asked to rate 20 different scenarios each. Scenarios were defined by combining four indoor sound sources and five urban environments, filtered through a window ajar, on 97 attribute scales. By applying principal component analysis, Comfort, Content, and Familiarity, were extracted as the main perceptual dimensions explaining respectively 58%, 25% and 7% of the total variance. Relationships between the principal component scores, acoustic parameters and indoor and outdoor sound categories were investigated. Comfort, Content, and Familiarity were found to be better predicted respectively by loudness N10, level variability LA10-LA90 and sharpness S. The magnitude of linear-mixed-effect model predictions sensibly improved by accounting for sound categories, thus pointing at the importance of semantic meaning of sounds in indoor soundscape assessment. A measurement system is proposed, based on a 2-D space defined by two orthogonal axes, Comfort and Content, and two additional axes, Engagement and Privacy – Control, rotated 45° on the same plane. The model indicates the perceptual constructs to be measured (e.g. in post-occupancy evaluations), the attribute scales to be employed and actions to improve indoor soundscape quality, thus providing a reference for both research and practice.

Data from an online survey conducted in January 2021 by 464 participants living in London and working from home (WFH) after the COVID-19 outbreak were analysed, focusing on: (1) types of building services at home, (2) perceived sound dominance of building services, and (3) the perception of the indoor acoustic environment (i.e. the indoor soundscape) in relation to two main activities, i.e. WFH and relaxation. Results show that most of participants’ houses had radiators for heating and relied on window opening for ventilation and cooling. Air systems (e.g., HVAC systems) resulted in higher perceived dominance compared to other systems, but only when evaluated for WFH. Sound dominance from building services was in turn related to soundscape evaluation. Spaces with less dominant sounds from building services were more appropriate for both WFH and relaxation, and spaces with fewer dominant sounds were assessed better, but just for WFH. Participants’ evaluations generally did not differ according to building service typology. The presence of air-cooling systems was associated with better perceived sound environments, most likely due to better acoustics conditions in newly built or retrofitted dwellings, more probably equipped with air cooling systems. Preliminary findings point out the importance of carefully considering the dominance of sounds by building services, especially for air systems, in relation to traditional and new uses of residential buildings.

The design of an indoor acoustic environment positively perceived by building occupants requires a perceptual approach to be adopted in order to define what makes it sound good. Soundscape standards ISO 12913 have been introduced to assess how the acoustic environment is perceived, in context, by people. According to the standards, a straightforward characterization of a soundscape as positive is currently possible only through measurements by persons, because of a current gap in linking perceptual metrics to acoustic or psychoacoustic measurements. In addition, despite applying also to indoor contexts, methods and perceptual metrics described by the standards have been mainly derived from studies related to outdoor urban environments and it is not clear whether they could be directly applied indoor. For this reason, a systematic review was performed to investigate: (i) Data collection methods used in the literature for indoor residential soundscapes and (ii) factors, output of such methods, that characterize them positively. For this purpose, a systematic review has been conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines (preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses) guidelines. The Scopus database was searched for peer-reviewed journal papers published in English, between 1 January 2009 and 24 June 2019, including: (1) field or laboratory studies relevant to residential buildings and (2) studies assessing factors that influence the perception by building users of indoor acoustic environments. The search excluded studies related to: (a) Speech perception issues; (b) noise-induced sleep disturbance; (c) acoustic perception by hearing impaired building users; (d) perception of vibrations or impact sounds. The search returned 1087 results. After the screening process, 37 articles were finally included. Given the differences in methodologic approaches, a quantitative meta-analysis could not be performed, and a qualitative approach was adopted instead. A large part of the selected literature reflected a general effort of minimizing noise annoyance by reducing noise exposure and, in particular, noise levels. Questionnaires and guided interviews were used to capture people’s perception, while the adoption of soundwalks and non-participatory behavioral studies did not emerge in the review literature and need further investigation. The evaluation of a variety of auditory sensations both in their positive and negative dimensions, beyond annoyance, would be required to explore the positive perceptual potential of sounds. Besides sound level, a variety of factors related and unrelated to the acoustic environment were found to affect perceptual outcomes and a framework of evaluation has been proposed as a reference for future assessments. Results encourage the integration of soundscape methodologies into IEQ research, in order to enhance user health and well-being.

The indoor-outdoor connection provided by ventilation openings has been so far a limiting factor in the use of natural ventilation (NV), due to the apparent conflict between ventilation needs and the intrusion of external noise. This limiting factor impedes naturally ventilated buildings meeting the acoustic criteria set by standards and rating protocols, which are reviewed in this paper for residential buildings. The criteria reflect a general effort to minimize noise annoyance by reducing indoor sound levels, typically without a distinction based on a ventilation strategy. Research has developed a number of solutions, discussed here, that try to guarantee ventilation without compromising façade noise insulation, but, currently, none have been adopted on a large scale. This concept paper highlights the main limits of the current approach. First, a fragmented view towards indoor environmental quality has not included consideration of the following acoustic criteria: (i) how buildings are designed and operated to meet multiple needs other than acoustical ones (e.g., ventilation, visual, and cooling needs) and (ii) how people respond to multiple simultaneous environmental factors. Secondly, the lack of a perceptual perspective has led acoustic criteria to neglect the multiple cognitive and behavioral factors impinging on comfort in naturally ventilated houses. Indeed, factors such as the connection with the outside and the sense of control over one’s environment may induce “adaptive acoustic comfort” opportunities that are worth investigating. The mere use of different sound level limits would not be enough to define criteria tailored to the complex user–building interaction that occurs under NV conditions. More holistic and human-centered approaches are required to guarantee not only neutrally but even positively perceived indoor acoustic environments. For this reason, this paper considers this apparent conflict from a soundscape viewpoint, in order to expose still unexplored lines of research. By underpinning a perceptual perspective and by contextualizing it, the indoor soundscape approach provides a framework capable of overcoming the limits of the traditional noise control approach. This could provide the opportunity to foster a wider adoption of NV as a passive design strategy that enhances user health and well-being, while enabling low-cost, and low-energy cooling and ventilation, thereby contributing to current climate change challenges.

This study addresses the issue of an enhanced acoustical design of rooms for speech, which besides targeting high speech intelligibility also ensures minimal effort in speech reception. Speech-in-noise tests in the Italian language were proposed to normal-hearing young adults, both in situ, within an existing university classroom, and via headphones, using auralized signals obtained from acoustic simulations of the same environment. Later, auralization was used to investigate the effect of realistic modifications to the room acoustics (acoustical treatment of a wall, change of the room size) by altering the virtual model of the classroom. The speech reception performance was characterized by using both the number of words correctly recognized (speech intelligibility, IS) and two estimates of listening effort: the behavioral measure of response time (RT) and a subjective judgement on a rating scale (LE). Firstly, the correspondence between the IS, RT and LE results in situ and in auralized conditions was considered and discussed. Then, the effectiveness of the three metrics in outlining the effect of the acoustic changes of the room was analyzed. The results showed that there were no differences between the compared acoustic conditions in terms of IS. The effects of the characteristics of the room acoustics were instead discriminated when RT and LE were considered, with the greatest number of significant differences observed by using RT. Using RT therefore seems to be an effective and promising strategy to better discern the effects of the room acoustics and to enhance the acoustical design of rooms for speech.

This study reports the outcomes of a literature survey aimed at exploring how different environmental factors-that is acoustic, thermal, visual, and air quality stimuli-interact in affecting building occupants' perception and performance. Recent laboratory studies have been collected, and their methodological approaches reviewed in terms of experimental design, adopted exposures conditions, perception and performance assessment methods. Results have been summarized and compared to identify interaction patterns between environmental factors and possible practical implications for improving the design of both experimental studies and the built environment. The analysis allows highlighting limitations, potential improvements and future opportunities in this field of research, thus providing a reference for further investigations aimed at a deeper understanding, modeling, and prediction of the impacts caused by the main indoor variables on human comfort and performance.

The present work constitutes the sequel to the analysis of data from an online survey administered to 464 home workers in London in January 2021 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Perceived affective quality of indoor soundscapes has been assessed in the survey through a previously developed model, as the combination of two perceptual dimensions, one related to comfort (a comfortable – annoying continuum) and the other to content (a full of content – empty continuum). Part I of the study reported on differences in comfort, content, and soundscape appropriateness based on the activity performed at home during the lockdown, i.e. working from home (WFH) and relaxation. Moreover, associations between soundscape dimensions and psychological well-being have been highlighted. Part II of the study deals with the exploration of the influences of several acoustical, building, urban and person-related factors on soundscape dimensions and well-being. A mixed-method approach has been adopted by combining multivariate regression of questionnaire scores with the qualitative analysis of spontaneous descriptions given by respondents. Results showed that several sound sources, urban features, housing characteristics, working modes and demographic factors can influence (positively and negatively) soundscape dimensions differently depending on the task at hand. Notably, the perceived dominance of neighbours’ noises during relaxation, moderated by noise sensitivity, and the number of people at home were common factors negatively affecting both comfort and well-being, that partially explained the association between comfortable indoor soundscapes and better mental health. The discussion points out the importance of considering the different impacts that acoustical factors (e.g. sound typology), building (e.g., house size), urban (e.g., availability of a quiet side), situational (e.g., number of people at home), and person-related factors (e.g., noise sensitivity) can provide on building occupants depending on the specific activity people are engaged with at home and the opportunities to foster people’s well-being through building, urban and acoustic design.