SALVE+

This study project was conducted by the Institute for Urban Public Health (InUPH) at the University Hospital Essen in cooperation with the Institute for Technical Acoustics at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) from February 2022 to June 2024.

Future sustainable urban development requires high urban density. To ensure acceptance for this, urban spaces must be acoustically pleasant. This requires an improved qualitative and quantitative understanding of the relationships between urban acoustic quality, urban spatial structures, and human health. A multidimensional approach is necessary, considering physical-acoustic, sensory, and cognitive-psychological dimensions. Two research fields and their approaches to quantifying the acoustic environment were the focus of the project: Soundscape Ecology/Ecoacoustics and Psychoacoustics. Both approaches offer the advantage of comprehensively and efficiently characterizing the acoustic environment and its properties through various acoustic metrics and describing the acoustic quality of urban spaces beyond the noise perspective. This includes describing the similarities and differences between psychoacoustic and ecoacoustic indices, thereby identifying possible connections between these two approaches for the first time.

Milestones / Achievements

The results achieved in the project provide valuable insights into the applicability of ecoacoustic and psychoacoustic parameters for characterizing urban spaces and lay the foundation for future research and applications. A significant step for advancing research in urban acoustics is the development of the dataset created in the project. This dataset can serve as a basis for further research questions and enables other researchers to build on the findings. Regarding sound source identification, the analyses have shown that many acoustic indices have a strong relationship with the existing built environment. From this, a connection between the indices and the existing sound sources can at least partially be derived. The strong relationship between acoustic indices and the built environment also makes it possible to model a high resolution acoustic environment. Initial results using machine learning methods show promising approaches to estimating acoustic properties based on land use maps and other urban characteristics. Additionally, this approach, in principle, allows the prediction and analysis of all acoustic properties that sufficiently correlate with the built environment.

Another important finding of the study is the possibility of reducing the set of acoustic indices used to describe the urban environment to 11 acoustic clusters. This provides a more efficient method for investigating and describing the acoustic properties of urban areas and can serve as a guideline for future research.

In January 2025, the HEAD-Genuit Foundation received a follow-up application titled “sonic.shift – Effects of Sustainable Urban Development Measures on the Acoustic Environment.” This project aims to build on the results of SALVE+ regarding the urban soundscape.