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Soundscape research represents a paradigm shift from noise control policies towards a new multidisciplinary approach as it involves not only physical measurements but also the cooperation of humanity and social sciences to account for the diversity of soundscapes across countries and cultures, with more focus on how people actually experience the acoustic environments; and it considers environmental sounds as a 'resource' rather than a 'waste'. The ten questions presented in this paper range from the very basic definitions underlying the emerging soundscape science, to more applied topics about how to use soundscape as a design approach for the planning and management of the built environments. Although significant research activity has been conducted so far, there is still a need to systematically provide the underpinning science and practical guidance in soundscaping. Thus, the last question aims to identify the most crucial gaps in soundscape research and set the agenda for future advancements in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When thinking about noise annoyance, the tendency is to imagine a person's rest being disturbed by noise. Although this idea is not formulated explicitly, the majority of traditional experiments implicitly assume that absence of activity during rest represents the typical situation in which noise annoyance should be studied. We propose that research should be extended to different kinds of activities. This study focuses on one kind of activity: verbal communication. Our hypothesis is that the assessment of difficulty with speech comprehension can be replaced by a speech intelligibility measure, which could assess annoyance experienced during communicative activities. Finally, we would like to find out how noise annoyance disturbs communicative activity, and to compare this with annoyance experienced during rest. To test our hypothesis, two psychoacoustic experiments were performed. In Experiment I, speech intelligibility was measured for eight environmental noises at seven signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). For these SNR values, the participants assessed their difficulty with speech comprehension. This established the relationships between the intelligibility functions and the difficultly in speech comprehension for all the investigated noises. The results of Experiment I show that the potential noise annoyance rating could be predicted on the basis of the speech intelligibility scores, as they give much smaller inter-individual differences between participants than an annoyance assessment test. In Experiment II, the standard 'resting' method of noise annoyance assessment was applied to the same eight noises. A comparison of the results indicated a correlation between the annoyance ratings obtained in both the experiments. Some limitations of this approach are also discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noise disturbs communicative activity, which in consequence creates difficulty with comprehending speech accompanied by noise. Obviously difficulty in speech comprehension leads to lower speech intelligibility scores. The idea behind this study is to check if a relationship between speech intelligibility scores and noise annoyance exists. A psychoacoustic experiment was designed to test how different types of noise impaired speech intelligibility. Nine noises were used to obtain the speech reception threshold (SRT), defined as the speech to noise ratio (SNR) corresponding to 50% correct responses. To get speech intelligibility scores, the Polish sentence matrix test (PSMT) was applied. The participants' task was to recreate a whole sentence which they had heard accompanied by noise. In addition, after each sentence, the participants were asked to assess (on a scale from 0-10) how difficult it was to comprehend the sentence heard. The difficulty with comprehending speech accompanied by noise is understood here as annoyance caused by this noise. The results show that the noise annoyance measure recorded during communicative activity is directly related to the speech intelligibility scores: 50% correctly recognized sentences corresponds to the same measure of difficulty with speech comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]