Qualitative Judgements of Urban Soundscapes: Questionning Questionnaires and Semantic Scales

The present work aims at a qualitative analysis of various soundscapes in two French cities in order to evaluate and potentially improve urban development. The method employs an analysis of open-ended questions and of verbal comments and judgments on a semantic differential grid. On-site experiments were carried out in various urban locations of two French cities, such as main thoroughfares, pedestrian districts, playgrounds and market squares. Differential patterns were clearly seen from a histogram analysis of the differential grid, which points to the limits of an average calculation of the semantic scale. A psycholinguistic analysis of the verbal comments was carried out to explicate the heterogeneous judgements across people about temporal, spatial and activity appraisals that the quantitative data obscure. Such an analysis allowed us to differentiate two cognitive modes for representing urban soundscapes: (i) a "descriptive listening" mode which refers to the identification of acoustic sources or events; and (ii) a "holistic hearing" mode which refers to the soundscape as a whole, without semantic processing of any specific sources. Since the same physical phenomenon may be interpreted by two distinct cognitive representations, the results highlight the need for employing differential scales with a semantic analysis to improve qualitative judgement and to further elaborate new semantic as well as physical indicators based on community noise measurements.