The Ideal Urban Soundscape: Investigating the Sound Quality of French Cities

A questionnaire study was conducted to investigate the sound quality of urban environments. Seventy-seven participants living in large French cities were questioned about their appraisal of familiar urban soundscapes in a free-response format questionnaire. A psycholinguistic analysis of spontaneous verbal descriptions was conducted to identify semantic categories of environmental sounds and relevant sound quality criteria for urban soundscapes. Our results confirm the influence of semantic features, besides physical ones, on auditory judgments, and further reveal the salience of human sounds.