Investigations on heuristics governing global Soundscape evaluations

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jochen Steffens
• Subject Area: Acoustics
• Term: from 2013 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252042763

According to a representative survey of the Federal Environment Ministry 27% of the Germans see their own and their families' health endangered by noise. Indeed many investigations on the effect of noise uncover significant correlations between noise exposure and health hazards, e.g. in the case of cardiovascular or psychiatric diseases. Thereby, the subjective assessment of a sound event is of crucial importance since it may lead to perceived annoyance and cause physiological stress reactions. Thus, the aim of the project is to gain a profound understanding of cognitive processes, in particular attention and memory processes, being involved in sound evaluations. Common experiences like listening to a Soundscape can be separated into several streams of transient states that vary in intensity from moment to moment. Several studies, e.g. on pain perception, show that retrospective judgements could be well explained by an unweighted combination of the most extreme affect (peak) experienced during the episode and by an affect at the ending (peak and end rule). These findings might be associated with those in noise research that a single undesired sound event like a vehicle passing by may particularly annoy people due to its salient, alarming character. Within the project so-called heuristics, the peak and end rule and the primacy effect, will be investigated in the context of sound evaluations. Therefore natural Soundscapes, e.g. traffic noise or product sounds, will be judged by test subjects in laboratory and field environments. In total, three experiments, each with three test groups, will be performed while varying the test task and the focus of attention of the subjects. By comparing the evaluations of the three groups the hypotheses concerning the different judgement heuristics can be proven.The obtained results will help engineers, city planners, and architects to create acoustical environments (Soundscapes) while taking account of the people concerned. This implies the avoidance of unwanted sounds as well as the design of sound events which are particularly perceived as pleasant. In the field of industrial sound design more target-oriented product modifications, e.g. of cars or household appliances, can be performed to address customer expectations. Moreover, the research outcomes will disclose the impact of memory and attention processes in sound judgements. This also has great implications for judgements and decision making in general and may apply to any kind of experiences that varies in hedonic intensity over time, e.g. a music concert, an aircraft flight, or pain conditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Canada
• Host: Professorin Dr. Catherine Guastavino