LAUSR

The Urban Soundscapes of the World project aims to set the stage for a standard on recording and reproducing urban acoustic environments with soundscape in mind. Immersive audiovisual recordings, which combine high quality spatial (binaural) audio with 360 degree video, are valuable to serve as an ecologically valid baseline for assessing the perceptual influence of noise control and soundscaping measures through auralization. As architects and designers commonly work by example, one of the goals of this project is to compile a comprehensive reference database of well-documented exemplars. These are to be recorded at a range of urban sites with a wide variety of soundscapes, in order to be able to achieve a good statistical power in any subsequent analysis. For this purpose, a protocol for selecting recording locations and time periods in a systematic way is developed, based on a common questionnaire that is conducted among panels of local experts in each selected city. The questionnaire contains open que...