IJERPH Webinar | Environmental Acoustics Monitoring and Soundscape
the chair
9th IJERPH Webinar
Environmental Acoustics Monitoring and Soundscape
Environmental sounds have been widely considered as “noise” by epidemiologists because of the potential for annoyance to citizens and its effects on well-being and quality of life. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently published its recommendations to reduce citizens' exposure to the most typical sources of community noise (e.g., road, railway and air traffic, wind turbine noise, etc.). Most policies have the goal of minimizing noise exposure; however, while the relationships between noise exposure and possible adverse health effects have been thoroughly investigated in literature, less is known about the association between environmental sounds and perceptual outcomes other than annoyance. Soundscape studies propose methodological approach to explore this, but they are typically limited in scope and rely on small datasets, so that large-scale effects are difficult to observe and extrapolate. Recent technological developments in the fields of crowd-sourced data (e.g., acoustic monitoring mobile applications) and the use of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASN) offer new ways of gathering data that is more likely to inform a holistic assessment of the urban acoustic environments.
Date: 15 November 2022
Time: 1:00 pm CET | 12:00 pm GMT | 7:00 am EST | 8:00 pm CST Asia
Webinar ID: 885 4000 5728
Webinar Secretariat: ijerph.webinar@mdpi.com
Meet Our Speakers
Dr. Rosa Maria Alsina Pages
Research Group on Media Technologies, La Salle Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain;
Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès is a telecommunication and electronics engineer, Director of Research of La Salle-URL and researcher at Research Group on Media Technologies. She has been working in signal processing for more than 15 years, first applied to communications and afterwards, to acoustic event detection and sound analysis.
Dr. Francesco Aletta
Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, University College London, UK;
Francesco Aletta is an architect and urban sound planner by training, research associate at University College London (UK). He has been active in soundscape studies for more than 10 years with an interest in methods for measuring soundscape perception by people and standardization processes, as well as how to translate soundscape descriptors in languages other than English.
On Tuesday, 15 November 2022, MDPI and the IJERPH Journal organized the 9th IJERPH webinar, entitled "Environmental Acoustics Monitoring and Soundscape".
The introduction was held by the Chairs of the webinar, Dr. Rosa Maria Alsina Pages and Dr. Francesco Aletta. Dr. Alsina Pages is a telecommunication and electronics engineer, Director of Research of La Salle-URL and researcher at Research Group on Media Technologies. Dr. Aletta is an architect and urban sound planner by training, research associate at University College London (UK).
The first presentation was held by Prof. Dr. Stephen Dance with his presentation "The Quietest Locations in Great Britain and Ireland - Results from The Quiet Project: UK Acoustic Community’s Response to COVID19". He is the Director of the Acoustics Group at London South Bank University.
He was followed by Prof. Dr. Jerónimo Vida Manzano and his presentation "Recent Investigations on Soundscape and Environmental Noise in Granada, Spain". He is tenured Professor at University of Granada.
The third presenter was Dr. Marc Freixes Guerreiro, who talked about "Sons al Balcó, a Citizen Science Approach to Map the Soundscape of Catalonia". He is a lecturer and researcher on audio and speech processing at La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull, where he earned a degree in Telecommunications Engineering, and a PhD.
The last presenter was Dr. Jieling Xiao with her presentation "Mapping Barriers to the Implementation of ISO 12913 Standard on Soundscapes". She is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Design. Her research specializes in sensory urbanism and design with a track record of publications on urban soundscapes and smellscapes.
The presentations were followed by a Q&A and a discussion, moderated by the Chairs Dr. Rosa Maria Alsina Pages and Dr. Francesco Aletta. The webinar was offered via Zoom and required registration to attend. The full recording can be found here on Sciforum website. In order to stay updated on the next webinars on IJERPH be sure to sign up for our newsletter by clicking on “Subscribe” at the top of the page.