Noise Annoyance in Urban Life: the Citizen as a Key Point of the Directives

The improvement of the quality of life in the framework of the smart-city paradigm cannot be limited to measuring objective environmental factors but should also consider the assessment of the citizens’ health. Road traffic noise has been widely studied in terms of citizens’ annoyance and its impact on health, but other types of urban noise are usually out of those analysis. Each node of a wireless acoustic sensor network can pick up street noise, and can even record specific sounds that reach a higher equivalent level for study, but the most important thing for administration is whether certain types of noise annoy the citizen. In this work, we present the analysis and the selection of several audio samples collected by a wireless acoustic sensor network in an urban environment in order to conduct perceptive tests by several users. This a first approximation to the evaluation of the real perception of citizens’ annoyance of the urban noise collected by a low-cost wireless acoustic sensor network.