Investigations on heuristics governing global Soundscape evaluations

根据联邦环境部的一项代表性调查，27%的德国人认为自己和家人的健康受到噪音的威胁。事实上，许多关于噪音影响的研究都揭示了噪音暴露与健康危害之间的重要关系，例如心血管疾病或精神疾病。因此，声音事件的主观评估是至关重要的，因为它可能会导致感知的烦恼，并引起生理应激反应。因此，该项目的目的是深入了解认知过程，特别是注意力和记忆过程，参与声音评估。像听声景这样的常见体验可以分为几个瞬时状态流，这些瞬时状态流的强度每时每刻都在变化。几项研究，例如关于疼痛感知的研究，表明回顾性判断可以很好地解释为在发作期间经历的最极端的影响（峰值）和结束时的影响（峰值和结束规则）的未加权组合。这些发现可能与噪声研究中的那些相关，即单个不期望的声音事件（如车辆经过）可能由于其突出的警报特性而特别困扰人们。在所谓的生态学项目中，将在健全评价的背景下调查峰末规则和首位效应。因此，自然声景，例如交通噪声或产品声音，将由实验室和现场环境中的测试对象进行判断。总共有三个实验，每个实验有三个测试组，将在不同的测试任务和受试者的注意力集中的情况下进行。通过比较三组人的评价，可以证明关于不同判断准则的假设，所得结果将有助于工程师、城市规划师和建筑师在创造声环境（声景）时考虑到有关人员。这意味着避免不需要的声音以及设计特别令人愉快的声音事件。在工业声音设计领域，可以进行更多面向目标的产品修改，例如汽车或家用电器，以满足客户的期望。此外，研究结果将揭示记忆和注意过程在正确判断中的影响。这对一般的判断和决策也有很大的影响，并且可以应用于任何类型的体验，这些体验的享乐强度随时间而变化，例如音乐会，飞机飞行或疼痛状况。

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.