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. 2020 Jun 12;17(12):4205.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph17124205.

A Taxonomy Proposal for the Assessment of the Changes in Soundscape Resulting from the COVID-19 Lockdown

César Asensio  1 , Pierre Aumond  2 , Arnaud Can  2 , Luis Gascó  1 , Peter Lercher  3 , Jean-Marc Wunderli  4 , Catherine Lavandier  5 , Guillermo de Arcas  1 , Carlos Ribeiro  6 , Patricio Muñoz  7 , Gaetano Licitra  8
Affiliations

A Taxonomy Proposal for the Assessment of the Changes in Soundscape Resulting from the COVID-19 Lockdown

César Asensio et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Many countries around the world have chosen lockdown and restrictions on people's mobility as the main strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. These actions have significantly affected environmental noise and modified urban soundscapes, opening up an unprecedented opportunity for research in the field. In order to enable these investigations to be carried out in a more harmonized and consistent manner, this paper makes a proposal for a set of indicators that will enable to address the challenge from a number of different approaches. It proposes a minimum set of basic energetic indicators, and the taxonomy that will allow their communication and reporting. In addition, an extended set of descriptors is outlined which better enables the application of more novel approaches to the evaluation of the effect of this new soundscape on people's subjective perception.

Keywords: COVID-19; descriptors; indicators; lockdown; metrics; noise; sound; soundscape.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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