An experimental study on the subjective evaluation of traffic sounds under the visual impact of ecological waterscape

The influence of the visual landscape elements,particularly ecological water patches,on the subjective evaluation of traffic sounds was studied,based on the laboratory tests,using 5-point Liket scale(1:very uncomfortable;5:very comfortable).The results show that,compared with sound-only test conditions,the ecological water patches with different landscape elements reduced linear correlation coefficient between the traffic sound evaluation and sound pressure level(SPL) from -0.91 to -0.81 ~ -0.57,and they could decrease the evaluation of traffic sound of 30 dBA by 0.13~0.68 and increase that of 70 dBA traffic sound by 0.10~0.22.Within a certain SPL range,landscape elements impacted the evaluation of traffic sound in different ways:the evaluation of traffic sound was higher by 0.33/10 dBA under the impact of artificial landscape elements than that of natural elements.In the case of the natural landscape stimuli,with distant view of waterscape the evaluation of traffic sound was 0.33/10 dBA more compared to that with closer-view.The evaluation of traffic sound was also higher by 0.28/10 dBA with landscape element of the appearances of human activities than that with the appearances of animals.