Listening to a City with the soundwalk method

Urban sounds are a characteristic part of a city's identity. This paper deals with a method for the evaluation of some characteristics of an urban soundscape. The method is supposed to help urban planners and other town designers to improve the outside acoustics in cities. Besides this, architects pay attention to the way in which transition from one place to another is organised. The method which is supposed to assess urban soundscape is based on the so-called soundwalk, which could be very illustrative for this suggestion. Soundwalks are sound recordings made with a binaural system (SEB) and a DAT recorder, on walks along a route with different urban forms. The different data (commented analyse of each track, recordings, photos, map,...) extracted from the soundwalks are examined in order to gather information about the relationship between the urban characteristics, urban activities and the sound environment. The acoustical images (time versus frequency graphs) of the sound signals can be seen as a representation of the soundscapes. The purpose of this approach is to enable us to evaluate what is pleasant and relevant in an urban sound environment in accordance with activities in the area.