Evaluation of the Turkish Soundscape Circumplex Model, and the Effects of Sound Source Dominance, Sequence, and Gender on the Perceived Affective Quality

Abstract

The International Standard Organization (ISO) standards series on soundscape for the identification, data collection and data analysis present a general framework for the soundscape studies that are conducted globally. Perceived Affective Qualities (PAQs) including 8 soundscape perceptual attributes in ISO/TS 12913-2:2018 and ISO/TS 12913-3:2019 are published in English language. Therefore, the 'Soundscape Attributes Translation Project' focuses on the reliable standardized translations of the PAQs in other languages. In the previously published Turkish translation and validation study, the PAQs were presented as; 'hareketli' (eventful), 'coskulu' (vibrant), 'keyifli' (pleasant), 'sakin' (calm), 'dura.gan' (uneventful), 'tekduze' (monotonous), 'rahatsiz edici' (annoying), and 'karmas ik' (chaotic). Within the scope of this follow-up study, firstly, sound sources in each audio stimulus are identified according to their dominance to explore their relation with the Soundscape Circumplex Model (SCM) quadrants and found that the human dominant audio stimuli are evaluated as 'vibrant' in SCM. Other noise dominating audio stimuli are categorized as 'monotonous' while traffic combined with other noise audio stimuli are evaluated as 'chaotic'. When the audio stimuli evaluated as 'calm' are investigated, they are either purely dominated by natural sounds or mixture of each category dominated by natural sounds. Secondly, a comparison between the Turkish and the English participants' evaluation of audio stimuli according to the SCM is done and found that they are similar except two audio stimuli. Furthermore, the effect of audio stimulus sequence and gender on 8 PAQs are statistically analysed through Kruskall-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests; respectively and found that both are significant. The sequences shifting from 'chaotic' to 'calm' or vice versa frequently are seen to be evaluated with higher scores whereas more homogenous ones in sequence, i.e. audio stimuli having the same dominating sound source are sequenced together mostly are graded with lower scores of 8 PAQs except 'chaotic' compared to drastic changes in the sound source and found that men grade 'cos kulu' (vibrant), 'dura.gan' (uneventful), 'tekduze' (monotonous), 'rahatsiz edici' (annoying) and 'karmasik' (chaotic) more than women by 5, 11, 24, 8 and 10 points, respectively according to the median values. Finally, conformance to the SCM is evaluated by the principal component analysis (PCA) and found that it can be reduced to two dimensions named as "pleasantness" and "eventfulness" in expected order but the main PAQs pleasant-annoying and eventful-uneventful are not aligned indicating the lack of achieving the ideal circumplexity. It is believed that the results of this study could contribute to both national and international future soundscape research with a focus on listening tests applying PAQs.