Multidimensional analyses of the noise impacts of COVID-19 lockdown

Pierre Aumond (1) , Arnaud Can (2) , Mathieu Lagrange (2) , Felix Gontier (2) , Catherine Lavandier (3)

1 UMRAE - Unité Mixte de Recherche en Acoustique Environnementale
2 LS2N - Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes
3 ETIS - UMR 8051 - Equipes Traitement de l'Information et Systèmes

As part of the ANR CENSE project, a questionnaire was sent in January 2019 to households in a 1 km² study area in the city of Lorient, France, to which about 318 responded. The main objective of this questionnaire was to collect information about the inhabitants' perception of the sound environments in their neighborhood, in their street, and in their dwelling. In the same study area, starting mid-2019, about 70 sensors were continuously positioned, and fifteen of them were selected for testing sound source recognition models. The French lockdown due to the COVID-19 crisis occurred during the project, and the opportunity was taken to send a second questionnaire during April 2020. About 31 of the first 318 first survey respondents answered to this second questionnaire. This unique longitudinal dataset, both physical and perceptual, allows us to undertake an analysis from different perspective of such a period. The analysis reveals the importance of integrating source recognition tools, soundscape observation protocol, in addition to physical level analysis, in order to accurately describe changes in the sound environment.

Mots clés: Soundscape; Noise annoyance; covid-19 lockdown; sound recognition

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Pierre Aumond, Arnaud Can, Mathieu Lagrange, Felix Gontier, Catherine Lavandier. Multidimensional analyses of the noise impacts of COVID-19 lockdown. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2022, 151 (2), pp.911-923. ⟨10.1121/10.0009324⟩. ⟨hal-03584844v1⟩