The Effect of Physical Structure and Urban Configuration on the Quality of Pedestrian's Soundscape Experience in Public Spaces by Using Virtual RealityCase Study: Distance between Valiasr Square to Jahad Square, Tehran

One of the main challenges in urban design is enhancing the relationship between human perception and the environment as well as improving pedestrians’ experience by focusing on their apprehension of surroundings. However, urban design mainly centers on the visual scape of surroundings and overlooks other human senses such as hearing. Specifically, the imbalance between the perception of visual and soundscape has hampered the capability of achieving a thorough perception of our surroundings. The soundscape is the result of the listener's perception of the environment which can arouse thoughts and emotions, affect the human experience, and guide users' behavior in the public space. Also, the physical structure is one of the main factors affecting the visual-auditory balance. The physical structure of the environment can affect different human senses and create different perceptions of the 3D space for individuals. Hence, this research studies the impact of different physical structures and spatial configurations on the pedestrians’ soundscape perception of urban spaces. It is hypothesized that different spatial configurations and physical structures can have specific effects on the observer's perception of sound while moving in an urban space. Also, to study the relationship between a physical structure and spatial configurations on the pedestrians’ soundscape perception, this research used tests based on different arrangements of physical structure. Therefore, a cause-and-effect analysis and exploratory field research were used. Besides, it is impractical to change the physical structures and spatial configurations in real life or control the non-physical factors. Therefore, this study employs virtual reality to probe the research hypothesis. This makes it possible to make dynamic changes to the physical-spatial variables in a semi-real context. Moreover, the physical components are prioritized and a subset of the most important components have been taken into account in our experiments. Hence, it is attempted to simulate the physical-spatial experiments as accurately as possible by considering several factors. The spatial configuration, height of buildings, route width, and the number of public spaces in a path are taken into account along with the real-life sound effects. Also, to achieve a logical review, the researchers analyzed the effects of the physical-spatial structures in nine defined simulated tests on pedestrians' soundscape perception. A questionnaire has been used to evaluate the impact of the abovementioned factors on pedestrians’ soundscape perception. Statistical analysis is conducted in SPSS software to study the mechanism and dependencies between different factors. Moreover, we simulated the distribution of sound in our experiments using the Arraycalc software. Therefore, the results show the practical understanding of comparing the distribution of sound in real conditions with the pedestrians’ soundscape perception in a three-dimensional urban space. It is observed that there is a strong correlation between the soundscape perception factors and the physical-spatial configuration of a structure. Furthermore, our experiments show that in the spiral and convex spatial configurations, reducing structure height, width, and obstacles will improve the auditory experience of pedestrians significantly.