Oscar Luigi Azzimonti

Human perception of a surrounding environment comes from our senses. Among these, vision has been considered the most important but, nowadays, the hearing perception features are attracting even more the attention of researchers. This study, based on five soundwalks conducted in the university district of Milano-Bicocca, compared subjective emotional responses evoked by the soundscape with psychoacoustic parameters determined from binaural recordings. Furthermore, a focus group discussion conducted at the end of each soundwalk made it possible to explore participants’ in-depth perceptions and to collect their accounts of everyday life in the neighbourhood, their geographical backgrounds, and their habitual and preferred soundscapes. From the survey analysis, a consistent preference emerged for green areas, which were also statistically clustered based on psychoacoustic indices, as well as the squares and the two sites most exposed to traffic, indicating alignment between subjective responses and psychoacoustic structure. Moreover, sites with comparable A-weighted sound pressure levels (dBA) elicited different perceptual evaluations: environments featuring water sounds were systematically perceived as less noisy, while the sites with the highest dBA levels were perceived either as chaotic or monotonous, depending on the listener’s subjective interpretation and the perceived meaning of the dominant noise source. These results reinforce the hypothesis that sound perception is shaped by contextual and semantic factors, and cannot be fully captured by conventional acoustic metrics alone.

Urban noise pollution significantly degrades people’s health and well-being and, furthermore, traditional noise reduction strategies often overlook individual perception differences. This study proposed to explore the role of eco-acoustic indices in capturing the interplay between biophony, geophony, and anthrophony, and their relationship with classical acoustic metrics and the perceived soundscapes within a University Campus (University of “Mila-no-Bicocca”, Italy). The study area is divided in to eight different sites in “Piazza della Scienza” square. Sound measurements and surveys conducted in June 2023 across four paved sites and adjacent courtyards involved 398 participants (51.7% female, 45.6% male, 2.7% other). The main noise sources included road traffic, technical installations, and human activity, where traffic noise was more prominent at street-level sites (Sites 1–4) and technical installations dominated underground courtyards (6–8). Human activity was most noticeable at Sites 4–8, especially at Site 5, which showed the highest activity levels. A circumplex model revealed that street-level sites were less pleasant and eventful than courtyards. Pairwise comparisons of noise variability showed significant differences among sites, with underground locations offering quieter environments. Eco-acoustic analysis identified two site groups: one linked to noisiness and spectral features, the other to intensity distribution metrics. Technical installations, people, and traffic noises showed distinct correlations with acoustic indices, influencing emotional responses like stimulation and liveliness. These findings emphasize the need to integrate subjective perceptions with objective noise metrics in soundscape descriptions.

Protected areas play an important role due to their twofold capacity for biodiversity conservation and the provision of many benefits to human well-being. Tourism can be a tool for protecting nature, enhancing people’s sensitivity, and a threat to biodiversity management. This study investigates users’ attitudes and perceptions and managers’ concerns related to the frequentation of two protected areas in the Italian Alps: the Gran Paradiso National Park and the Adamello Regional Park. We carried out 32 semi-structured interviews with park managers and municipalities to identify their perception of tourism and possible threats related to the use of the parks. Thus, we administered questionnaires to 3399 users of the PAs to investigate their attitudes and perceptions. We made considerations on whether there were similarities in the attitudes identified by the park managers and results of the questionnaires. Questionnaires confirmed the managers’ perception of mass tourism regarding one-day stays and the purpose of the visits, but we could not exhaustively confirm the increase of new visitors. We performed a binary logistic regression to understand the relationship between short-term stays and attitudes of visitors (origin, frequency of visits, stakeholders’ category, and biographical data). Eventually, interviews stated an exacerbation of the growth of visitors due to the COVID-19 pandemic; thus, we investigated if the pandemic changed the assiduity of visits, and half of the users claimed a change in their assiduity of visits, but mostly declared a decreased frequentation of the area.