At the Forum Acusticum Euronoise 2025, the 11th EAA Annual European Conference on Acoustics and Noise Control Engineering, to be held in Malaga on June 23-26, 2025, the following papers by Melissa Ferretti, Paola Cutugno, Alessandra Cinini and Davide Chiarella of the CNR-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (CNR-ILC) will be presented:
- Exploring soundscape perception through the Italian language: a study on descriptive words for noise and sound
This study investigates the linguistic description of soundscapes in seven port and hinterland areas in Italy, focusing on the perceptual aspects of remembered or heard sounds. Adjectives associated with the Italian nouns “rumore” (noise) and “suono” (sound) were extracted from large linguistic corpora and presented in a linguistic-acoustic questionnaire, allowing participants to select those most descriptive of the sounds they perceived.
Through the analysis of responses, a four-point scale was constructed, ranging from “silenzioso” (silent) to “molto rumoroso” (very noisy), with significant adjectives identified for each level. This scale offers a structured framework to interpret and classify soundscapes, linking linguistic descriptors to specific acoustic environments and sound sources.
The findings highlight the importance of integrating linguistic and perceptual approaches to capture the subjective and cultural dimensions of soundscapes. By offering a language-specific perspective, this research aims to support a deeper understanding of auditory perceptions and inform urban and environmental planning in culturally sensitive ways.
- Developing a linguistic corpora-based soundscape questionnaire: addressing translation challenges in the ISO Standard
This study presents the development of a linguistic-acoustic questionnaire, created and administered as part of the PNRR RAISE (Robotics and AI for Socio-economic Empowerment) project, designed to validate and extend the results of the previous survey on the perceptual description of soundscapes in Italian port and backport areas conducted as part of the TRIPLO project.
This new questionnaire incorporates elements of the standard PD ISO-TS 12913-2:2018 (Method A), developed as part of the ISO 12913 series to establish international consensus and facilitate communication in soundscape research. The ISO 12913 series promote an integrated approach to the acoustic environment, assessing all perceived sounds in their complexity.
Based on this, the questionnaire integrates the framework of the standard and its Italian translation drawn from recent literature to perform a comparison between adjectives derived from English and those identified through linguistic analyses of Italian corpora. By incorporating both established methodologies and linguistically grounded approaches, this study aims to further refine the descriptive framework for soundscape perception and explore the interplay between language and cultural context in evaluating acoustic environments. The results may offer valuable insights and be a good basis for the development of tools to enable comparative soundscape studies between languages.
The Forum Acusticum Euronoise 2025 is organised by the Spanish Acoustics Society (SEA) and the European Acoustics Association (EAA).