Arnaud Can

Université Gustave Eiffel · Department of Planning, Mobilities and Environment (AME)

The management of sound environments is a major challenge for the quality of life of residents (a definition here including city users). Local authorities have regulatory tools at their disposal to manage urban noise pollution, but these are sometimes far removed from the residents' perceptions. The aim of the SonoRezé project is to build on a citi...

Human voice plays a pivotal role as a sound source in urban environments. Despite the plethora of natural sound sources present in urban spaces, human voice often stands out as one of the sound source, exerting a significant influence on the perception and affection of these spaces. However, compared to other aspects of urban soundscapes, such as t...

Beyond the estimation of daily exposure profiles of agents, agent-based models can be used to investigate the role of different urban areas in noise exposure. This study explores this potential by proposing a new approach to spatio-temporal mapping of the accessibility to quiet areas in agglomerations, integrating mobility into the analysis of plac...

This article aims to report on the development of a method to study the acoustic factors driving the short-term annoyance experienced by neighbors of high-speed train lines (> 250 km/h). In fact, current indicators (e.g., LDEN) only partially explain annoyance caused by high-speed trains noise. They could potentially be improved by considering some...

Purpose of the Review This paper is devoted to the review of the most popular literature Road Traffic Noise Models (RTNMs) frameworks, from the oldest ones to the recent machine learning techniques. A dedicated section is reserved to the review of Noise Emission Models (NEMs), with specific focus on approaches that allow the assessment of single ve...

This study introduces an agent-specific assessment method of traffic noise exposure in agent mobility simulations. The assessment is achieved through a combination of an energy-based noise exposure impact assessment using noise exposure cost, and the state-of-the-art traffic noise prediction tool NoiseModelling coupled with the activity-based agent...

Environmental noise control is a major health and social issue. Numerous environmental policies require local authorities to draw up noise maps to establish an inventory of the noise environment and then propose action plans to improve its quality. In general, these maps are produced using numerical simulations, which may not be sufficiently repres...

Construction site noise significantly contributes to urban noise pollution. To accurately assess the noise exposure from urban construction sites, it is essential to consider the variability and dynamic nature of the urban context. This paper proposes an innovative approach using individual-level activity-based modeling to tackle the given challeng...

The health and equity issues related to urban pollution, coupled with the need to assess the consequences of implementing transport policies or new mobility solutions, make it imperative to provide decision-makers with a relevant modeling framework. The coupling of activity-based travel models with environmental models presents a promising approach...

The goal of this article is to report on the development of a study of the acoustic factors driving the short-term annoyance experienced by neighbors of high-speed train lines. In fact, annoyance caused by high-speed trains (> 250 km/h) is not completely modeled by current indicators (e.g., LDEN). For example, the suddenness, spectral content, temp...

The civil security sirens are used by the authorities in a wide range of countries to signal an imminent or ongoing threat. Even if their sound level is known, it is nevertheless difficult to evaluate their audibility across a given zone, especially in complex urban environments. An experimental protocol was deployed around a siren installed in a t...

The development of citizen-based approaches to the diagnosis and decision-making on urban noise environments responds to a demand from both local authorities and residents. However, the methods for fostering the involvement of citizens and the valorization of local knowledge have yet to be invented. This article reports on a co-constructed experime...

Teaching science subjects such as acoustics to youth or the general public can be facilitated by illustrating physical phenomena or scientific issues using fun experiences. A few years ago, our team developed a smartphone application named NoiseCapture with the aim of offering to anyone the opportunity to measure their sound environment and to shar...

As part of the Agence Nationale de Recherche Caractérisation des ENvironnements SonorEs urbains (Characterization of urban sound environments) 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 inf...

The influence of fluctuating road traffic noise on perceived disturbance during a reading task as well as on performance, inside a living room with closed windows, is presented in this paper. Sixteen 2-min sound sequences were created combining two variables: the number of events (four levels varying from one to four car pass-bys) and the peak emer...

The CENSE project, funded by the French Research National Agency from 2017 to 2021, aimed at proposing a new methodology for the production of more realistic noise maps. CENSE stands for "Characterization of urban sound environments: Modelling, noise sensors network and open data". The project relied on a dense network of low-cost sensors deployed...

The goal of this research is to assess environmental quality at the neighbourhood level through a multi-dimensional and multi-sensory approach that combines social and physical methodologies. For this purpose, an interdisciplinary protocol has been designed to simultaneously collect physical parameter measurements (related to microclimate and acous...

Accurately predicting dynamic noise levels in urban environments is non-trivial. This study aims to optimally combine both simulated and empirical data. Acoustic data from microphone arrays, traffic and weather data was merged with a simulated noise map, created with a statistical emulator tool (meta-model). Each hour, a noise map is generated by t...

This study aims to produce dynamic noise maps based on a noise model and acoustic measurements. To do so, inverse modeling and joint state-parameter methods are proposed. These methods estimate the input parameters that optimize a given cost function calculated with the resulting noise map and the noise observations. The accuracy of these two metho...

Following the successful first Urban Sound Symposium held at Ghent University in 2019, the second edition in 2021 had to face the challenges of the pandemic. The symposium turned this challenge into an opportunity for giving easier access to practitioners and experts from around the globe who are confronted with urban sound in their professional ac...

Following the successful first Urban Sound Symposium held at Ghent University in 2019, the second edition in 2021 had to face the challenges of the pandemic. The symposium turned this challenge into an opportunity for giving easier access to practitioners and experts from around the globe who are confronted with urban sound in their professional ac...

In light of the growing concern about the adverse effects of noise pollution on health, a better understanding is needed of the relationships between urban transport and individual exposure. To improve the scientific community's modeling capabilities specific to this issue, we propose a noise exposure modeling framework that uses agent-based activi...

Regulatory road traffic noise maps are based on input data that are sometimes incomplete, erroneous or non-existent. When designing them, it is therefore necessary to label and qualify these data by giving priority to certain sources of information and certain parameters over others. Beforehand, a sensitivity analysis of the sound prediction model...

Urban noise mapping generally consists of simulating the emission and attenuation of noise in an area by following rules such as Common NOise aSSessment methOdS (CNOSSOS-EU). The computational cost makes these models unsuitable for applications such as uncertainty quantification, where thousands of simulations may be required. One solution is to re...

The degradation of the sound environment contributes significantly to the external costs of mobility and is an obstacle to the development of cities. Action plans aiming at fighting traffic noise often take a long time to reach mature implementation. Therefore, it is advantageous to envisage how societal and urban changes and associated changes in...

The teaching of acoustics notions with a young or heterogeneous audience in an educational framework can be facil-tated by acoustic measurement practices through entertaining activities. NoiseCapture is a smartphone application dedicated to the evaluation of environmental noise and to the realization of collaborative noise maps based on voluntary m...

NoiseModelling is a free and open-source tool initially designed to produce environmental noise maps on large urban areas. It is closely paired with spatial database H2GIS or PostGIS in order to handle a large amount of spatial features and facilitate cross analysis with other spatial data. The tool integrates the CNOSSOS-EU model for road traffic...

As part of the pedagogical curriculum for first-year students in the Faculty of Geography at the University of Nantes, students are invited to conduct a fieldwork during a week. In 2019 and 2020, the theme was the exploration of the soundscapes of Nantes, France. Each March of those years, about 120 students were given an area of the city to analys...

Many countries around the world have chosen lockdown and restrictions on people's mobility as the main strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. These actions have significantly affected environmental noise and modified urban soundscapes, opening up an unprecedented opportunity for research in the field. In order to enable these investigations to...

Noise pollution reduction in the environment is a major challenge from a societal and health point of view. To implement strategies to improve sound environments, experts need information on existing noise. The first source of information is based on the elaboration of noise maps using software, but with limitations on the realism of the maps obtai...

Classically, one mean vehicle representative of each category is used by both static and dynamic traffic noise prediction models. The spectrum associated with this mean vehicle is determined from a linear statistical regression analysis based on measurement campaigns on a track or in situ. However, the variability of individual vehicle emissions ca...

Participatory measurement of environmental sound levels has gained interest in recent years. The calibration of measuring instruments is currently the main technical limitation. It is often the responsibility of the users and can be a potential source of error or add costs to the measurement protocol. In this article, a calibration protocol is prop...

This research presents a modeling framework that allows checking the statistical requirements for producing noise maps based on mobile measurements. First, a sound field of reference is created based on a micro-simulation traffic modeling coupled with acoustic modeling, which outputs sound levels each second on a grid of receivers. The aggregated i...

Experimental acoustic sensor networks are currently tested in large cities, and appear more and more as a useful tool to enrich modeled road traffic noise maps through data assimilation techniques. One challenge is to be able to isolate from the measured sound mixtures acoustic quantities of interest such as the sound level of road traffic. This ta...

Sound level predictions are based on both simplified emission and propagation models able to deal with transport and industrial sources only, thus neglecting other sound sources which yet contribute to urban soundscapes. Sound level assessment can take advantage of acoustic measurements if a sufficient amount of sensors is deployed to pick up the v...

The sonic environment of the urban public space is often experienced while walking through it. Nevertheless, city dwellers are usually not actively listening to the environment when traversing the city. Therefore, sound events that are salient, i.e. stand out of the sonic environment, are the ones that trigger attention and contribute highly to the...

Coupling a traffic microsimulation with an emission model is a means of assessing fuel consumptions and pollutant emissions at the urban scale. Dealing with congested states requires the efficient capture of traffic dynamics and their conditioning for the emission model. Two emission models are investigated here: COPERT IV and PHEM v11. Emission ca...

The dramatic impact of sound events on health issues such as awakenings, demonstrated in a plethora of studies in the last decades, invites to reconsider the sound prediction modeling frameworks to enable their estimation. In this paper, a stochastic modeling approach is described, which enables the estimation of sound level distributions and sound...

Network-based sound monitoring systems are deployed in various cities over the world and mobile applications allowing participatory sensing are now common. Nevertheless, the sparseness of the collected measurements, either in space or in time, complicates the production of sound maps. This paper describes the results of a measurement campaign that...

La méthodologie de création des cartes sonores réglementaires est maintenant standardisée, notamment dans le cadre d’application de la directive européenne de 2002. Cette approche cartographique souffre néanmoins de limites, mises en exergue lors de sa confrontation à l’expérience terrain. Il a été démontré que la dynamique des environnements sonor...

The process of modeling noise maps is now well defined: long-term aggregated indicators are calculated based on a collection or estimation of road, air and rail traffic variables. This framework however disregards the sound levels variations, and hence prevents the production of statistical or emergence indicators, and does not allow for the study...

This paper relies on vehicle trajectory collection on a corridor, to compare different traffic representations used for the estimation of the sound power of light vehicles and the resulting sound pressure levels. Four noise emission models are tested. The error introduced when the emissions are calculated based on speeds measured at regular interva...

Relying on monitoring networks to compute or improve noise maps is an increasingly used approach. To be able to use this approach to provide adequate temporal treatments, a good understanding of the temporal variations within urban sound level time series is required. This paper provides an in-depth statistical analysis of the temporal characterist...

The spreading of urban areas and the growth of human population worldwide raise societal and environmental concerns. To better address these concerns, the monitoring of the acoustic environment in urban as well as rural or wilderness areas is an important matter. Building on the recent development of low cost hardware acoustic sensors, we propose i...

Noise maps based on measurements gained interest during the last decade. Network monitoring systems are deployed in various cities over the world and mobile applications allowing participatory sensing are now very common. Nevertheless, the sparseness of the collected measurements, either in space or in time, complicates the production of such noise...

Mapping the pleasantness of an urban environment is an alternative approach, closer to the city dweller's perception, than standardized sound levels cartography. This study reports on modeling pleasantness in urban context using perceptual assessments and sound measurements for specific locations during an urban walk. These assessments have been co...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Because noise is a major pollution leading to non-negligible socio-economical impacts, many national regulations aim at reducing the population noise exposure. Within the context of the European directive 2002/49/EC, a special attention is paid to the evaluation of the existing noise environment. Nowadays, this assessment...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Sound source detection and recognition using acoustic sensors are increasingly used to monitor and analyze the urban environment as they enhance soundscape characterization and facilitate the comparison between simulated and measured noise maps using methods such as Artificial Neural Networks or Non-negative Matrix Factori...

Urban noise reduction is a societal priority. In this context, the European Directive 2002/49/EC aims at producing strategic noise maps for large cities. However, nowadays the relevance of such maps is questionable, due to considerable uncertainties, which are rarely quantified. Conversely, the development of noiseobservatories can provide useful i...

This paper investigates how the overall pleasantness of the sound environment of an urban walking trip can be estimated through acoustical measurements along the path. For this purpose, two laboratory experiments were carried out, during which controlled and natural 3-min audio and audiovisual sequences were presented. Participants were asked to co...

Sound source detection and recognition using acoustic sensors are increasingly used to monitor and analyze the urban environment as they enhance soundscape characterization and facilitate the comparison between simulated and measured noise maps using methods such as Artificial Neural Networks or Non-negative Matrix Factorization. However, the commu...

The health benefits of a daily physical activity, and of walking in particular, are widely acknowledged. However, walking in urban environment inevitably leads to an increased exposure to noise, which forms a drawback of choosing this transportation mode. Being able to estimate the sound pleasantness associated with an urban walk trip has many pote...

Being able to characterize and estimate the urban sound perception is a key point to improve the city dwellers environmental quality. In the past decade, various studies have focused on collecting perceived global sound pleasantness at specific locations. Some of them were carried out on field in order to evaluate the soundscape perception of the p...

Participatory measurements appear as a promising technique for performing noise mapping and monitoring. However, the confidence in the quality of raw data collected through participatory measurements controls the faithfulness of the output noise maps. In this paper, a cross-calibration method is proposed, which aims at both selecting the best candi...

Noise is a major environmental issue, which gave birth in the last decades to the development of many engineering methods dedicated to both its estimation and mitigation. The specificity of the noise pollution problem lies in the complexity of human hearing and subjective assessment, and in the high spatiotemporal variation and rich spectral conten...

The high temporal and spatial granularities recommended by the European regulation for the purpose of environmental noise mapping leads to consider new alternatives to simulations for reaching such information. While more and more European cities deploy urban environmental observatories, the ceaseless rising number of citizens equipped with both a...

TAP 2016, 21st International Transport and Air Pollution Conference, Lyon, FRANCE, 24-/05/2016 - 26/05/2016

Noise is a major environmental issue, which gave birth in the last decades to extensive research and consecutively to the development of many estimation and mitigation engineering methods. The specificity of this pollution, which lies in its high spatiotemporal variations, its rich spectral component, its variety of sources, and the complexity of h...

Diffusion on building facades and fittings within a street can significantly affect sound propagation in urban areas. These phenomena are however not reproduced by the widespread outdoor sound propagation models that are based on ray codes algorithms, because their modeling would induce increased computational costs. In this paper, a set of 32 175...

The diagnosis of urban sound environments requires noise indicators able to capture its main physical characteristics. However, the more information furnished by indicators, the longer the measur