Sons al Balcó: A Subjective Approach to the WASN-Based <i>L_Aeq</i> Measured Values during the COVID-19 Lockdown

The lockdown in Spain due to COVID-19 caused a strong decrease in the urban noise levels observed in most cities, clearly followed in the case that these cities had acoustic sensor networks deployed. This fact had an impact on people’s lives, who, at that time, were mainly locked at home due to health reasons. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the subjective vision of the citizens participating in a data-collecting campaign during the COVID-19 lockdown in Girona, a Catalan city, named ‘Sons al Balcó’. The alignment of the subjective data gathered was too scarce to conduct final conclusions, but already giving a bias of the results indicates that the objective <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>L</mi><mrow><mi>A</mi><mi>e</mi><mi>q</mi></mrow></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> measurements, which showed a clear decrease in noise in the streets during the lockdown, were supported by the fact that new sounds found during the lockdown were not very annoying. Former existing noise sources, such as road traffic noise or leisure noise, are depicted as annoying but their decrease during the lockdown improved the soundscape of many homes. This paper’s goal is to show the possibility of gathering both objective and calibrated data with perceptive approximation for the first time in ‘Sons al Balcó’, and how this supports our conclusions, in survey with a limited number of participants conducted during the 2020 lockdown period in Catalonia.