Acoustic comfort in the living environment and its association with noise representation: A systematic review

Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes − Mauritius

Abstract

Noise is commonly known to have adverse health effects on residents in urban living environment. In the past, great focus has been placed on the impact of external traffic noise on residents’ health and the development of urban noise mapping. On the other hand, neighbourhood noise − a combination of noise generated from outside residences and noise generated from within residences − are also considered to be as detrimental as external traffic noise and are yet to be widely investigated. This paper focuses on the systematic review of studies assessing neighbourhood noise with the intention of determining the presence of architectural variables and methods of noise representation for micro-scale areas. 153 articles are retrieved from specific research databases and out of which 12 were considered to be relevant to the study. The results indicate that architectural variables present in the studies were mostly related to the analysis of external traffic noise and that representation of noise in analyses were rarely devised which highlights the need for further investigation in this area.