Awaking the awareness of the movida noise on residents: measurements, experiments and modelling

Noise is one of the most important pollutant of the modern cities. It affects human health, social relationships and the cognitive sphere. Following the Directive 2002/49/EC, in EU urban agglomerations, noise is assessed by the noise modelling of the main transportation infrastructures and the calculation of noise maps. However, within the historical and pedestrianized centers of cities, night time noise is mostly engendered by the aggregation of people who talk, discuss, drink, listen to music, and have fun together, in a word by the movida, and less by traffic. But the coexistence between movida and the rest’s expectations of residents represent a very big issue for lots of historical centers. New initiatives oriented to the social cohesion, need to be introduced in order to smooth existing conflicts. This research extends the preliminary results presented at the Acoustics Society of America meeting, in 2018, on the implementation of a new methodology to awake citizens' awareness on the effects of leisure noise. The paper shows the in situ measurement, the results of subjective assessments administered by a Point of View Questionnaire, and the development of a Neural Net Algorithm to predict the degree of annoyed people.