Environmental thermal influence over soundscape perception: a test room experimental campaign involving the psychological and physiological description of the indoor environment

Abstract

Human environmental perception leads occupants’ behaviour when interacting with buildings components, affecting the final building energy performance. A solid understanding of human comfort perception includes simultaneous multisensory stimuli and cross-modal interactions among different comfort domains. This study aims to explore the cross-modal effect between thermal and acoustic domains. Each of the 40 subjects took part in a multisensory survey under two different stationary environmental temperature settings. Results show that people in thermally warm conditions are less confident in describing the provided acoustic records. To perform the same procedure but providing a decreasing air temperature ramp would lead to a better interpretation of the results of this campaign.