Professor Jian Kang presents at city conversations - the invisible city: soundscapes

On 1 May 2018, Professor Jian Kang presented at the Buildings Centre’s city conversations panel event on how engineering and design can affect sound in a city environment.  Matthew Harrison, the regional director and leader of the acoustics group at BuroHappold Engineering, chaired the event.

Professor Jian Kang’s presentation was ‘Towards Soundscape Indices’. He first discussed the need to achieve a ground-breaking development through the establishment of ‘soundscape indices’ (SSID). His presentation then illustrated the importance of adequately reflecting on levels of human comfort, with wider intellectual goals of moving from noise control to soundscape creation.

Using research based on the SSID project (ERC Advanced Grant) he is carrying out, he then proposed that coherent steps for achieving this would be to characterise soundscapes, to determine key factors and their influence on soundscape quality, to develop, test and validate the soundscape indices, and to demonstrate the applicability of the soundscape indices in practice.