A comparative study on residential soundscape perception of Arabic and Turkish people living in Ankara, Turkey

In studying the soundscape perception of the people of a certain acoustic environment, several concepts should be taken into consideration. Studies from the literature suggest that the factors that influence the soundscape perception are the sound environment and the auditory perception mainly. As a person spends most of the time in their houses, understanding the soundscape perception in the residential context is significant. This research investigates the soundscape perception differences of two cultural groups of the same acoustic environment. Therefore, the Arab and Turkish residents of Ankara participated with 405 questionnaires in order to assess their soundscape perception of the sound environment of the city within their house environment. The findings of the study suggest that the sound environment is equally important to both cultural groups, while the Arab residents showed a higher satisfaction level from the sound environment of their houses. Furthermore, the cultural factor demonstrated significant differences in the soundscape perception of the Arab and Turkish groups based on an overall soundscape perception evaluation, sound source loudness, sound frequency of occurrence and sound favourability using statistical analysis such as, one-way ANOVA and t-test.