The Affective Evaluation of Immersive Soundscapes Including Physiological Measures

This thesis is focussed on evaluating affective and physiological responses to soundscape stimuli, building towards understanding the importance of ecological validity on ex-situ soundscape evaluation.
The primary focus of soundscape research is the subjective evaluation of environmental sound, furthering our understanding of our relationship with our acoustic environment.
Although relationships between cognitive and physical measures of soundscape quality have been explored in the literature, there is a lack of research that has focussed on the relationship between physiological and subjective responses.

Two of the experiments presented in this thesis focus on developing a methodology for identifying if changes in physiological behaviour can be used to identify changes in the subjective experience of soundscapes.
Results of the first experiment indicate that using more accurate heart rate measurement methods may be necessary to identify the effects of soundscape stimuli on modulation of the autonomic nervous system.
The results of a second experiment provide evidence that heart rate variability does not vary in a systematic manner with changes in the subjective experience of soundscape stimuli.
It is hypothesized that a lack of presence and immersion in the experimental environment contribute to these results.
The results of a third experiment show that control over listener orientation does not influence the subjective experience of soundscape stimuli.

Finally, a set of software tools are described which facilitate the design of soundscape evaluation experiments that utilise virtual reality, offering a greater sense of presence and immersion than those provided in a typical listening test.
Future work will test this toolset and attempt to validate its use for the ex-situ evaluation of soundscapes.