Tomasz Kaczmarek

Auditory perception of sound source velocity

In this study we investigate the perception of the velocity of linearly moving sound sources passing in front of a listener. The binaural simulation of motion used in two psychoacoustical experiments includes changes in the overall sound pressure level, the Doppler effect, and changes in interaural time differences. These changes are considered as cues for the perception of velocity. The present experiments are an extension of the experiments performed by Lutfi and Wang [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 919-928 (1999)]. The results of Experiment I show that the differential velocity threshold is independent of the reference velocity (10, 20, 30, and 40 m/s), varying across listeners from 1.5 to 4.6 m/s. In Experiment II, a method based on the successive elimination of cues in compared pairs of signals was employed to estimate the weights of potential cues for velocity discrimination. The magnitudes of all underlying cues at thresholds are reported. The experimental results show the subjects preference for the Doppler cue and a weakest sensitivity to the cue related with interaural time differences. Finally, it was found that spatial differences in the source location at the endpoints of the motion trajectory are not a significant factor in the velocity discrimination task.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Metropolitan Integration in Poland

Since the start of the 1990s, the population of Polish cities has decentralised, forming constantly expanding metropolitan agglomerations. Core cities have lost population, retail activity, and employment to peripheral areas, but despite a declining asset base, they must still provide a range of services to meet the needs of their region’s inhabitants. The comprehensive reorganisation of Poland’s administrative structure in 1999 replaced 49 voivodes (regions), organised mainly around a leading town, with 16 larger regions, and created a new level of local government, the powiat, analogous to the county or kreis, leading to fragmented metropolitan development. The long period between the restoration of local government powers in 1990 and the creation of the new administrative system left a vacuum in metropolitan management just when suburbanisation was most rapid. The new, 1990 administrative system contained no measures for metropolitan management. As a result, no single government within metropolitan areas has been able to effectively or efficiently deal with region-wide problems. Smaller units of government fear domination by core cities, and core cities fear the further loss of jobs and residents to suburban municipalities. National efforts to create metropolitan units go back to 2003, when a law was passed mandating physical planning in metropolitan regions. This was followed by attempts to create units of metropolitan governance, mandatory for Warsaw, the Katowice conurbation, and the Gdansk-Gdynia region, and voluntary for Poland’s other main metropolitan regions, particularly between 2007 and 2009. However, these top-down attempts failed. Instead, a growing number of metropolitan regions have turned to informal agreements among local government units. Many are informal forums which serve mainly to exchange information. However some, often created in response to more or less urgent needs, are single purpose, aimed at managing waste, water resources, or transport. A growing number have a broader, multifaceted character, including those in the Wroclaw, Katowice, and the Gdansk-Gdynia metropolitan regions, which aim to coordinate regional economic development, transport and urban planning, and even marketing. Perhaps experience in Poland shows that although metropolitan cooperation might be desirable, it is often best organised from below, in response to local needs, rather than from above. Equally, it is possible that over time, as a culture of intra-metropolitan cooperation grows, acceptance of national legislation to create metropolitan government will grow.

Influence of sound source recognition on annoyance judgment

Research on annoyance usually focuses on the annoyance estimation of the perceived acoustic signal. It disregards the fact that the basic aim of the auditory system is the detection of the properties of the sound source and not the sound signal itself. In this study the annoyance caused by a tram and a bus and two pairs of artificially modified original recordings has been investigated under two experimental conditions. In the first, subjects judged the noise annoyance of the original signals (the tram and bus) together with two modified sound sources (a tram-like bus and a bus-like tram). In the second, the original signals were judged together with another pair of modified sound sources (a tram-like noise and a bus-like noise). The tram-like bus and bus-like tram signals were created in the way that hybrid instruments are built, while the tram-like noise and bus-like noise were simply white noise shaped in accordance with the power spectrum envelope of the original signals. Although both types of modified signals had the same power spectra and time patterns as the original signals, the tram-like bus and bus-like tram signals were more similar in their effect on annoyance judgments to the original recordings than the tram-like noise and bus-like noise signals. It is shown that the same acoustic characteristics of signals, including the calculated loudness, does not necessarily entail the same annoyance judgments. The annoyance judgments of two original signals - the tram and bus - obtained in the two psychoacoustic experiments were not the same. A possible explanation of this phenomenon is discussed.

The influence of speed bumps on perceived annoyance

Recently, several attempts to use speed bumps as a noise reduction method have been made. Objective analyses of the effect of speed bumps on noise have been shown to result in a rather small reduction of noise. In the present paper the influence of speed bumps on perceived annoyance is investigated. The annoyance rating of a situation in which a passenger car approaches with constant velocity, then decelerates, crosses the bump, accelerates, and then recedes at a constant speed was compared with a car pass‐by at a constant velocity without a bump. Three different velocities were analyzed: 40, 50 and 60 km/h, and two types of driving conditions: normal, and aggressive. Listeners judged their annoyance for all the investigated scenarios using the ICBEN scale (0‐10) for annoyance assessment. Objective analyses showed a significant reduction of LAeqT in the bump situation for all tested velocities, and for both driving conditions. The results of this psychoacoustic experiment show no effect of the bump on annoyance rating for normal driving conditions. However, in aggressive driving conditions the bump resulted in a significant increase in annoyance. In the light of these results, speed bumps cannot be considered as a noise reduction method.

Metropolitan integration in Poland: the case of Poznań Metropolis

ABSTRACT The political and socio-economic transition in Poland brought many spatial problems, including dynamic processes of suburbanization around the bigger cities, which require metropolitan-wide approach. But the national metropolitan reform process is still in an initial stage, and the only form of integrated governance in urban areas is provided by some bottom-up initiatives based on the cooperation of local governments. While the experience of ‘top-down’ approach to metropolitan region building in Poland is too short and incomplete in context of its impact on territorial polarization at the national level, the ‘bottom-up’ initiatives of local governments for metropolitan integration are key instruments to more balanced development and territorial cohesion within the metropolitan areas. In terms of metropolitan integration, the case study – Poznań Metropolis – is one of the most interesting examples for an evolutionary way from informal to legally binding institutional arrangements of urban–suburban cooperation.

Participation in Public Consultations on Spatial Planning Documents. The Case of Poznań City

Abstract This article seeks to present the development od public participation in local spatial planning in Poland. An assessment was made of the procedure of preparing planning documents and forms of their consultation with residents. To achieve this goal, use was made of the results of a survey research conducted among participants of public consultations in Poznań in the years 2012-2014. It is stressed that it is necessary to improve the decision-making process in urban spatial planning by accommodating not only traditional but also new forms and instruments of public participation.

The relationship between speech intelligibility and the assessment of noise annoyance

When thinking about noise annoyance, the tendency is to imagine a persons rest being disturbed by noise. Although this idea is not formulated explicitly, the majority of traditional experiments implicitly assume that absence of activity during rest represents the typical situation in which noise annoyance should be studied. We propose that research should be extended to different kinds of activities. This study focuses on one kind of activity: verbal communication. Our hypothesis is that the assessment of difficulty with speech comprehension can be replaced by a speech intelligibility measure, which could assess annoyance experienced during communicative activities. Finally, we would like to find out how noise annoyance disturbs communicative activity, and to compare this with annoyance experienced during rest. To test our hypothesis, two psychoacoustic experiments were performed. In Experiment I, speech intelligibility was measured for eight environmental noises at seven signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). For these SNR values, the participants assessed their difficulty with speech comprehension. This established the relationships between the intelligibility functions and the difficultly in speech comprehension for all the investigated noises. The results of Experiment I show that the potential noise annoyance rating could be predicted on the basis of the speech intelligibility scores, as they give much smaller inter-individual differences between participants than an annoyance assessment test. In Experiment II, the standard �resting� method of noise annoyance assessment was applied to the same eight noises. A comparison of the results indicated a correlation between the annoyance ratings obtained in both the experiments. Some limitations of this approach are also discussed in the paper.

Models of governance in the urban functional areas: Policy lessons from the implementation of integrated territorial investments (ITIs) in Poland

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present the genesis and the development of two models of the “leading path” to the integrated management of functional urban areas of voivodeship centres (FUA VC) in Poland in the context of the implementation of the new instrument of the EU’s Cohesion Policy – Integrated Territorial Investments (ITIs). The implementation of ITIs is presented in the light of the inter-commune cooperation in FUA VC, which has been realised variously so far. As examples of the “leading path” to the integrated management based on the ITI, two functional areas have been selected, differing in this respect, Poznań in western Poland (an example of a bottom-up model) and Lublin in its eastern part (an example of a top-down model). In the conclusion, the instrument of ITI was evaluated as a factor which initiates, deepens or complicates the cooperation of local governments in FUAs. It has been emphasised, that in spite of the creation of organisational and financial instruments (ITIs) which activate the cooperation of self-governments in functional areas, one must take into account the need for legislative changes which give a special status to metropolitan areas, income sources and specific powers.

Determinants of the Quality of Life in the Communes of the Poznań Agglomeration: A Quantitative Approach

Abstract Since the 1990s, large urban agglomerations in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have shown highly dynamic functional and spatial changes resulting from the transformation of their political systems. The aim of this study is to present differences in social, economic and environmental living conditions among the communes of a single agglomeration. This, in turn, allows a discussion, in the first place, of local factors, assuming that national and regional conditions in a given area are uniform. The study focused on the agglomeration of Poznań, which consists of the city of Poznań and 17 surrounding communes (Polish: gmina) forming the district, or ‘poviat’ (Polish: powiat) of Poznań. The analysis of variations in living conditions uses a set of nine indicators reflecting the local level of development in social, economic and environmental terms. The results lead to the conclusion that the development of urbanisation processes in suburban areas over the past 20 years has had a significant share in improving the living conditions of their inhabitants. In some communes they are, in fact, better than in the central city of Poznań

The relationship between speech reception threshold and the assessment of annoyance caused by different environmental noises

Noise disturbs communicative activity, which in consequence creates difficulty with comprehending speech accompanied by noise. Obviously difficulty in speech comprehension leads to lower speech intelligibility scores. The idea behind this study is to check if a relationship between speech intelligibility scores and noise annoyance exists. A psychoacoustic experiment was designed to test how different types of noise impaired speech intelligibility. Nine noises were used to obtain the speech reception threshold (SRT), defined as the speech to noise ratio (SNR) corresponding to 50% correct responses. To get speech intelligibility scores, the Polish sentence matrix test (PSMT) was applied. The participants� task was to recreate a whole sentence which they had heard accompanied by noise. In addition, after each sentence, the participants were asked to assess (on a scale from 0-10) how difficult it was to comprehend the sentence heard. The difficulty with comprehending speech accompanied by noise is understood here as annoyance caused by this noise. The results show that the noise annoyance measure recorded during communicative activity is directly related to the speech intelligibility scores: 50% correctly recognized sentences corresponds to the same measure of difficulty with speech comprehension