EEG monitoring during binaural and stereo audition of soundscapes.

Soundscape is the perception of an acoustic environment. This perception includes thoughts and feelings of the human being owing to the environment interaction, and physical properties of such environment. Soundscape recordings involve the human perception usually captured by questionnaires. However, human perception is inherently subjective, and questionnaires are tools to gather information with several bias (e.g., design, response, sampling, event recall, and management). To move towards the study of the soundscape effects in terms of not only involving questionnaire-based information, but also the neurophysiological reaction, this works aims to provide a database of 30 individuals, who experienced four types of soundscapes in Monterrey, N. L., Mexico (ecological park, riverwalk, music avenue, and traffic) in two audio formats (stereo and binaural). The sense of being in the auditory environment was gathered by applying the Usoh and Steed questionnaire and recording the electroencephalographic activity (brain electrical reaction) of the individuals. This database could be useful to study stress level and cognitive load induced by traffic, to measure whether ecological park or riverwalk reduce stress, to evaluate the engagement and excitedness level arisen in music venues, and to improve user-experiences in immersive environments such virtual reality and augmented reality.