The EU Directive on Environmental Noise requires “preserving environmental noise quality where it is good”, and this is often referred to as management of “quiet areas”. However, “quiet” is not always (even rarely) the acoustic characteristic that people want in such areas - instead we should change the terminology to “areas of high acoustic quality”. There are three domains of interest: nature and wilderness, rural/non-urban, and urban, but the underlying principles in terms of human appreciation of high acoustic quality are the same. The available literature on human preference in these contexts provides a little guidance: people prefer sounds of moving water, the sounds of nature, the sound of wind, and the sounds of other people (voices, footsteps, laughter, singing) to mechanical sounds. There is enough evidence to discount integrated sound energy (say Leq or Lden) as the criterion for defining such areas. The criterion instead must be based on whether sounds that are preferred or wanted in that particular context are heard, and whether the sounds that are wanted significantly mask those that are unwanted. Further understanding of the masking of outdoor sounds (masking unwanted by wanted sounds) is needed.
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