The impact of man-made noise on the passenger transport stations of Port of Barcelona

Abstract

Ports and harbours are logistic nodes characterized by several types of noise, which can usually occur in a concurrent manner in the same harbour premises: ferries, cruises, fishing and trade ships coexist with other industrial and auxiliary services. Noise pollution can have negative effects on the urban population inhabiting the port vicinity. The Port of Barcelona is an infrastructure that serves trade, passengers and fishing. The purpose of this work is to describe the impact of certain acoustic events recorded in the maritime stations of Port of Barcelona dedicated exclusively to passengers and vehicle transport. The traffic of arrivals and departures of cruises with passengers is intense in these maritime stations; the characterization of the acoustic events caused by this traffic, as well as the acoustic events collected by means of a short but complete recording campaign in Port of Barcelona. This work presents a proposal of categorization of the noise sources in order to generate an algorithm to classify automatically several types of activity.