The present work summarizes a study of the hypothesis that urban noise can be stratified by measuring street noise according to a prior classification of a town’s streets according to their use in communicating the different zones of the town. The method was applied to five medium-sized Spanish towns (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Salamanca, Badajoz, Cáceres, and Mérida) with populations ranging from 218 000 down to 50 000 and with different socio-economic characteristics, climate, etc. As the initial hypothesis of the work was that traffic is the main source of urban noise and is also the principal cause of the variability of the sound levels measured in urban settings, the study focused only on the five nonpedestrian categories of streets. The continuous equivalent sound level (Leq) was employed in the statistical analysis as it is commonly used as a general noise index, and other noise indicators such as LDN or LDEN are calculated from it. It was found that, although differences between the medians were not statistically significant in some of the towns for certain pairs of adjacent categories, the differences between pairs of nonadjacent categories were always significant, indicative of the stratification of noise in these five towns. Further studies on other medium-sized towns and on large towns and small villages would be needed to test whether the present definition of street categories is extensible elsewhere without modification.

This paper reports an investigation of a new kind of material and its acoustical performance. The main component of this porous absorber is the ground tyre rubber (GTR) with different particle sizes, from the shredding of tyres of heavy vehicles, mixed with different proportion of polyurethane resin. Acoustical properties were assessed according to ISO 10534 - 2: 1998. The data obtained show porous absorbers having a high sound absorption performance with low thicknesses and compared to some of the current models for the prediction of their absorptive properties. The use of this model constitutes a good tool in order to design a new sound absorber to solve two environmental problems, noise and environmental pollution.