## 4 Discussion and Conclusions
The relevance of water on acoustic, visual and space indicators was also underlined by recent work describing the soundscape of the waterfront areas in Naples [13]. In that research, in which the percentage of sea in areas where the road traffic was limited or opened, the perception of the acoustic environment was positively affected. It is therefore important to outline a consistent, consensually determined method for defining these physical context factors. This paper and other previous work [13; 27] propose a method that identifies the elements relating to the quality of the spaces (maintenance and safety) and the presence of nature, both green and blue components. Similar indices have been widely used in urban planning and, more recently, in acoustics, to evaluate the soundscape of urban and rural areas [10; 11; 13]. In this study the physical context variables, despite their simplicity; have contributed to explaining the soundscape pleasantness felt by people in urban places. Therefore, it is considered necessary to agree on common indicators representing them. Another important finding is that acoustic parameters are relevant when predicting soundscape pleasantness, though their contribution is low. The poor positive relationships between acoustic and subjective indicators may indicate that in some of the places studied there are activities involving high sound levels, such as children playing or social interaction on the terraces of bars, but which are considered pleasant because they are associated with relaxing activities. However, this may also occur due to the generally weak relationship between objective parameters and their perception, a finding also reached in other fields of research: Some are closely related to the soundscape, such as being disturbed by noise, while others are less related, such as perception of health. In general, the percentage variance explained for disturbance by sound on the basis of acoustic indicators is equal to 9%-15%, even higher than those we found (7%). When the assessments are about positive aspects such as pleasantness, beauty, etc., their relationship with objective parameters appears to be somewhat weaker due to the greater level of subjectivity involved. Another remarkable result related with acoustic factors is the low contribution of sound events to the soundscape pleasantness in a place, which is surprising considering the vast literature supporting this relationship. Only weak relationships were detected between the balance of events, soundscape pleasantness and quietness and beauty of the landscape, in such a way that the more positive the balance of events, the higher the level of soundscape pleasantness, and the higher the calm and beauty of landscape. This result may, of course, be influenced by the event detection method applied in the study and the characteristics of the acoustic environment analysed. However, the contribution of the number of sound sources identified by participants and related pleasantness is remarkable. The results seem to indicate that the most important variable for soundscape is the overall acoustic characterisation of the place (sound sources) rather than specific sound events. The total number of sources could reflect the sound diversity in the environments analysed, and the balance of sources reveals the need for a predominance of pleasant sources in order for the soundscape to be considered pleasant. The results presented in this paper are similar to those found in the previous study conducted in Vitoria-Gasteiz [23], with the percentage of explained variance also being similar (32% and 36%, respectively). In both studies, it was concluded that the most significant aspect in soundscape pleasantness is the congruence between soundscape and landscape. The consistency of the resultsseems to indicate that these studies have a higher reproducibility than that typical of psychological correlations and experiments.