Effects of soundscape on rural landscape perception
Invited paper
School of Architecture
Wednesday 3 june, 2015, 11:40 - 12:00
0.6 Madrid (49)
Abstract:
Soundscape has an important influence on landscape experience, but there is
still a
lack of study on the relationships between sounds and the contexts of rural
landscape.
In this study, the sounds and images in Chinese rural villages were collected
and the
effects of soundscape on the landscape perception were examined in terms of
landscape
visual aesthetic quality (VAQ) (using a seven-point scale), landscape
tranquility
(using a seven-point scale) and landscape preference (using a five-point
scale),
considering five typical landscape types including distant view, farmland,
waterscape,
road, courtyard, based on audiovisual experiments and eye-movement tests. The
results
show that soundscape impacted the rural landscape perception in different
ways. Under
the effect of the natural sounds, compared with artificial sounds and no-sound
situation, the mean score of landscape preference is increased by 2.11 and
0.22
respectively for positive landscape and 1.29 and 1.65 respectively for
negative
landscape. In terms of the mean score of landscape tranquility, the increase
is 2.58
and 0.12 for positive landscape and 2.24 and 1.39 for negative
landscape,respectively.
The score of Landscape VAQ is the highest under the no-sound situation for
positive
landscape, as with natural and artificial sounds the mean VAQ decreases by
0.18 and
1.43 respectively, whereas for negative landscape the mean VAQ with natural
soundscape
is 0.46 and 0.2 higher than that with artificial sounds and no-sound
situation,
respectively. The correlation coefficients among landscape VAQ, landscape
tranquility
and landscape preference are 0.54-0.86 with no sound situation, but with
sounds they
are reduced to 0.37-0.68, for distant view, farmland and road landscape, and
conversely, for waterscape and courtyard landscape, they are increased by 0.10
and
0.05 respectively.