Are Urban Park Soundscapes Restorative or Annoying?
Invited paper
Heriot-Watt University
Tuesday 2 june, 2015, 11:00 - 11:20
0.4 Brussels (189)
Abstract:
Urban parks play an important role in creating healthy and sustainable cities
for urban dwellers. They provide opportunities to interact with nature and
visually the perceiver can feel like they are immersed in a different world to
the city. Therefore, urban parks can be restorative environments allowing
people to recover from any directed attentional fatigue. Opportunities to
restore are important for people to avoid prolonged fatigue, stress, and
potentially, symptoms of burnout. However, acoustically, urban parks can also
be filled with the sounds from the surrounding city which may be less
restorative than natural sounds. Using a virtual reality laboratory, this study
assesses the perceived restorativeness and noise annoyance of two urban park
soundscapes. Seventy-seven participants viewed a video whereby 'they' walked
along a street and into an urban park. They rested there for a few minutes
before walking back out of the park. This video was either accompanied by no
sound, or one of two created soundscapes containing natural sounds and traffic.
Participants evaluated their experience in terms of the perceived
restorativeness of the environment/soundscape and where appropriate, noise
annoyance. This paper will discuss the outcome of these results and the
relationship between the two concepts of restoration and annoyance.