Rural Soundscape Research Under The Audio-visual Interactions

With the accelerating urbanization process and the rapid economic growth,China’s urbanization also showed a lot of serious problems.Under the large-scale industrial construction,natural resources and traditional villages are decreasing drastically,and the rural environment is affected.On the other hand,due to the improvement of living standards,people gradually pay more attention to the environmental quality,while the natural,tranquil,and honest soundscape environment is deeply desired by the urbanites.Therefore,in the new era to promote people-oriented,ecological civilization,pastoral,beautiful and highly livable of the rural environment construction based on humans’ perception,it is particularly important to create the visual and auditory environment which can achieve local identity and tourists’ expectation.Soundscape is human-centered in the acoustic environment,with the goal of improving the acoustic environment through optimizing interactions among sounds,users,and the environment.In this thesis,based on the concept of soundscape,investigations have been made on the interactions among sound sources,users,and visual landscapes in rural environment,through field measurements,surveys,and laboratory research methods,to explore the acoustic environmental status of traditional villages in the Northeast areas,soundscape perception,evaluations from the villagers,and soundscape expectation form the tourists,as well as change rules of soundscape evaluations,visual landscape evaluations,attention interests under the audio-visual perceptions.Finally,it proposed rural soundscape design strategy based on the research results.Through investigating sound sources,the sound field,and the villagers’ soundscape perception and audio-visual evaluation in the farmlands,waters,streets and courtyards of traditional villages,a greater impact is found from rural transportation to the overall acoustic environment.In mail roads,squares,streets and courtyards the main sound sources perceived are tire/ road noise,while in the farmlands and waters places natural sound perception is dominated.In terms of the richness of the sound sources,more sound source categories were perceived in the main road and the courtyards environment,but low acoustic comfort s.In terms of the evaluations of visual landscapes,the farmland landscapes achieved good aesthetic standard only.In the sound preference evaluations,most of the villagers prefer natural sound and melody.For the sound of livestock and human speech the evaluation is at a medium level.While they do not like the sound of traffic and industrial sounds.However,in terms of age,education,environmental experience,cultural background,there are differences on the evaluation s of sound preference with regular variations.Soundscape expectation research of Chinese and British tourists found that livestock and natural sounds with traditional rural characteristics are most expected sound sources by Chinese tourists,whereas the sound sources expected by British are more related to the interaction between human and nature,and cultural experience.The results of perception expectation of acoustic environment showed that the indicators have four aspects,including function(recreation),sound characteristics(tone,sound,dynamics,etc.),space,and perception psychology(environmental perception,emotional reactions,etc.).Differ from sound characteristics that dominant influence British,Chinese people are most concerned about sound functionality.In the aspect of psychological perception,Chinese people look for the auio perception of calm and comfortable to meet ecological consciousness,while the British expectations include varied indictors which fits with emotion reactions.The results of visual environmentl expectation suggested that Chinese people more prefer the natural elements of farmland landscapes,natural and ecological waterscapes,wide and clean streets,and courtyards with flourish plants.Moreover,for audiovisual factors,tranquil,in terms of audio perception,and its display greatest impact on rural landscape experience of Chinese tourists.Through experimental research on the audio-visual interactions of soundscape,it was found that when landscape elements match the sound sources acoustic comforts relatively increases.For the combined effects of visual and audio elements,the sound types and landscape objects have a significant impact on acoustic comforts of human activity sounds,and the sound types and visual fields significantly affected acoustic comforts of natural sounds and music.On the other hand,sound types also make a significant change in landscape evaluation s of three dimensions,including landscape aesthetics,landscape tranquillity and landscape preference.The results showed that natural sounds or music can significantly enhance the landscape evaluations,and the effects on positive landscapes are more obvious,whereas man-made sounds can significantly reduce the landscape evaluations,although they can also play an enhanced role for some particular types of negative landscapes.In addition,compared with quiet,when sounds were perceived,the correlation between landscape tranquillity and landscape preference is enhanced,while that of landscape aesthetics and landscape preference is weaken.Under audio-visual interactions,landscape attentions also changed significantly.Overall,in the quiet condition,the attention areas of landscape tranquility evaluation are more concentrated than those of aesthetic landscape,with fixations agglomerating in the central axis region of landscapes.While with sounds,the attention areas are dispersed: artificial sounds tend to make visual interests focuse on the associated visual elements for longer time,while the natural sounds make the attention interests move to diverse landscape features,namely natural elements abtained extensive attention.To improve and create good rural soundscapes,four aspects of design strategies were proposed,including focusing on soundscape perception and expectation,attention to the differences in evaluations from users,general control and use sound sources and optimization of audio-visual elements of rural soundscapes,based on objective data measurements,subjective questionnaires and experimental research,which could be useful for improving the Northeast traditional village soundscapes,audio-visual environmental optimization for rural tourism,and can be used as references for the countryside-related design and management.