Research On The Restorative Soundscapes For School-age Children

With the rapid development of urbanization,the urban environment is becoming noisier and worse,which triggered more public health problems,including the increase of the physiological and psychological problems of urban residents.Moreover,children,targeted as a vulnerable group,are more susceptible to the surrounding environment than adults.Also,they are also reported to suffer a certain degree of cognitive fatigue and mental stress in their daily life and study.Therefore,there is an urgent need to restore the negative effects of fatigue and stress on children through the optimization of environmental design.The “restorative environment” is a theoretical concept born in the field of environmental psychology.It refers to an environment that enables people to recover from psychological fatigue and mental stress.As an integral part of the urban environment,soundscape design is essential to the construction of a restorative environment.In this research,with school-age children as the research sample and the concept of “restoration” as the research perspective,the soundscapes in children's living places were systematically explored and studied.Firstly,a social questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the children's needs for a restorative environment,the restorative evaluations of children's current living environments,and the potentially restorative audio and visual elements for children.Additionally,the acoustic environments of the survey sites were also recorded and tested.Secondly,based on the results of the questionnaire survey,16 potentially restorative soundscapes for children were extracted.Those soundscapes were used as experimental stimuli to explore children's restorative perception of different sound sources and signal-to-noise ratios in a laboratory study.The perceptive dimensions and acoustic characteristics of restorative soundscapes were analyzed,and the sound sources and signal-to-noise ratio that were perceived to be most restorative by children were determined.Thirdly,the above sound sources and signal-to-noise ratio were used as experimental stimuli to examined children's attention restoration(indicated by sustained attention and short-term memory)and stress reduction(indicated by physiological stress and emotional stress).Finally,based on the concept of evidence-based design,all the above research results were applied gradually to help optimize the soundscape design of children's living places.Above all,this research explored and examined the restorative soundscapes in daily contexts from the perspective of school-age children.The research results would provide a new direction for environmental research and landscape design for children,and lay a reliable and solid theoretical foundation for healthy and sustainable sound environments for children.