The Study On The Restorative Environment Of Urban Parks Based On Auditory-visual Perception

Significant global health challenges are being confronted in the 21 st century.As an increasing number of people tend to relax and relieve stress through outdoor recreation,urban parks have been considered to be an important part in the provision of sustainable habitats and welfare.To maximize the health-promoting effects of urban nature,and achieve a major change in the medical model from hospital treatment to daily prevention,strengthening and expanding the research on the environment with high restorative potential and aesthetic vaule is of great era significance.However,the majority restorative environmental studies in recent years have only placed the attention in spatial characteristics and visual perception,and little has focused on specific landscape elements and components from the perspective of audio-visual perception,so that the final landscape effect has not achieved the design intention.In order to truly reflect visitor experiences and provide comprehensive guidelines for the practical health-promotion design of landscapes,exploring key qualities and spatial aspects of the audiovisual landscape that contribute to relaxation and stress recovery has become an important aspect of future development in this field.First,tooking Huanhuaxi Park,the largest urban forest park in Chengdu,as the study site,this paper introduced theories of restorative environment that are widely used in healthy urban planning.Psychophysical measures were applied to explore the effects of different landscape stimulations on physiological(blood pressure,blood glucose and electroencephalography [EEG])and psychological(the abbreviated Profile of Mood States [POMS] and the Landscape Perceived Restorativeness Scale [LPRS])activities in human restorative experiences,and to establish the relationship between human health and natural qualities from macro(landscape types),meso(landscape elements)and micro(landscape components)perspectives.Then,we combined the generalized nature qualities and landscape features that promoting health and wellbeing from study in Huanhuaxi park with corresponding sound factors,and conducted an indoor experiment to investigate the effects of integration between visual and auditory stimuli in urban green spaces on restorative potential and aesthetic preference using the Short-version Revised Restoration and Preference Scale(SRRPS).The aims of this study are to identify the important predictors that contributing to human relaxation and stress recovery,and to explore which features and attributes of auditory-visual combinations improve restoration and preference ratings.This study brings a new perspective into healthy urban planning by taking sound,vision,and human interaction into account from multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory perspectives,and has great promise to broaden the scope of application of restorative environment designs,to supplement the knowledge base of restorative environment,and to provide new insight into the improvement of restorative environments of existing urban parks.The main research findings are as following:(1)In the study of restorative environment of urban parks from a "visual stimuli" perspective,we found that different landscape types,landscape elements and landscape composition led to different physiological responses and mood states.(2)In the study of restorative environment of urban parks from a "auditory stimuli" perspective,we found that auditory-visual combination stimuli had better performance in terms of mental restoration and aesthetic preference than single visual stimuli.An environment with natural sounds typically evoke people’s pleasant emotions,while the inclusion of human voices brings negative feelings.The visual and auditory stimuli with higher diversity and complexity in natural environments might be significant restorative attributes for enhancing human psychological health.(3)From a "auditory-visual perception" perspective,we found that a positive correlation was found between restorative potential and aesthetic preference.The conceptual model of the generalized restorative environments of urban parks might be an urban mountain forest with natural water,lush vegetation,and flying birds accompanied by flowing water sounds,wind-induced vegetation sounds,and birdsong.(4)This study proposes that restorative environments can be achieved by suitable configuration and organization of visual landscape characteristics,auditory landscape characteristics,and human activities in future healthy urban planning.Interdisciplinary cooperation and multi-sensory design has great potential in enhancing the restorative potential and aesthetic quality of urban green spaces,and providing feasible methods for addressing incompatibilities between human health recovery needs and current urban park design.