Restoration Effects Of Soundscape In Urban Environment

With the acceleration of urbanization,people are getting farther away from the natural environment.The rapid pace of life has brought tremendous mental pressure to people,causing a series of mental health problems.Urban residents urgently need ways to relieve stress.As the external physical environment for people to carry out various activities,the urban environment is closely related to daily life.Therefore,fully exploring the restoration function of the urban environment has important practical significance for improving the quality of the urban environment and people’s well-being.As an important part of the urban environment,soundscape can directly affect people’s restorative feelings,and promote or inhibit individual psychological recovery.However,the existing researches on soundscape restoration mainly focused on indoor experiments and artificial controlled of several specific sound sources,and the respondents were limited to college students with similar ages.Without considering how soundscape experience in the real environment affects overall environmental restoration and the differences in the psychological recovery effects of soundscape on different people.Therefore,in order to find out the relationship between soundscape restoration and overall environment restoration,to prove out the value of soundscape in the construction of restorative environment,to clarify the difference of people’s psychological restoration in different urban environments,and the influence of people’s perception preference for different individual sounds on soundscape restoration effect.In this study,through online screening and field investigation,ten sample plots of five typical urban environmental types(gray space,blue space,open green space,semi-open green space and closed green space)were selected.Researchers recorded individual sounds and designed questionnaire by listening individual sounds on the spot.The respondents’ perception and preference of sound environment,perception of the overall environment and self-reported physical and mental health index were investigated in our questionnaire.Each individual sound that may affect the restoration of soundscape was refined and analyzed.In view of main research questions,reliability analysis,validity analysis,analysis of variance,tukey HSD back testing,paired t-test,spearman’s correlation coefficient and canonical correlation analysis were used to process the data.The results showed that:(1)Soundscape played an indispensable role in overall restorative environment.Soundscape experience affected the soundscape restoration,thus affected the overall environmental restoration.Compared with visual experience,the overall environmental restoration effect tended to be influenced by the soundscape experience.(2)In different types of urban environments,the effects of soundscape restoration were different.Among them,soundscape in the semi-open green space had the best psychological restoration for the respondents,followed by blue space,open green space and closed green space,and the gray space had the weakest psychological restoration effect on respondents.(3)Compared with the low physical and mental health index group,the high physical and mental health index group had better soundscape experience and psychological restoration effect.Respondents in the group with high physical and mental health index and those in the group with low physical and mental health index achieved the best soundscape restoration effect in the semi-open green space.(4)Respondents’ preference for different individual sounds had significant impacts on the overall environment psychological restoration effect,and the perceived occurrences,perceived loudness and perceived preference of bird song and tree rustling had significant positive correlation with the soundscape restoration.The research results not only confirmed the important role of soundscape restoration in the overall environment restoration,but also clarified the soundscape restoration effect in different urban environment types.The positive correlation between the interviewee’s physical and mental health index and soundscape restoration was confirmed,and proved out the individual sound perception attribute which played a major role in the soundscape restoration effect in urban environment.These results can provide theoretical basis and practical guidance for the future urban restoration soundscape design.