Residents’ Preferences to Multiple Sound Sources in Urban Park: Integrating Soundscape Measurements and Semantic Differences

Abstract

Urban parks provide their residents with a space for activities and interactions, and soundscapes play an important role in influencing the residents’ sense of experience of the park environment, with the result that the preferences of residents regarding multiple sound sources can be used as the basis of improving the soundscape quality and optimizing the function of urban parks. Using Shanghai Century Park as the research area, this study focused on the residents’ preference to multiple sound sources based on registered residence differences, and comprehensively used the semantic differential method, importance-performance analysis model, and multinomial logit model to conduct quantitative research on urban park soundscapes and combined the measurement results of the soundscape with the residents’ perception and preference. The results showed that the artificial sounds in Century Park were noisy during the morning and evening peak, while the human sounds were noisy when residents gathered in the park. There was a close relationship between the favorability and subjective loudness of urban park soundscapes, and the residents’ perceptions of urban park soundscapes substantially differed in terms of loudness, tone, and sense of belonging, whereas the differences in the perception of timbre, coverage, and sound source distance were relatively small. Furthermore, it is necessary to enhance the role of natural sounds as well as control the main noise-producing sound sources so that various sounds in the park will not interfere with each other; the optimization of soundscapes should also focus on the residents’ different soundscape preferences due to their individual characteristics.

AI-based soundscape analysis: Jointly identifying sound sources and predicting annoyance

“…Based on audio recordings containing implicit information in soundscapes, Thorogood et al (2016) established the background and foreground classification task within a musicological and soundscape context. For urban park soundscapes, Gong et al (2022) introduce the concepts of "importance" and "performance" and position the soundscape elements in this twodimensional plane. The importance dimension reflects to what extent a particular sound is an essential part of this soundscape.…”

The effects of the natural visual-aural attributes of urban green spaces on human behavior and emotional response

“…Though individual differences may exist, natural sounds in urban green spaces such as birdsong, cicadas, flowing water, and the sound of breeze blowing through leaves have positive benefits and contribute significantly to soothing stress ( Zhong et al, 2023 ). In a study focusing on residents’ preferred sound sources in urban parks, researchers found that all types of residents had a high preference for natural sounds, especially the elder group ( Gong et al, 2022 ).…”