The Personal Viewpoint on the Meaning of Tranquility Affects the Appraisal of the Urban Park Soundscape

Abstract

Abstract:Previous research has shown that tranquil areas in the city, such as urban parks, are usually perceived as positive and have a restorative effect on visitors. However, visitors could experience these spaces differently depending on the meaning they assign to the concept of tranquility. To investigate how individuals' personal views on tranquility affect their perception of the sonic environment, a soundscape study was conducted in several city parks in Antwerp, Belgium. Mobile sound measurements were combined with a questionnaire survey amongst 660 park visitors. Within the survey, the participants' viewpoint on tranquility was evaluated using their agreement with a set of previously established prototypical statements, categorizing them into one out of three main tranquility viewpoint groups: people that associate tranquility with silence, those that associate it with hearing natural sounds, or those that associate it with social relationships. Next to this, the sounds that participants had heard during their visit were noted, and their perception of the overall quality of the soundscape and the degree to which it matched their expectation were assessed. Results show that the park visitors who associate tranquility with natural sounds or to silence are more often found amongst those that report hearing mechanical sounds a lot. The same groups of visitors rate the overall quality of the sonic environment of the park more often bad to very bad. These findings suggest that park visitors pay attention more to the sounds they do not expect to hear, and that the higher their expectations about the soundscape, the more critical they become in their appraisal of the soundscape.

Propuesta metodológica para valorar la calidad escénica de los paisajes del agua y su potencial como recurso turístico

“…La vista también fue el sentido que obtuvo una mayor puntuación, constatándose que en la percepción del paisaje existe una dominancia del sentido de la vista, reforzado por el enfoque estético de las culturas occidentales, también dominado por la vista (Prior, 2016). Sin embargo, esto difiere con algunos estudios previos que muestran que una de las cualidades más valoradas por los visitantes de estos paisajes del agua es la tranquilidad (Pueyo-Ros, Ribas, & Fraguell, 2016b) un aspecto que está claramente ligado al sentido del oído (Filipan et al, 2017). Aunque una muestra de tres espacios resulta insuficiente para sacar conclusiones definitivas, el índice de correlación utilizado para comprobar la validez de la metodología sugiere que el método puede generar buenos resultados, aunque será necesario aplicarlo en más espacios para comprobar si el índice de calidad escénica continúa correlacionándose con éxito con las valoraciones de los visitantes.…”

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“…La vista también fue el sentido que obtuvo una mayor puntuación, constatándose que en la percepción del paisaje existe una dominancia del sentido de la vista, reforzado por el enfoque estético de las culturas occidentales, también dominado por la vista (Prior, 2016). Sin embargo, esto difiere con algunos estudios previos que muestran que una de las cualidades más valoradas por los visitantes de estos paisajes del agua es la tranquilidad (Pueyo-Ros, Ribas, & Fraguell, 2016b) un aspecto que está claramente ligado al sentido del oído (Filipan et al, 2017). Aunque una muestra de tres espacios resulta insuficiente para sacar conclusiones definitivas, el índice de correlación utilizado para comprobar la validez de la metodología sugiere que el método puede generar buenos resultados, aunque será necesario aplicarlo en más espacios para comprobar si el índice de calidad escénica continúa correlacionándose con éxito con las valoraciones de los visitantes.…”

Activity as a Mediator Between Users and Their Auditory Environment in an Urban Pocket Park

“…They developed methodologies to collect, on-site, (quasi) simultaneous data on the evaluation of users' auditory environments, contextual insights on how the space is being used, as well as on its physical properties through sound recordings, measurements and land use information, and then to process the resulting dataset in an integrated manner (e.g. Filipan et al 2017, Herranz-Pascual et al 2017. While some of these models proposed integrating an activity component (Jennings & Cain 2013) and some, a spatial-temporal dimension (see Liu et al 2014), this process of integration lacked, in the authors' opinion, a geographical space-time component that considered users' activities in relation to how, where and when spaces are being used and how that related to users' evaluation of their auditory environments, in context.…”