Soundscape components, perceptions, and EEG reactions in typical mountainous urban parks

Abstract

The soundscape quality of an urban park can affect human comfort and well-being. This paper investigated the components, assessments, and EEG reactions to soundscapes in mountainous urban parks. Four mountainous urban parks in Chongqing, China, were selected as the areas of study. The results indicate that biological and human sounds make up more than 84.4 % of the overall soundscape components in the mountainous urban parks. The influence of mountainous topography on spatial variation of noise levels was greater than that on temporal variation. The fields for dancing activity were limited and fixed due to the limitations of mountainous topography, but singing activities were not constrained by fields and were distributed widely. The temporal variations in noise levels are known to be affected by the daily activities of visitors, categorised by the time periods of ‘all day’, ‘weekday’, and ‘weekend’. The levels during the weekends were usually 8.0–9.8 dBA higher than those of weekdays. Mountainous landscapes are characterised by abundant visual diversity and flexible spatial scale. The site with greater visual diversity may have higher assessments of sound comfort and soundscape diversity. On the other hand, the naturalness of the soundscape had a significantly negative correlation with spatial openness in the mountainous urban parks. The restorative EEG rhythm was more remarkable at the birdsong-dominant site than at the traffic-noise-dominant site, under both the audio-only condition and the audio-visual condition. Interestingly, more restorative EEG reactions were observed with the audio stimuli than with the audio-visual stimuli, as people may pay more attention to the visual stimuli under the audio-visual condition, which could lead to an EEG rhythm indicative of a tense state.