Effects of Soundscape on Mental Restoration in Urban Green Space

At present, most of the researches on soundscape mainly focus on exploring people’s preferences while giving little consideration to the interaction between soundscape and visual landscape. To explore the effect of the interaction between soundscape and visual landscape on mental restoration in urban green spaces, this paper has selected eight representative urban green spaces. Video programs that can reflect the landscape characteristics of the sample sites are applied as the media to evaluate the restorative capacity. Five selected sounds (single bird tweeting, multiple bird tweeting, frog croaking, sound of flowing water and Chinese classical music) were aligned with eight videos recorded on the selected sites through computer technology, and 191 university students were invited to evaluate the mental restorative capacity of urban green space, and five graduate students majoring in landscape were asked to make quantitative analysis of the landscape characteristics of urban green space. The results show that the presence of water flow sound or frog croaking in urban green space would reduce the mental restorative capacity of green space. Setting single bird tweeting or multiple bird tweeting in a flat terrain environment could effectively improve the mental restorative capacity.