Effects of Sounds on Preferences for Outdoor Settings

TLDR

The study employed three procedures—field evaluations with 18 realistic sounds, questionnaire descriptions, and photo–audio presentations—to examine how sound influences aesthetic judgments of outdoor settings. All three procedures consistently showed that natural and animal sounds improved aesthetic ratings of wooded and residential sites, while other sounds lowered them; at downtown streets sounds were neutral except traffic sounds, which were most enhancing, indicating that visual–acoustic interactions significantly shape setting evaluations and that sound appropriateness only partially explains their effect.

Abstract

Three methods were used to assess the influence of a number of realistic sound stimuli on esthetic evaluations of outdoor settings. We reproduced 18 sounds-including those of children, songbirds, construction equipment, automobiles, aircraft, and wind-for college students serving as evaluators at field sites ranging from a forest to a downtown street. In two other procedures, settings and sounds were described in a questionnaire, or were presented using photographs and tape recordings. All.three procedures produced similar results; natural and animal sounds had enhancing effects on evaluations of the heavily wooded natural and residential sites, and other sounds had detracting effects on the same sites. The sounds were relatively neutral in effect at two downtown streets, where traffic sounds were found to be most enhancing. The results show that the interaction of a setting's visual and acoustic characteristics significantly influences evaluations of that setting, and that appropriateness of sounds only partly accounts for their influence on setting quality.