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.