The Role of Landscape Architecture on Soundscape Experience

Landscape design always refers to the construction of visual landscape environment, but human cognition of environment includes not only visual, but also acoustic cognition. In recent years, the soundscape was usually used as a key method to increase the sound quality in urban open spaces. Landscape factors have been considered in many previous studies in relation to sound and soundscape perception. Therefore, this aim of this research is to review the relationships between soundscape and landscape. This paper introduced the concept of soundscape, investigated sound envrionment of urban areas and explored soundscape elements and soundscape designs. In view of current sound environment features of open areas and different population groups’ preferences for different sound elements, this paper proposed soundscape design method to improve sound environment of open areas.