Shaping city soundscapes: In-situ comparison of four sound installations in an urban public space

The soundscape approach considers sound as a resource from a user perspective in the planning of public spaces. While this approach is garnering increased research attention, practitioners rarely integrate sound into their practice beyond noise mitigation. Yet, sound design of public spaces has long been a major focus of sound installation artists, who offer creative site-specific interventions to (re)design public spaces. In this study, we present the systematic evaluation and comparison of four temporary sound installations deployed over two consecutive summers in the same urban public space. The sound installations featured compositions by the artist collective Audiotopie using different combinations of ambient music, nature, and vocal sounds. To measure the effects of the sound installations on users’ experience, we deployed 825 questionnaires including soundscape ratings and sound source listings. The results show that all four sound installations improved the public space’s soundscape, with commonalities (increased calmness and pleasantness, decreased perceived loudness) and specificities (increased sense of being-away for one installation, increased extent-coherence and reduced ratings for chaotic for another) related to compositional and contextual factors, such as the intended design goals, users’ location, or the presence of construction noise. As well, three of the four installations distracted participants from other non-dominant sound sources such as construction works, air conditioners, but also birds and human voices. Overall, the results confirm that sound installations can have a common enhancing effect on the experience of public space users, in addition to specific, tailored effects to reinforce the intended design goals in public spaces.