Enhancing the park experience by giving visitors control over the park's soundscape

Sound pollution is an ever growing problem in modern society, and especially in urban environments. In this paper, we investigate if and how artificial sounds can improve the experience of visitors of an urban park with a lot of traffic noise. By using a mobile app, park visitors can control the sound playback by selecting the natural sounds they like, such as birds or a waterfall, and setting the volume. This process of adding artificial sounds to the existing sound environment results in an augmented soundscape. Comparison of the environment with and without this sound playback showed that most visitors experience this as an improvement of the park environment and enjoy controlling the sounds. An experiment with 165 users identified various correlations between the visitors’ subjective evaluations of the sound environment and objective measures of their usage behavior with the app, such as the number of interactions and the spent time.