Sonic Gathering Place: implementation of a biophilic soundscape design and its evaluation

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Lacey, Jordan
Brown, AL
Anderson, Charles
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2024
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Abstract

The Sonic Gathering Place (SGP) is a prototype urban furniture installation that uses sound design to enhance the biophilic effects of plants. It uses field recordings from four different biomes in South-Eastern Australia mixed with plants that are representative of those biomes. The SGP has a circular seating structure comprising four integrated planter boxes, each with a single speaker. Nature-based field recordings play through the four-speaker array to create an immersive audio playback experience, though without masking the existing acoustic environment of the installation site. This paper focuses, as practice-led research, on the design process of the installation that encompasses four disciplinary approaches: soundscape design, biophilic design, field recording and urban furniture. Innovatively, it then reports a quantitative survey of the user’s experience of the SGP that hones understanding of human response to the design. Measured user-responses to the SGP, collected through a smartphone-based questionnaire, were overwhelmingly affirmative of the design, including a positive change in self-reported mood resulting from the visit to the SGP. These responses were observed with introduced sound levels set only marginally louder than sound levels that existed before the installation. The results signal a wider role that biophilic sound installations might play in urban landscape design.

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Landscape Research

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© The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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This publication has been entered in Griffith Research Online as an advance online version.

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Lacey, J; Brown, AL; Anderson, C, Sonic Gathering Place: implementation of a biophilic soundscape design and its evaluation, Landscape Research, 2024

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