Effects of the visual landscape factors of an ecological waterscape on acoustic comfort

In an ecological waterscape, acoustic comfort is an important element of the landscape experience; however, there is still a lack of study on the relationships between sounds and landscape factors. In this study, the acoustic comfort influenced by three visual landscape factors was examined based on audiovisual experiments. The results indicate that although landscape factors can influence the acoustic comforts of 11 types of sounds in different ways, the audiovisual matching contexts resulting in higher acoustic comforts are presented regularly. The analysis of the effect of landscape objects suggests that the acoustic comforts of the sounds relating to people’s participation are increased by artificial landscape objects compared with those under the effect of natural landscape objects, whereas natural landscape objects closely match natural sounds, as well as the sounds with music-related and melodic characteristics. In terms of the effect of the distance to water edge, the acoustic comfort score (based on a five-point scale) of children frolic is higher with a closer view of a waterscape, by 1.06, compared to that with a distant view, whereas the distant view continuously increases the evaluation scores of road traffic sound by 0.50 per 10 dBA at 30–50 dBA compared to those with the closer view. In terms of the effect of the appearance of animals and humans, the coherence between audio and visual environment is: with the appearance of animals, the evaluations of natural sounds are higher compared to those without, whereas with the appearance of humans, the evaluations of the sounds relating to people’s participation are higher compared to those without.