A Soundscape Analysis to the Historical and Ethnomusicology Area of Ethnic Tourism

Soundscape is a sound environment that emphasizes the awareness of auditory perception and social or cultural understandings. However, previous studies which focused on the soundscape of historical and ethnomusicology areas were mainly concerned on the collection, measurement and evaluation of the soundscape and ethnomusicology samples for heritage protections or noise controlling projects, as a result, researches on the direct application and influence of soundscapes to ethnic tourism or music itself have been limited. Based on a long-term soundscape case study in a historical and ethnic tourism destination of TUNXI OLD STREET in Huangshan City of Anhui Province of CHINA from 2008 to 2016, the acoustical sound mapping, soundscape investigation and its changing were examined in this paper. By the combination of the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the soundscape keynotes, signals, soundmarks and their relationships to factors such as the environmental background noise, tourist flows, tourist behaviors, and the form of business and tourism routing, we concluded that the soundscape has a highly correlation to the experience of ethnic tourism, especially for the positive sounds like ethnic music or the extreme negative and unsuitable traffic noise, even though no sufficient attention has been paid to the context of the soundscape, music and ambient sounds. With the purpose of developing a more suitable sound functional space partition of ethnic tourism and ethnic music exhibition, a rough sound planning for this area was also put forward. Finally, a rough concept of sound history for the policy and its importance in keeping the constant of keynotes and soundmarks in the historical area was also discussed in this paper.