Influence of Environmental Sensitivity on Soundscape Evaluation in Urban Open Public Spaces

Urban open public spaces play a vital role in contemporary cities, and the quality of the soundscape in these environments affects people's psychological and physiological restoration. Previous soundscape research has shown that environmental sensitivity is a crucial factor affecting psychological responses to the acoustic environment, but many of these findings are restricted to the interpretation of "negative" dimensions' variance of evaluations. In this experiment, we examined the effects of individuals' different aspects of environmental sensitivities such as vulnerability sensitivity (noise sensitivity, etc.) and vantage sensitivity (aesthetic sensitivity, etc.) on soundscape evaluation through experiencing audio-visual environments of various urban open public in laboratory. The participants, 20-45-year-old college students and staffs with normal hearing (N=30), experienced ten common urban open space scenarios (parks, plazas, pedestrian streets) for at least 10 minutes each, and finished the questionnaire which consisted of two parts: items from the Soundscape Quality Protocol and the Environmental Sensitivity Survey includes Weinstein's Noise Sensitivity (WNS) Scale and Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) Scale. The results show that people with high noise sensitivity tended to overestimate the "negative" dimensions of soundscape evaluations, whereas people with high aesthetic sensitivity tended to overestimate the "positive" dimensions. These environmental sensitivities were found to be statistically independent. In other words, environmental sensitivity affects the soundscape evaluation significantly in urban open public spaces. This suggests that attention should be paid to the diverse needs of different people, in policy-making and urban planning.