Chen, Xiaochao; (2025) Soundscape and Social Relationships. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Soundscape and Social Relationships.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 May 2026. Download (13MB)

Abstract

Social relationships are critical to human health and well-being throughout life. Research has shown that improving the quality of the physical environment can have a positive impact on facilitating people’s social interaction, but few studies have explored the role of the acoustic environment in this. Therefore, this research links the acoustic environment with an individual’s social factors, aiming to examine the mutual interaction between soundscape and social relationships. This research explored the extent to which people’s soundscape evaluation is affected by their social relationships based on the online survey with questionnaires and reproduced acoustic environment. Two onsite soundscape intervention experiments were carried out in urban parks and residential areas to investigate the effects of different sound resources on people’s social interaction behaviours. Finally, this study further explores the effects of physical characteristics of sound, including pitch and tempo, on people’s social interactions. Based on these experiments, it was found that individuals’ social relationship situations affect their evaluation of the acoustic environment. People who are more socially supported are more sensitive to human and natural sounds, and people who are more socially connected are more sensitive to human and natural sounds as well as traffic noise. Also, people with higher social relationships tend to perceive positive aspects of the acoustic environment. In return, the acoustic environment of the site can also influence people’s social behaviours, as the results showed that natural sounds can encourage more social interactions among people in urban parks. And the impact of natural sounds on people’s social interactions changes depending on the tempo. One key finding from the virtual experiment on sound tempo is that water sounds with a faster tempo significantly increased participants' willingness to engage in social interactions, while variations in birdsong tempo had no measurable effect. Overall, this research fills the knowledge gap by exploring the influence of social factors on soundscape evaluation and extending the soundscape impacts to social relationship dimensions. Meanwhile, it provides empirical evidence regarding the role of sound sources in shaping social behaviours and the impact of sound tempo on social interaction willingness. This research also provides a reference and theoretical basis for evaluating soundscapes and constructing urban environments that promote social interactions from a practical perspective.

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