Sound ambiences consistent with visualizations of landscape types – An evaluation

Using digital landscape representations for assessing people’s perceptions of the visual landscape and their preferences for alternative options of landscape change, a high simulation quality is required. Thereby, sounds can augment people’s experiencing of the demonstrated landscape. We present an approach to establish sound ambiences and to investigate their level of perceived con-sistency with visual representations of different landscape types in a laboratory experiment. The results show that sounds expected through the visual contents and sounds anticipated by partici-pants remembering similar situations need to be reproduced. For presenting a realistic sound am-bience a mix of soundmarks and of more general ambient sounds is important. Further, the sounds’ volume and dominance are decisive for the overall consistency. It is notable that people in laboratory environments seem to not always accept the volume measured in the real landscape as appropriate. Our conclusions give advice for designing audio-visual simulations. Furthermore, we provide guidance for evaluating the consistency of audio-visual stimuli for implementation in landscape preference studies.ISSN:2367-4253ISSN:2511-624