Research on Evaluation of Audio-Visual Perception Quality of Urban Parks: A Case Study of Chengdu Outer-Ring Ecological Zone

With the high-quality development of contemporary cities, people attach more importance to the rich sensory experience provided by landscape. Previous place-making methods for urban parks that mainly focus on visual landscape can no longer support the increasing demands of urban residents. Considering that vision and hearing are the most essential senses for people to perceive environmental information, the exploration of the relationship between them and landscape experience may provide a new perspective for improving the audio-visual perceptive quality of urban parks. This research selects thirteen indicators from existing literature to measure the dimensions of visual landscape perception, aural landscape perception, sound source perception and functional features of urban parks, so as to evaluate the audio-visual perceptive quality of three urban parks with different dominant functions in Chengdu Outer-Ring Ecological Zone. And the interaction between the aforesaid dimensions and the overall audio-visual perception perceived by urban park users are explored. Results show that a park’s overall evaluation results turn out to be satisfying when its dominant functional features align with its visual and aural landscape attributes. It is also found that the influencing factors and mechanisms with respect to the audio-visual perceptive quality of urban parks vary with their functions. Based on the analysis of existing problems with regard to the audio-visual perceptive quality of selected urban parks, this research proposes a perspective of employing the interactions between audio-visual perception to improve people’s landscape experience in urban parks indirectly. Research findings provide rigorous and flexible design strategies for optimizing people’s audio-visual perception in urban parks with different dominant functions.