Music as a tourism soundscape: musicscape in sensory marketing and destination experience design

While the relationship between music, place, and tourism has been well-documented, there is a noticeable gap in understanding how tourists’ sensory perceptions, particularly auditory perceptions of music, influence their overall tourism experience. The study adopted mixed research methods to address this question. In the qualitative phase, we utilised co-occurrence network analysis to identify musicscapes derived from the lyrics of Inner Mongolian grassland songs. Furthermore, in the quantitative phase, we exam­ined the relationships among musicscape, cultural involvement, and tourism experience quality, based on 420 valid questionnaires collected from visitors during the peak tour­ism season in July 2021 at the Xilamuren Grassland. The findings reveal that Grassland songs include eight distinct types of musicscapes, and the perception of these land­scapes positively influences cultural involvement, which, in turn, significantly enhances the evaluation of tourism experience quality. Cultural involvement partially mediates the relationship between musicscape perception and tourism experience quality. This study highlights the adaptability of music as a tourism soundscape, enriches the under­standing of tourism landscape appeal across diverse cultural contexts, and underscores the practical importance of incorporating music into sensory marketing and travel desti­nation experience design.