Natural sounds can encourage social interactions in urban parks

Urban parks play an essential role in hosting social activities and providing spaces for social interactions. Previous studies have examined the effects of the sound environment on individuals, particularly in terms of perception and behavior; however, few studies have investigated the impact of the sound environment on social interactions in urban parks. In this study, an experiment was conducted involving sound interventions and covert behavioral observations in a typical urban park activity space to determine whether different interventional sounds influence social interaction behaviors. In this experiment, four sound intervention groups and a control group were established and three variables describing the social interaction situation in the study area were defined: proportion of people engaging in social interaction, frequency of social interaction, and percentage of time spent on social interaction. These findings indicate that changes in the sound environment have a significant impact on social interactions. The natural sound intervention was found to increase the proportion of people engaged in social interactions and the frequency and time spent on social interactions. The positive effects of natural sounds primarily promoted social interactions within groups. In addition, the noise interventions in this experiment had no significant negative effects. These findings suggest that protecting and augmenting positive sounds are sometimes more important than noise control and that design strategies that focus on the sound environment could facilitate social interactions in urban park spaces and long-term social cohesion.