The Subjective Assessment And Design Strategy Of Jiangnan Gardens

Gardens are one of the most important parts of the Chinese housing environment, as well as the special tourist resources with humanistic values. As one of the main branches in Chinese gardens, Jiangnan Gardens gain more and more attention from the managers and users on its sound environment. Though Jiangnan Gardens have already owned some original unique soundscape constructions, it is still necessary to make some reasonable improvement using the modern soundscape design methods, since the gardens' inside and outside acoustic environment changes and the users' differdent subjective assessment standard caused by the social development and the the gardens'functional changes. The main focus of this paper is to improve the soundscape in Jiangnan Gardens to meet the modern users' requirements under the premise of protecting the original soundscape. The exploration of the traditional soundscape design methods in Jiangnan Gardens for modern gardens construction is also very important.In this paper, Jiangnan Gardens are divided into two types, natural gardens and artificial gardens. Ten gardens distributed in three typical cities as Hangzhou, Suzhou and Yangzhou are chosen for research objects, in order to figure out the universal soundscape features in Jiangnan Gardens. By the means of researches review, on-the-spot investigation, questionnaire survey and mathematical statistics, the soundscape existing situation and improvements of Jiangnan Gardens are discussed in terms of subjective evaluation and the soundscape designing methods of Jiangnan Gardens are discussed basing on the three-factors theory. Finally, the design guideline is listed. This research mainly involves the following three aspects:Firstly, three factors of soundscape in Jiangnan Gardens are analyzed. Based on the existing research results, three influential factors are summed up as:sound, environment and human. Specific meaning and interaction of each factor are demonstrated. Survey and analysis are made about soundscape of Jiangnan Gardens. In detail, factor of environment includes spatial environment and time environment, factor of human includes humanistic factor and individual factor, and factor of sound includes volume and sound source. Taking all these factors into consideration, an objective database is developed. Soundscape design is divided into three types: acoustic design, environmental design, and humanistic design, and detailed methods of each type are summarized.Secondly, subjective assessment system for soundscape in Jiangnan Gardens is developed. Subjective assessment system for soundscape is the actual reflection of sightseers'experience, and it is consist of assessment for overall soundscape and assessment for independent sound source. The assessment system is developed as following steps:establishing the assessment indicator, collection of on-the-spot data, frame construction for assessment system. Ultimate evaluation indicator of "degree of satisfaction", eight semantic evaluation indicator of overall soundscape, three evaluation indicator of independent sound source, and influence factor of evaluation indicator are separately determined by sound walk and laboratory tests. Subjective database of soundscape in Jiangnan Gardens is developed based on the results from on-the-spot questionnaire survey. Through statistic analysis of the data, structure chart of overall soundscape, category of independent sound source, score of evaluation indicator and their correlation are obtained.Finally, derivation of the design guideline for soundscape design in Jiangnan Gardens. The design guidelines for soundscape design in Jiangnan Gardens are inferred from subjective evaluation system and design method of soundscape. The guideline covers two levels, including overall soundscape design and independent sound source design. In this research,"sunny and Rainy Lakeside" and "Geyuan Garden" are selected as research case. Particular analysis is performed on the current situation of the selected gardens, and improved design is carried out according to the design guideline. Thus, feasibility of the guideline is demonstrated.This paper owns three innovation points:(1) Establish a subjective assessment system of soundscape constituted by evaluation indexes, the whole soundscape and each independent sound source.(2) Compile a soundscape design guideline for Jiangnan Gardens. (3) Put forward a soundscape design method based on the three-element theory.