Urban Sound Gardens: Supporting Overlapping Audio Landmarks in Exploratory Environments

Sound gardens rely on location tracking technology to situate audio landmarks in public spaces, typically urban parks. These landmarks are surrounded by a proximity zone, and content relating to them is displayed to users within this region. In densely populated sound gardens, overlap between zones is inevitable and will result in simultaneous playback of multiple audio sources – a potentially confusing situation. We propose an urban sound garden design featuring both overlapping proximity zones and spatialized animal sounds to attract the user’s attention to particular landmarks in a non-guided exploratory environment. We first present a detailed description of our sound garden design and then report results from a user study in which our proposed sound garden design provided a much greater sense of discovery and immersion when compared to three less complex designs.