Research on the characteristics of soundscape preference of forest tourists in China

In order to investigate the characteristics of forest soundscape that Chinese tourists like and provide a guidance for forest landscape planning and tourism management, a research on the characteristics of soundscape preference of forest tourists in China has been carried out. By designing Likert scale and semantic differential scale and combining cluster analysis and factor analysis, the characteristics of Chinese tourists' preference for single sound source and overall acoustic environment in forest environment are statistically classified. The results show that in forest, the natural sound has the highest overall preference, while traffic sound is the lowest, however, there are different evaluations for specific sound sources, which can not be generalized. In addition, 20 sets of semantic indicators are selected to evaluate the forest soundscape on a scale of 7 levels, and 4 main factors affecting forest soundscape preference are found to be entertainment, spatial characteristics, sound quality and dynamics, and environmental perception. Moreover, the coverage of the dominant factors to all the index parameters reaches above 61% and the results are satisfactory. Thus, in practical work, it is necessary to highlight the sound sources with high expectations of tourists and meantime focus on the factors that play a leading role in subjective perception evaluation, then the goal of reducing dimensions and simplifying problem can be achieved.