Chongqing - In a remote village in Southwest China’s Yunnan, a soundscape project is carried out to protect Hanihaba, an ancient ballad and a wordless encyclopedia that records the religious culture and living customs of the Hani people. This is one of many scenarios where Xie Hui and his team, the X-scape Lab, explore the possibilities for sound to make a difference.

Creating an immersive visual and auditory scenario

“We analyze from the perspective of soundscape ecology and bring forward effective measures to protect, reshape, and promote the intangible cultural heritage,” said Xie Hui, a professor at Chongqing University and the director of the X-scape Lab.

The X-scape Lab is recording a Hanihaba scenario (photo provided to iChongqing)

The soundscape is the acoustic environment in context perceived by humans. Sound can best approach the spiritual world of all media. According to Xie, it enables the great potential of soundscape design, which ranges from better living experiences by optimizing the architectural design to therapeutic purposes.

In his latest soundscape design exhibition Listening to the Future, the team showcased their recent achievements. The installation piece Soundscape Materialization showed how sound helps present vivid scenes and enhance human perception. The piece captures four typical soundscapes in Southwest China’s Bashu region through audio-visual interaction, including The Pine-soughing Valleys, Evening Rain of the Ba Mountain, Running Water over Stone, Cold Apes, and Returning Birds. Each of the four items features an audio clip, an abstract painting, and a poem to materialize the intangible soundscapes.

The Pine-soughing Valleys were displayed on Listening to the Future. The exhibition was held at Jinshan ECool. (Photo/Guo Shuyu, Liangjiang New Area Media Center)

The soundscape is composed of different sound sources and rhythms. When integrated with images, it becomes a penetrating and expressive reflection of the dynamic change of objective things. According to Xie, it creates an immersive visual and auditory scenario for the audience.

Soundscape helps to treat anxiety disorders

As the vision is in a dominant position, the role of sound has long been underestimated in human perception, communication, and action in the living environment, Xie said. He believes the future to be a space for an all-around experience of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

The concept of the all-around experience is also embodied in the architectural design of the team. A project was carried out in Kunming National Botanical Museum for immersive experiences of the desert plants.

“We reformed the Desert Greenhouse Exhibition Hall with architectural techniques and adopted approaches of immersive visual creation and three soundscape elements, including wind, sand, and water,” said Yang Ping, a team member who led the project. In the simulated environment, visitors can understand how it feels to be in a distant place, which differs from everyday scenarios.

In 2020, the therapeutic benefit of the soundscape was approved through a research project on anxiety disorder jointly carried out by the team and a local hospital. The project showed that patients receiving adjuvant treatment of soundscape experienced significant improvement compared with those receiving standard therapy.

“Access to high-quality acoustic environments may positively affect well-being, quality of life, and environmental health. We are exploring more possibilities and scenarios of soundscape for a better living environment and experiences,” Xie said.

(This article is written by Guo Shuyu, Liangjiang New Area Media Center)