Understanding soundscape as a specific environmental experience: Highlighting the importance of context relevance

A conceptual model about environmental experience is presented to guide soundscape studies. This proposal combines the state of the art and the experience of Tecnalia regarding psychosocial studies which focuses on the relationship between environment and people. The model has been structured around five main elements: person (community), place, activity, previous interaction between person and place, and environmental experience. The environmental experience is understood as a holistic experience not only within that soundscape but also linked to other perceptions, such as landscape, odour, etc. The relevant factors and variables of each main element have been identified to assist us in describing human and social holistic experience in relation to the place, in general, and soundscape (perception) in particular. The main objective of this paper is to analyze conceptually and throughout a field experiment, the relevance of the context, understanding it as the surrounding circumstances of the environmental experience. Hence, a field experiment is presented to analyze the relevance of a context characteristic, namely sound environment on the global environmental experience.