Soundscape as an Outstanding Universal Value: An Introduction with Case Studies of Chinese World Cultural Heritage Sites

Sound was an important element in residential and landscape design in ancient China. Acoustic sources of geophony, ecophony (tianlai and dilai in Chinese, meaning sound of heaven and earth), and anthrophony (renlai, man-made sound) are frequently used together with landscape, and sometimes also with scentscape, to make the living environs an ideal microcosm for cultivating minds and achieving unity with nature, a philosophical idea of Confucianism and Daoism that the elite class of society has pursued in the past. Dictated by this functional purpose, only sounds regarded as elegant or bestowed with philosophical, cultural, and religious meanings are chosen in the design. Currently, many of these designs have been preserved as soundscape heritage.

By 2019, of the forty-one Chinese cultural and mixed World Heritage properties designated by UNESCO, twenty-eight have sound as an important attribute testifying to the outstanding universal values. This paper gives an introduction to the Chinese perception of sound, followed by a detailed analysis of soundscapes of three world cultural heritage sites in terms of their philosophical and cultural meanings and design techniques, and finally a brief discussion of the challenges on the conservation and management of soundscape heritage.