Scoring for Calm or for Excitement? Smalley et al. (2023) on choices of sound in digital nature experiences (10/25/24)

I’m lucky enough to live on a farm, so wandering around in nature is something that comes as a matter of course for me, but I’m interested in how “digital nature” fits into the modern soundscapes we inhabit, and came across the Smalley et al. article while looking for a different reference. It was an interesting read, so here’s my summary!

Great Egret in a Florida waterway

Alexander J. Smalley et al., “Soundscapes, music, and memories: Exploring the factors that influence emotional responses to virtual nature content,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 89 (2023): #102060, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1787215/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The idea of visiting nature in a digital environment is popular, and was doubly so during the period of shelter-at-home recommendations during the first outbreak of the COVID pandemic. During that time, the authors of Smalley et al.’s “Soundscapes, music, and memories” got the idea of testing how the digital delivery of nature was actually working in terms of its emotional deliverables: cognitive reset, restorative potential calm, excitement, and awe. (They cite Kaplan & Kaplan 1989 on attention restoration theory, and Ulrich et al. 1991 on stress recovery theory as influences on their thinking). They had n=7636 participants, so provide a robust quantitative assessment of the field.

They noted that while we’ve done a lot of work to understand how viewing nature works, we’ve done less to understand how hearing such nature-scapes works in that digitally mediated environment, and they developed a clever plan to test the parameters that matter, using four different audio setups: silence, only music, only nature sounds, and a combination of music and nature sounds.

Since most documentaries have historically relied on big bold orchestral scores, they commissioned a “wall-of-sound” score (à la Hans Zimmer) to accompany their 3-minute digitally-generated nature scene, and (in collaboration with BBC Soundscapes for Wellbeing) measured the video’s impact with and without natural sounds layered in. (The natural sounds included things like bird song, water sounds, and the like.)

They were also interested in memory and its intersection with “affective outcomes triggered by digital nature content,” but noted that nostalgia (more particularly), being so often tied to specific musical cues, may not have been operational, given the newly generated score.

They found that:

The inclusion of music in our scene was associated with greater feelings of excitement (where it was the highest rated condition for this outcome), lower levels of calmness, and no significant change in restorative potential, awe, or nostalgia, compared to the silent control.

Music, in other words, is doing something, but it is not actually doing the restorative work of nature. To create excitement, we may be seeing “rhythmic entrainment” – the body responding to the upbeat rhythms of the music – and/or “emotional contagion,” in which the listener identifies with “the energy and excitement expressed by the music.”

But, since music meets only one of the positive parameters that “nature videos” can head for, the authors emphasize “the importance of multi-sensory depictions of nature.” Restoration and reset, and even awe at the beauty of the world, are supported by the hearing of the sounds that surround it.

My take-away is that video with nature sounds is the best choice if you’re trying to invoke a state of calm and get ready for another round of writing (ha!), but nature with music is better if you need that energy boost to clean the house.