Contrasting urban and natural soundscapes: implications for child development, cognitive functioning, and physical and mental health

Soundscapes, defined as the collection of biological, geophysical, and human-generated sounds, can exert meaningful effects on various aspects of human wellbeing. Not all soundscapes are created equal: natural and anthropogenic sounds often elicit fundamentally different physiological and psychological responses. As global urbanization accelerates and more people spend their lives immersed in acoustic environments dominated by anthropogenic sounds, understanding these differences has become increasingly important. Although the scientific study of soundscapes is relatively new and still developing, current evidence reveals three consistent patterns for urban soundscapes: they tend to elevate physiological stress and sympathetic arousal, impair attention and working memory, and contribute to negative physical outcomes such as sleep disruption or cardiovascular strain. In contrast, research on natural soundscapes identifies three recurrent benefits: they promote rapid stress recovery, support attentional restoration through low effort “soft fascination,” and reliably enhance mood and emotional stability. Yet urban and natural soundscapes are not uniformly harmful or beneficial; both may contain elements that can produce positive or negative effects depending on context, intensity, and listener characteristics. This paper further proposes a feature-based framework for understanding soundscapes, suggesting that human responses may depend less on broad categories such as “natural” or “urban” and more on acoustic properties including predictability, informational load, intensity, and spectral entropy. It also synthesizes mechanistic hypotheses, including evolutionary signaling, acoustic similarity, and habituation, to explain why certain sounds promote restoration while others provoke stress or cognitive disruption. In addition, the paper highlights underexplored roles of culture, developmental timing, circadian alignment, and multisensory integration in shaping responses to sound environments, and outlines future research directions for designing healthier acoustic spaces.