What is a soundscape refers to perception, experience, and understanding of the sound heard by an individual or group in the environment. It describes people's feelings and interpretations of the sound environment where he/she locates. Soundscapes,metaphorical landscape, express aesthetic result of acoustic environment and whether the environment perceived auditory comfort/pleasant.

Soundscape is different from noise on the later is healthy killer,which is poor result of a soundscape. Noise refers to negative soundscape. Soundscape focuses on the perception of acoustic environment not the level of ambient sound. To the sounds perferrrd by people,they are ecological resources instead of noise, which are need to protect. With our society evolved in the industrial stage, our living environment is full of various mechanical and traffic sounds, which are noisy and irritated. With the higher of these sounds,the noise control is highly and widely emphasized in which other sounds are ignored. In the era of ecological development, sounds from narural facet cannot be ignored,building good soundscape is more focused than noise control, as it can provide a great benifit on social wellbeing.Generally,soundscape design is totally different from noise control on its way treating acoustic environment, the former concerns on creating a good auditory environment making people happy and relaxation through properly planning and design, however, the latter emphasized on reducing sound physical level.

What a soundscape express, it includes scape, sound in a scape, people embraced in the scape, and result in perception, experience, and understanding of such auditory scape, which is differnet from noise control. Soundscapes describe the overall acoustic environment of how people feeling good or bad of it through hearing. Soundscape studying aims at obtaining pleasant acoustic environment by providing high-quality ecological sound resources through targeted planning and design.

Soundscape describes a person's perception of the acoustic environment including irritability,pleasure,tranquility and other psychological perceptions

The perception results of the soundscape can be measured through subjective evaluation, behavioral observation, physiological index analysis and other methods. However, there is currently no metric measurement.

Soundscape design can be combined with landscape design, such as arranging landscape facilities and elements (green plants, water features, space interface) based on auditory perceptions.