When All the Birds Are Singing in the Sky – Perceived Natural Sounds and Bird Diversity as Booster for Subjective Mental Health

Natural noises, especially the sounds of birds, have been found to be beneficial in lowering tension, anxiety, and agitation as well as promoting emotional healing. Recent laboratory research has mainly examined how public responses to birdsongs differ from those to other biological, artificial, or mechanical sounds, finding that birdsong promotes more effective physiological and psychological recovery. Our study continued this experiment with a questionnaire survey (N=202) in a non-lab on site outdoor setting in a larger Viennese recreational area, accompanied by soundscape analysis. Main findings show an overall effect on perceived mental health, with strongest effects in the field of emotional restoration (reduction of worries) than to cognitive clarity (clarification of thoughts). More in-depth analysis confirms low relevance of demographic variables age and gender but outlines the interesting relevance of the belief in the presence of animals in the recreational area. random forests, GAMMs, mediation, conditional inference trees, Bayesian models — suggest that it is not the acoustic composition per se that drives restoration, but rather how visitors perceive and interpret the soundscape. Interventions should therefore not focus solely on improving NDSI values but also on facilitating visitors’ awareness of the natural sounds already present.