Restorative urban soundscapes

Urban soundscapes can support psychological restoration, but the effect depends on far more than whether a sound is natural. Across psychoacoustics, environmental psychology and neuroscience, restoration is shaped less by source category than by perceived meaning and audiovisual congruence, varies with listener and culture and registers differently across physiological, cognitive and subjective measures. We organise this evidence into a framework and identify where translated measurement tools distort cross-cultural comparison.