Soundscapes and sonicscapes in tourism: A decade of research insights from bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The soundscape studied has gained increasingly frequent attention across multiple disciplines, especially in tourism and leisure domain. While it has already indicated a unique soundscape provides dynamic and memorable tourism experiences, a clearly mapped perspective across different segmentations of soundscapes, both natural and acoustically created, remains missing. Therefore, a comprehensive mapping and review of soundscape studies is imperative to understand its implications for potential inbound tourism research in future. This article aimed to explore potential soundscape studies by assessing trends and developments in recent decades (2013–2023). We applied a bibliometric approach, using a PRISMA framework and under NVivo 12 Plus, VOSViewer, and Biblioshiny-R-Studio software as analytical tools. Significant yield discoveries showed that tourism soundscape research is undergoing steady growth, as evidenced by quantity of publications and citation trends. Single and multi-country international collaborations characterized by soundscape outreach research playing an influential role were highlighted. We identified multiple research themes, such as anthropogenic noise and music heritage, and pointed out how we approached this research from two perspectives: environmental/natural and manufacturing/acoustics. In our review, several keywords and predominant themes were identified, which suggested soundscape studies have recently become an increasingly popular topic in tourism research. The broad spectrum of key themes, such a tourism, tourists, sustainability, areas, and development perspectives, are evidence points of significant diversity in these topics. Most importantly, our research offers significant theoretical and conceptual implications for future direction of soundscape studies. We identified three originality main focus domains in soundscape tourism research: urban and natural environments, technological advancements, and tourists’ perceptions and behaviors.