The concept of soundscape appeared in the end of last century. With developing of environment acoustics and increasing of requirement on improving sound environment, soundscape has been being studied more and more in order that the idea of soundscape could be used in practice. Variation of the contents of soundscape research, the improvement of research method and the state of art at home and abroad were reviewed systematically in this paper. Furthermore, the problems facing us are pointed out for reference.

In the present work, the soundscape elements in three kinds of urban parks (coastal park, street park and general park) are studied. Wave sound, road traffic noise and water-flowing sound were considered as background sounds of these three kinds of parks respectively. Primary quantification of seven sounds including the wind sound, traffic noise, and birdsong and so on was analyzed in the scenes of the three kinds of parks with and without background sounds. According to the experiment results of subjective evaluation on soundscape elements and their sound levels, it is shown that people prefer natural sounds such as birdsong and sound of flowing water rather than artificial sounds such as the sound of broadcasting and traffic noise. Birdsong is considered as the most delightful and harmonious sound in all parks. Finally, the suitable sound level of each soundscape element was explored and the relationship between sound level and subjective evaluation was determined primarily.

Haihe river, as the mother river of Tianjin, not only plays a vital role in social culture and psychology, but also provides a good place for people’s leisure and entertainment. With the advance of landscape transformation in Haihe coastwise area, creating a comfortable acoustic environment becomes an important part of the overall transformation. In this study, the sound situation of Haihe coastwise area including sound type, relationship among different sounds, sound expectation and so on, is analyzed through physical measurement and social surveys. On this base, the method of improving the acoustical environment of Haihe coastwise area and its overall soundscape design are hopefully explored. Meanwhile, a suitable expression method of soundscape design in open area like Haihe coastwise area is studied in order to build a communication platform for acoustics researchers, urban planners and the general publics.

To exist inaccurate damage location for current flexibilitybased method for damage localization，a new damage index based on the orthogonal relation between stiffness matrix and flexibility matrix is presented combining with the matrix perturbation method and the finite element method. It can obtain accurate damage location using several order modal parameters. The effectiveness and superiority of this approach is verified by a numerical simulation for the plane truss，and it will be possibly used on damage localization for complex structures.