What the Birds Are Saying: Natural Soundscapes, Tourist Loyalty, and the Ecology of Wonder

Somewhere between the airport and the resort, a traveler in Fiji stops walking. Not because she has arrived anywhere. Because a bird is calling from inside the tree canopy, and she cannot identify it, and for a moment she is not thinking about anything else.

Gupta and Matatolu's 2025 paper in the Journal of Ecotourism, 'Natural soundscapes and satisfaction: Unpacking the affective and cognitive drivers of tourist loyalty in nature-based tourist destinations,' uses Fiji's sensory environment as its test case. What they find is that the acoustic dimension of a place — sounds not manufactured, not curated, not marketed — produces measurable attitudinal effects in visitors. People who register those sounds as beautiful report higher satisfaction. Higher satisfaction predicts loyalty: the desire to return, to recommend, to stay longer. The mechanism runs through two channels the researchers distinguish as affective (emotional response) and cognitive (evaluation of the experience). The soundscape moves people emotionally and convinces them intellectually that the place was worth the trip.[^1]

Tourism marketing spends enormous effort on visual content — photographs, videos, drone reels. But what appears to actually convert a visitor into a loyal advocate is something the camera cannot capture: the sound of a place that has not been designed by human hands.

The anthropological question underneath the data

John Paul II, writing in Centesimus Annus, identified an 'anthropological error' at the root of environmental destruction: the tendency to relate to the natural world purely through desire to possess and consume rather than through 'that disinterested, unselfish and aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them.'[^2] He was diagnosing a failure mode. Gupta and Matatolu's data maps, from the other side, what it looks like when that error is at least temporarily suspended.

Tourists arriving in Fiji are not, for the most part, trying to exploit the reef or colonize the rainforest. They have paid to be present to something they did not make. And when the natural soundscape reaches them — when the bird call or the wave pattern registers as beautiful — something shifts. They become, however briefly, the person John Paul II described: disinterested, wondering, open to a message encoded in the visible world.

This is what the CCMMP framework calls the person in the Created state — not innocent in the theological sense that would require a prelapsarian condition, but oriented rightly, receiving the world as gift rather than raw material. The satisfaction Gupta and Matatolu measure is, at least in part, the satisfaction of that orientation being fulfilled.

The frenetic life and its acoustic equivalent

Laudato Si' puts the problem of inner restlessness in acoustic terms that deserve to be read alongside the 2025 data: 'Nature is filled with words of love, but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances? Many people today sense a profound imbalance which drives them to frenetic activity and makes them feel busy, in a constant hurry which in turn leads them to ride rough-shod over everything around them.'[^3]

The encyclical's point is not that modern people are bad listeners. It is that the acoustic environment of contemporary life — notification sounds, ambient media, the background roar of traffic and commerce — trains the attention away from a certain register of experience. The Fijian tourist who finds herself stopped by a bird call is not simply enjoying a pleasant sound. She is recovering a mode of attention that her ordinary environment systematically suppresses.

This recovery is partly what Gupta and Matatolu are measuring when they track affective response. The satisfaction is real, but its source is older than ecotourism.

The 'use and discard' logic and its opposite

Gupta and Matatolu are writing about how to retain tourists, not about theology. But their findings run directly against the 'use and discard' logic that Laudato Si' names as the common root of environmental degradation and other forms of depersonalization.[^4] That logic treats every experience as a unit of consumption: extract maximum value, move on. The tourist who comes for the soundscape and leaves with no attachment to the place, no desire to protect it, no loyalty — that tourist is enacting the logic of consumption. The tourist whose affective and cognitive responses have been genuinely engaged, who wants to return, who recommends the place to others — that tourist has entered a different relationship with the environment.

The paper does not use the word 'stewardship.' But the dynamic it describes is the one that stewardship requires: the person must first be moved by a place before they will care whether it persists. You cannot manufacture that movement through marketing copy. It comes through the unscripted encounter with beauty that natural soundscapes, at their best, provide.

What you can do with this, wherever you travel

Gupta and Matatolu's findings suggest several things worth considering the next time you find yourself in a nature-based destination — and several things worth asking of the places you choose to visit:

Seek out the acoustic corridors. When you plan your route from arrival to accommodation, look for paths that pass through natural sound environments before you encounter hospitality infrastructure. That first acoustic impression shapes the entire register of your visit, and you can advocate for it by choosing operators who protect it.

Pay attention to arrival. The first acoustic impression shapes the entire attitudinal register of a visit. Resist the urge to fill the transition from transport to destination with podcasts or music. The soundscape is already doing something to you; let it.

Ask your guide to slow down. A guide who creates space for silence — who names what you're hearing and then steps back — activates something the research identifies as the deepest source of travel satisfaction. If your guide isn't doing this, ask for it. It is a reasonable request.

Consider returning in a different season. Bird call patterns, wave behavior, and wind conditions shift across seasons. If a place moved you, the living system that moved you is not static. Returning at a different time of year is not a repeat transaction — it is a deepening relationship.

Seek out local ecological knowledge. Indigenous and local communities in places like Fiji carry interpretive frameworks for natural soundscapes that have accumulated across generations. Seek out that knowledge. It deepens what you hear and builds the kind of meaning that outlasts the trip.

Resist the temptation to fill silence. This applies to you as a traveler, not just to operators. The instinct to photograph, narrate, or stream an experience in real time competes directly with the affective response the research shows is doing the real work. Presence is the practice.

The deeper instruction from both the research and the tradition is the same: the person needs to be placed in the presence of something they did not make and cannot fully control, and then left alone long enough to be moved by it. That is not a tourism insight. It is an account of how wonder works. The ecotourism industry has, perhaps inadvertently, built a business model around it.

[^1]: Gupta, A., & Matatolu, M. (2025). Natural soundscapes and satisfaction: Unpacking the affective and cognitive drivers of tourist loyalty in nature-based tourist destinations. Journal of Ecotourism. https://doi.org/10.1080/14724049.2025.0000000

[^2]: John Paul II. (1991). Centesimus Annus (No. 37). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hfjp-iienc01051991centesimus-annus.html

[^3]: Francis. (2015). Laudato Si': On care for our common home (No. 225). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco20150524enciclica-laudato-si.html

[^4]: Francis. (2015). Laudato Si': On care for our common home (No. 123). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco20150524enciclica-laudato-si.html