Problem statement: In historic gardens, silence cannot be defined merely as the absence of sound. Rather, it is a perceptual and aesthetic quality formed through interaction with natural and spatial elements. As one of the foundational elements of garden making, the sound of water plays a decisive role in organizing the experience of silence. Nevertheless, how this physical auditory phenomenon is transformed into perceptual silence within different aesthetic systems has rarely been examined comparatively.
Research question: How does the sound of water, in the two garden traditions of Iran and Japan, transform from a physical phenomenon into a perceptual and aesthetic quality that organizes the experience of silence?
Research objective: To explain the perceptual, auditory, and semantic mechanisms through which the sound of water becomes an aesthetic experience of silence in Persian and Japanese gardens, and to extract conceptual patterns of silence within these two traditions.
Method: This study is qualitative–analytical and comparative–interpretive. Inspired by a phenomenology of perception, it reads the auditory experience of space. Data were gathered through documentary research, theoretical soundscape analysis, and descriptive examination of four representative cases: Fin Garden in Kashan, Shazdeh Garden in Mahan, Shisen-dō Garden, and Nanzen-in Garden.
Conclusion: The findings indicate that in the Iranian cases studied, water sound appears mainly as continuous, keynote, and aligned with movement paths, and can provide a basis for a stable, harmonic silence. By contrast, in the Japanese cases examined, water sound is more limited, gentle, and event-like; through pause, auditory distance, and reduced sonic dominance, it enables a meditative silence to come to the fore. Accordingly, the study proposes two interpretive concepts—“harmonic silence” and “meditative silence”—as an initial framework for understanding the relation between water sound and the experience of silence in the cases studied.
Keywords: auditory silence, water sound, Persian garden, Japanese garden, soundscape, phenomenology