A soundscape that follows the sun: Park Hyatt Johannesburg

Park Hyatt Johannesburg opened in July 2025 in the former Winston Hotel in Rosebank, the first Park Hyatt in South Africa. The restored 1930s building has 31 rooms and suites around an open courtyard of jacaranda trees, gardens and a heated pool, with the Room 32 restaurant and The Lounge.

The hotel sits in Rosebank’s tree canopy, and its sound was designed to bring that world inside. At the centre of it is NatureScape, a soundscape by Resonate Audio, the Cape Town sound studio we have worked with for many years.

Most hotels play a playlist. Park Hyatt wanted sound that behaves like a place: birds and insects placed around the courtyards and pool, changing as the light changes, with no obvious start or end.

That asks a lot of a background music system. It plays all day, every day, with guests sitting a few metres from a loudspeaker, so it has to sound natural up close and sit at a level that is felt rather than noticed. The equipment had to stay out of sight in a restored building, and the hotel’s own staff had to be able to run it.

Resonate built NatureScape from its own field recordings across Southern Africa, captured over years with 3D microphone rigs and hydrophones (underwater microphones). It has two sound worlds. Johannesburg Mode brings the city’s birdlife into the courtyards and pool area: hadedas, masked weavers, thrushes and cicadas. Kruger Mode moves to the bushveld, with hornbills, starlings, frogs and distant calls.

The soundscape follows real dawn and dusk data rather than a fixed schedule. As evening comes, the bird calls thin out, the insects rise and a night texture takes over, gradually. In the pool, two more soundscapes play through submerged transducers: one built from hydrophone recordings of rivers, wetlands and estuaries, the other an abstract version Resonate calls Underwater Kaleidoscope.

We supplied and installed the whole background music system that carries it, working with Newtrix and Clayton Communications. Audac loudspeakers cover the hotel’s spaces, driven by Plus Audio amplifiers that take their audio over Dante (audio carried over the building’s network). Q-SYS runs the system and gives staff their controls.

Guests hear the Highveld in the courtyard by day and the night coming in as the light fades, without anyone at the hotel changing a setting. When staff want a different mood, the control interface lets them choose Johannesburg or Kruger Mode, or blend the two, crossfading in real time.

For us it is another project with Resonate Audio: their sound design, and a system built to play it back faithfully, day after day.