![]() ![]() ![]() To partly address those challenges, we used georeferenced social media data to map the soundscape of an entire city, and related that mapping to people's emotional responses. That is because the collection of data for managing urban acoustic environments has mainly been relegated to small-scale surveys . Therefore, policies focusing only on the reduction of noise levels might well fall short.įinally, urban sounds cannot be captured at scale and, consequently, they are not considered when planning cities . But perceptions depend on a variety of factors for example, on what one is doing (e.g. So far, the assumption has been that a good proxy for perceptions is noise level. Second, studying the relationship between urban sounds and people's perceptions is hard. Signal processing techniques for automatically classifying sounds have recently used labelled examples , but, again, those training labels are not organized in any formal taxonomy. Back in the early days of the World Soundscape Project, scholars collected sound-related terms and provided a classification of sounds , but that classification was meant to be neither comprehensive nor systematic. Since that work, there remains a number of unsolved challenges though.įirst, there is no shared vocabulary of urban sounds. That early work eventually led to a new International Standard, ISO 12913, where soundscape is defined as acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in context . defined soundscape for the first time as an environment of sound (or sonic environment) with emphasis on the way it is perceived and understood by the individual, or by a society . In the World Soundscape Project, 1 for example, composer Raymond Murray Schafer et al. Only a few researchers have been interested in the whole ‘urban soundscape’. Pleasant sounds have been left out from the urban planning literature, yet they have been shown to positively impact city dwellers’ health . ![]() Foursquare, Twitter) .Īll this work has focused, however, on the negative side of urban sounds. They have worked, for example, on epidemiological models to estimate noise levels from a few samples , on capturing samples from smartphones or other pervasive devices , and on mining geolocated data readily available from social media (e.g. To fix the lack of scalability of a typical solution based on sensors, in distinct fields, researchers have worked on ways of making noise pollution estimation cheap. They do so mainly because they have to comply with the environmental noise directive , which requires the management of noise levels only from specific sources, such as road traffic, railways, major airports and industry. ![]() City officials typically measure noise by placing sensors at a few selected points. However, those solutions are costly and do not scale at the level of an entire city. Studies have found that long-term exposure to urban noise (in particular, to traffic noise) results into sleeplessness and stress , increased incidence of learning impairments among children , and increased risk of cardiovascular morbidity such as hypertension and heart attacks .īecause those health hazards are likely to reduce life expectancy, a variety of technologies for noise monitoring and mitigation have been developed over the years. Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world. Finally, we studied the relationship between soundscapes and people's perceptions and, in so doing, we were able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm and exciting. We learned that streets with music sounds were associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, whereas those with human sounds were associated with joy or surprise. From picture tags, we then studied the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. To begin with, we compiled the first urban sound dictionary and compared it with the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours was experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offered a wider geographical coverage. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we applied a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures to the cities of London and Barcelona. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, whereas general urban sounds do not come to the attention as they cannot be easily captured at city scale. Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. ![]()
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