Abstract
Acoustic data can be a source of important information about events and the environment in modern cities. To date, much of the focus has been on monitoring noise pollution, but the urban soundscape contains a rich variety of signals about both human and natural phenomena. We describe the CitySounds project, which has installed enclosed sensor kits at several locations across a heavily used urban greenspace in the city of Edinburgh. The acoustic monitoring components regularly capture short clips in real-time of both ultrasonic and audible noises, for example encompassing bats, birds and other wildlife, traffic, and human. The sounds are complemented by collecting other data from sensors, such as temperature and relative humidity. To ensure privacy and compliance with relevant legislation, robust methods render completely unintelligible any traces of voice or conversation that may incidentally be overheard by the sensors. We have adopted a variety of methods to encourage community engagement with the audio data and to communicate the richness of urban soundscapes to a general audience.
Highlights
The concept of the ‘smart city’ has been subject to controversy and conflicting visions, especially over the relative primacy of technology-driven versus citizen-centric agendas (Hemment and Townsend, 2013; Hollands, 2015; Kitchin, 2014; McFarlane and Söderström, 2017)
The importance of environmental sensing tends to be a common thread running through these different models and has been boosted further by the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor networks (Alvear et al, 2018; Gabrys, 2014; Jin et al, 2014; Perera et al, 2014)
An important initiative that connects soundscape, gardens and community engagement is the site-responsive sonic artwork Sounding out Spaces (Hayes and Stein, 2018), which ran in the Arizona Desert in 2017
Summary
The concept of the ‘smart city’ has been subject to controversy and conflicting visions, especially over the relative primacy of technology-driven versus citizen-centric agendas (Hemment and Townsend, 2013; Hollands, 2015; Kitchin, 2014; McFarlane and Söderström, 2017). In the CitySounds project, we have set ourselves the goal of capturing a comprehensive ‘picture’ of the urban soundscape. The Meadows park is bounded by one major road, and is itself an important thoroughfare for pedestrians and cyclists It hosts annual fairgrounds and marquee-based festival events, as well many sporting facilities. We have completed a ‘sprint’ to install a small array of networked sensor kits — Audio Capture Devices (ACDs) — and are in the early stages of a 12-month phase of 24/7 data collection; cf section 3. The audio samples that we will eventually collect through a yearlong natural cycle will constitute a unique and substantial soundscape dataset. With further work, this large body of audio data could provide valuable training input for machine-learning. We have developed a highly secure architecture which protects data at source, in transit and in storage, combined with a robust set of measures for ensuring that any published data preserves privacy
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