Abstract
Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. 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. 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. 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. From picture tags, we then studied the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. 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. 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. Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.
Highlights
Studies have found that long-term exposure to urban noise results into sleeplessness and stress [1], increased incidence of learning impairments among children [2], and increased risk of cardiovascular morbidity such as hypertension [3] and heart attacks [4,5].Because those health hazards are likely to reduce life expectancy, a variety of technologies for noise monitoring and mitigation have been developed over the years
To see whether noise pollution was associated with specific sound categories, we considered the street segments with at least N tags and computed, across all the segments, the Spearman rank correlations ρj(EWLj, soundj,c) between segment j’s equivalent-weighted level (EWL) values and j’s fraction of picture tags that matched
Because SmellyMaps showed that picture tags were more effective than tweets in capturing geographical-salient information, ChattyMaps entirely relied on Flickr tags
Summary
Studies have found that long-term exposure to urban noise (in particular, to traffic noise) results into sleeplessness and stress [1], increased incidence of learning impairments among children [2], and increased risk of cardiovascular morbidity such as hypertension [3] and heart attacks [4,5]. Because those health hazards are likely to reduce life expectancy, a variety of technologies for noise monitoring and mitigation have been developed over the years. They have worked, for example, on epidemiological models to estimate noise levels from a few samples [7], on capturing samples from smartphones or other pervasive devices [8,9,10,11,12], and on mining geolocated data readily available from social media (e.g. Foursquare, Twitter) [13]
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