Abstract
Although overshadowed by visual information, sound plays a central role in how people perceive an environment. The effect of a landscape is enriched by its soundscape, that is, the stratification of all the acoustic sources that, often unconsciously, are heard. This paper presents a framework for archiving, browsing, and accessing soundscapes, either remotely or on-site. The framework is based on two main components: a web-based interface to upload and search the recordings of an acoustic environment, enriched by in- formation about geolocation, timing, and context of the recording; and a mobile app to browse and listen to the recordings, using an interactive map or GPS information. To populate the archive, we launched two crowdsourcing initiatives. An initial experiment examined the city of Padua’s soundscape through the participation of a group of undergraduate students. A broader experiment, which was proposed to all people in Italy, aimed at tracking how the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown was dramatically changing the soundscape of the entire country.
Highlights
Cultural heritage is a broad term that refers to both tangible and intangible human artifacts
This paper introduces Locate Your Sound (LYS), a novel system dedicated to real soundscapes, where acoustic data is gathered through crowdsourcing
LYS architecture can be divided into two main elements: a web-based server built over a spatial database and a mobile app developed for Android smartphones
Summary
Cultural heritage is a broad term that refers to both tangible and intangible human artifacts. It includes natural elements relevant to a given place or society. These components can, in principle, be discerned by all sensory channels, most attention is usually paid to tangible artifacts that are visually perceived. The role of music as a significant contributor to cultural heritage is undisputed, and there are numerous projects regarding the relationship between music and places, from the use of music as an aid to teaching geography [31] to the automatic identification of music that is representative of a geographical area through social media mining [24]. Musical works have been geolocated and made accessible through a web interface representing a stylized planisphere [19] and cartography inspired Island of Music [23], a two-dimensional representation of a music collection obtained from self-organizing maps
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