Sound collection systems using a crowdsourcing approach to construct sound map based on subjective evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents a sound collection system that uses crowdsourcing to gather information for visualizing area characteristics. First, we developed a sound collection system to simultaneously collect physical sounds, their statistics, and subjective evaluations. We then conducted a sound collection experiment using the developed system on 14 participants. We collected 693,582 samples of equivalent A-weighted loudness levels and their locations, and 5,935 samples of sounds and their locations. The data also include subjective evaluations by the participants. In addition, we analyzed the changes in sound properties of some areas before and after the opening of a large-scale shopping mall in a city. Next, we implemented visualizations on the server system to attract users' interests. Finally, we published the system, which can receive sounds from any Android smartphone user. The sound data were continuously collected and achieved a specified result.