Chatty Maps: Constructing sound maps of urban areas from social media data
This work addresses the challenge of understanding urban soundscapes for city planning and public well-being, offering a novel data-driven approach to map pleasant and unpleasant sounds beyond traditional noise complaints.
The researchers tackled the problem of capturing urban sounds at city scale by developing a method using geo-referenced picture tags to create sound maps for London and Barcelona, resulting in the first experimentally valid urban sound dictionary and insights linking soundscapes to emotions and perceptions.
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, while 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 geo-referenced pictures to the cities of London and Barcelona. To begin with, we compiled the first urban sound dictionary and compared it to 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 geographic 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, while 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.