Chatty maps: constructing sound maps of urban areas from social media data

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.

Mapping the intangible: Using geolocated social media data to examine landscape aesthetics

“…This will allow for the analysis of much larger photo samples and thus provide a comprehensive database for the assessment of LA-flow. Finally, considering that LA experiences can be mediated by other sensory inputs than just sight (Gobster et al, 2007), a comparison with maps reporting the spatial distribution of sensory and acoustic perceptions (see Aiello et al, 2016;Quercia et al, 2015) or activity tracking has potential to reveal unexpected relationships.…”

Soundscape mapping in environmental noise management and urban planning: case studies in two UK cities

“…In particular, previous studies for mapping the variability of sound sources [14,30,31] and use various geostatistical and non-geostatistical mapping techniques. A few studies have dealt with the representation of psychoacoustic parameters [26,32] such as loudness, sharpness or pleasantness in the urban environments.…”

Ten questions on the soundscapes of the built environment

“…For instance, attempts have been made to map directly some soundscape dimensions (e.g. 'calmness', like in Figure 6), starting from individual data collected on site through soundwalks (e.g., Liu, Kang, Luo, Behm, & Coppack, 2013;Liu, Kang, & Behm, 2014;Aletta, Margaritis, Filipan, Puyana Romero, Axelsson, & Kang, 2015;Aiello, Schifanella, Quercia, & Aletta, 2016). The hypothesis for developing such maps is that based on the soundscape information on certain locations in an area, the soundscape of the whole area could be predicted with spatial interpolation analysis method in GIS platforms.…”