Sons al Balcó, a Citizen Science Approach to Map the Soundscape of Catalonia

Abstract

Sons al Balcó (Catalan for “Sounds of the balcony”) was a project born to study the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown caused on the perception of noise in Catalonia. One of the aims of the project was to combine the research activities—acoustic and image processing, urbanistic analysis and health and annoyance evaluation—with the dynamic collaboration with citizens and other stakeholders to create social and environmental impact, to raise awareness and design tools to improve citizenship development and empowerment. This first year of Sons al Balcó has shown that citizens are willing to participate in initiatives that work with their everyday life, because one year after the lockdown, a new soundscape map of Catalonia has been built with their collaboration and their perceptual impact from their balconies or windows. This has allowed the inclusion of other issues that enhance the final goal of describing and finding relationships between the annoyance caused by noise, and other factors as the environment (urban, suburban, rural) and the landscape, including the soundscape and noise levels in this evaluation. Objective measurements of LAeq have been conducted during the lockdown and in the months afterwards to describe the average noise and its possible link with outdoor activities. During this second collecting campaign, Sons al Balcó managed to gather more than 220 contributions. In this work, we detail the definitions of the metrics that include urbanistic and health-related environmental elements (water, trees, etc.), together with the socio-economic and demographic data that correspond to the answers of the questionnaires, and finally, the information extracted from the audios and the videos sent by the citizens. Preliminary results show encouraging dependencies between perception gathered with the questionnaires and the objective data collected, still in process of analysis, and a clear bias to a worse soundscape in 2021 in comparison to the 2020 campaign.

Sons al Balcó: A Comparative Analysis of WASN-Based LAeq Measured Values with Perceptual Questionnaires in Barcelona during the COVID-19 Lockdown

“…Several campaigns have been conducted to collect data in the Sons al Balcó project [ 49 , 51 ]. This present work is focused on data obtained from the first campaign performed in 2020 during the final stages of the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial stages of the de-escalation process.…”

Analysis and acoustic event classification of environmental data collected in Sons al Balcó Project

“…Participants were asked to send short 30-second videos recorded with their smartphones or tablets and to answer a questionnaire about their perception of the soundscape from their balconies. A year later, another campaign was conducted [11] in a post-lockdown, normalized context, enabling the Sons al Balcó team to compare both scenarios.…”

Analysis and Acoustic Event Classification of Environmental Data Collected in a Citizen Science Project

“…Noise from road traffic [ 17 ], railroads, airports, or even leisure activities showed a significant decrease in the majority of cities studied [ 18 , 19 ]. Sons al Balcó is a citizen science project, initially launched to analyze the impact of the lockdown on the soundscape of Catalonia [ 20 ]. At that moment, and in response to the lock down measures, other similar projects were launched worldwide: in the United Kingdom [ 21 ], Italy [ 22 , 23 , 24 ], in New York City [ 25 ] and even worldwide [ 26 ].…”