Sound and the city. How can you map sounds?

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Visualizing geotagged*data can reveal a unique*spatial*pattern that might allow you and/or decision makers to make choices based on knowledge. We’ve seen maps of different phenomena like diplomacy networks, human activity, age of buildings, adultery, or even sights of Virgin Mary.*But how one can map sounds of a city?

The most straight forward approach would include listening to urban sounds, measuring and interpreting it but the scale of that kind of project would make it hardly doable. Another approach that has been implemented a few months back by Trulia, includes mapping noise complains.

The new project*called Chatty Maps*looks at the same topic from a different angle.*The maps were created by mining Flickr for geo-tagged images containing sound-related words. The researchers started from*creating a library of sound-related words which they were looking in the description of photos. These words are taken from Freesound, the largest crowdsourced online repository of audio samples and then categorized into six types: transport, nature, human, music, mechanical, and indoor sounds.

Each of the streets on the maps are colored according to what kind of noise is mostly associated with it. Blue means human-related sounds, red stands for transportation, green for nature, yellow for music, and grey for construction.*When you click on a particular street you get its sound profile.*Everything is nicely done in CartoDB.

For now the maps are available for*New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Miami, Seattle, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan and Rome.

Cool project.



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