Explore the sounds of New York, London and Barcelona in these gorgeous maps
Ever wanted to escape the big city hustle and just find a quiet place to sit and rest for a minute? A new project called Chatty Maps might help you find that ideal spot.
The project aims to map the most common sounds in cities, turning the results into beautiful maps that tell you what an urban area sounds like.
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Created by researchers Luca Maria Aiello, Rossano Schifanella, Daniele Quercia and Francesco Aletta, the project currently includes maps of New York, London, Boston, Madrid and Barcelona.
The sounds are divided into five categories: Transport, nature, human, music and building (mechanical), each represented with a different color (red, green, blue, yellow and grey). So if an area is predominantly green, chances are you'll hear birds chirping and water splashing there. A red area, on the other hand, will likely have the noise of buses and trams drowning out all other sounds.
The researchers did not directly measure the sounds themselves; instead, they processed millions of geotagged images from Flickr that contained sound-related terms. The results were then classified, resulting in what the researchers call the "first urban sound dictionary," which is publicly available here.
"We showed that social media data make it possible to effectively and cheaply track urban sounds at scale," the researchers claim in their study, published Wednesday at The Royal Society Open Science website.
They acknowledge, however, certain challenges the project has faced, most importantly the dynamic, ever-changing nature of city soundscapes.
"No matter what data one has, fully capturing soundscapes might well be impossible. (...) The ultimate goal of this work is to empower city managers and researchers to find solutions for an ecologically balanced soundscape where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment is in harmony," the researchers wrote.
You can find more details about the project in the paper.
h/t: Gizmodo.
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Topics New York City
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
