Besides those bad memories with honking car horns and sudden car breaks, how would you say your city sounds like? Might seem a simple question but you’ll see it’s hard to give a straightforward answer. That’s why an Europian research team started Chatty Maps, a project that develops interactive maps of cities based on the sounds most often heard there.
The software sifts through loads of Flickr images with geotags considering location and keywords that relates to sounds. Then, the data is categorized in five parts: transport, mechanical, human, nature, music. On the west side of Manhattan, for example, there are nature sounds in proportion of 81.5% and just 2.7% transport sounds. Seems ydillic, right?
Chatty Maps includes 12 cities for now, including London, Barcelona and Rome (not just the States). If you’re curious how your city stands, go at their site, select a city from the left corner of the interface and use the magnfying glass to observe closely neighbourhoods.
Urban planners and city officials have mostly focused on the negative side of urban sounds, giving little attention to pleasant sounds. Yet, positive sounds have been shown to positively impact city dwellers’ health
The team behind the interactive sound maps want to “empower city managers and researchers to find solutions for an ecologically balanced soundscape”.
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