=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1621/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=Padova Soundscape: a Crowdsourcing Approach to Describe the Sound of a City (position paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1621/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-1621
|authors=Nicola Orio
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/Orio16
}}
==Padova Soundscape: a Crowdsourcing Approach to Describe the Sound of a City (position paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1621/paper9.pdf
Padova Soundscape: a Crowdsourcing Approach
to Describe the Sound of a City
[Position Paper]
Nicola Orio
Department of Cultural Heritage
University of Padova
Piazza Capitaniato, 7 – 35139 Padova (Italy)
nicola.orio@unipd.it
ABSTRACT similarity between music content [6] and graphical represen-
This paper reports the results of an initial experiment on tation of self-organizing maps [5]. With the obvious excep-
the acoustic description, called soundscape, of the city of tion of speech, non-musical audio received less attention even
Padova. A group of users has been involved in recording if the sound has a strong evocative impact of populations,
the sounds of the city and in tracking their position in space places and historical periods.
and in time using a web based interface. Collaboration and The term soundscape refers to the acoustic environment
coordination among participants has been promoted using that characterizes a location. A first characteristic of a
a wiki, where participants could assign themselves the loca- soundscape is related to the balance of natural versus man-
tions to be recorded and define the standard to be followed. related sources [2], although it can be considered a combi-
The result is the creation of an acoustic map of the city of nation of four kinds of sources:
Padova, which can be navigated in space and in time through • Earth: e.g. wind, sea waves, waterfalls.
a web interface. A mobile version of the interface is under
development. • Animal: e.g. screams, calls, chirps.
• Human: e.g. voice of one or more persons, noise of a
CCS Concepts crowd, footsteps, claps, breath.
•Information systems ! Multimedia content creation; • Machinery: e.g. engines, alarms, mechanical parts in
Geographic information systems; •Human-centered com- movement.
puting ! Empirical studies in HCI;
Soundscapes have been the subject of research by composers
Keywords and musicologists since the seventies [7] and are increas-
ingly gaining attention by the research community because
soundscape; crowdsourcing; cultural heritage of their relations with natural Human-Computer Interac-
tion [4] and of their applications to immersive audio [1],
1. INTRODUCTION which is very popular in the game industry. Soundscapes
Cultural heritage is a broad term that refers to both tangi- are also studied in other fields, for instance in public health
ble and intangible human artifacts and includes also natural research [8] with a focus on the impact of the noise produced
elements that are relevant for a given place. Although these by machinery.
components can, in principle, be perceived by any sensory This paper presents an approach to soundscape research
channel, most of the attention is usually payed to tangi- aimed at the dissemination of the cultural heritage of a city.
ble artifacts that are visually perceived. As a consequence, To this end, a number of sounds have been recorded in public
the application of information technologies to the dissemi- places in the city of Padova (in northern Italy) and geolo-
nation of cultural heritage has privileged the visual content. calized on an interactive map. Since the acoustic environ-
The role of music as a major witness of cultural heritage ment of a given place can change during the day, spatial
has never been disputed, and there exists a large number localization is paired with information describing the time
of projects regarding interfaces for music search and access, intervals in which the soundscape is pertinent. For instance,
based on geographical location of the composition [3], music a given square in Padova in the early afternoon is strongly
characterized by the high pitched noises of school children
coming back from school but, some hours later, its sound
environment is mostly created by groups of young persons
gathering for the happy hours; moreover, at noon the only
audible song is the one of the church bells. Clearly, the nar-
row road few meters towards the center has a more stable
soundscape, mainly silence with rare footsteps or bicycles,
and the roundabout towards the highway is characterized by
Copyright @ 2016 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for a continuous noise of city traffic. The final goal was to allow
private and academic purposes. the user to navigate the sounds both in space and in time,
exploring the more active and the more calm areas, discover- In order to promote collaboration, the project included a
ing the places dominated by machinery and the ones where wiki and a forum where participants could propose new lo-
natural sounds could still be heard. cations and schedule the recording sessions. Moreover, the
wiki become the shared place where participants provided
2. PADOVA SOUNDSCAPES additional contributions to the project. For instance, they
agreed on a color code for the di↵erent typologies of loca-
This ongoing project has been carried out within a labo-
tions (churches, historical building, public squares) and pro-
ratory of the University of Padova on tourism applications
posed acoustic paths across the di↵erent locations. Notwith-
of computer science (namely, the class in Computer Meth-
standing these positive results, the presence of platforms for
ods for the Organization of Tourism Services for the course
collaboration did not prevent that some locations had been
in Design and Management of Cultural Tourism of the Uni-
over-represented, with many similar recordings of the same
versity of Padova). The di↵erent steps of the project are
sound environment, while others have been neglected, with
described in the following sections.
basically no recording. It can be noticed that many over-
2.1 Tools and Formats represented locations were also cultural landmarks of the
city, but others (i.e. the train station, the entrance of the
The first step in the project development was the choice
Department of Cultural Heritage that hosts the course) were
of a suitable platform to manage geolocalized multimedia
chosen just because of they were easier to reach.
content. In particular, one of the goals was to select content
As regards maintaining a standard quality for the record-
according to temporal information. The platform that has
ings, in this initial step it has been decided to simply make
been used for the project is NeatLine (http://neatline.org),
all the contributions directly available to all participants,
which has been developed at the Scholars’ Lab of the Univer-
who were invited to browse the content and comment the
sity of Virginia Library. NeatLine provides a user-friendly
quality on the wiki. A possible approach for future develop-
interface for the geolocalization of multimedia content using
ments can be based on a rewarding mechanism, exploiting
pre-existing maps, such as OpenStreet Map, or even digital
some gamification concepts.
copies of historical maps. The choice of NeatLine is moti-
vated by its focus on temporal information, because each 2.3 Results
item can be associated to a temporal span of validity. The
Soundscapes have been recorded in the period December
NeatLine graphical interface provides tool to associate ge-
2015 - January 2016. The total number of participants to
ometries to multimedia content and, at the same time, to
the laboratory was 44. In a period of about two months they
hide selected elements that are not relevant for a time pe-
provided 166 recordings, meaning that the city of Padova is
riod selected on a timeline. A simple guided tour and some
now described by about 1 hour and 20 minutes of sounds.
templates of HTML5 code provided to be sufficient for the
Almost all the center of Padova has been represented and it
participants to learn the basic NeatLine tools to add content.
is basically possible to have a virtual walk in the center and
The second step regarded the choice of the formats to
have the experience of hearing the sound of the city.
be used for the multimedia content, considering that wach
These initial results seem to prove the feasibility of a
participant had to provide a sound recording of a di↵erent
crowdsourcing approach at least for a city like Padova. The
soundscape (that is, di↵erent places or di↵erent times), to-
project is continuing as a M.S. thesis, in order to complete
gether with a picture of the area (possibly taken from the
the sampling of the city.
same position where the microphone was set and with a
short textual description (free text and tags). Sound files
had to be in MP3 format, with the standard sampling rate 3. NAVIGATING SOUNDSCAPES
of 44.1 kHz and with the reasonable quality of 192 kbps. Padova Soundscapes can be accessed via a simple web in-
Specifications included the duration, which was mandatory terface. The user can adjust a time span of his/her interest
set to 30 seconds for each location, the loudness normaliza- within the 24 hours and start to navigate aurally the city
tion, and some post-processing on the beginning and the end of Padova. Colored icons depicted on the interactive map
of the recordings in order to allow a continuous loop of the – we choose OpenStreet Map among the available ones –
sound signal. The picture had to be in PNG format, 72 dpi guide the user towards di↵erent areas of the city. When an
and with a size of 400x400. The name of the place and the acoustically active location is at the center of the user inter-
time of recording were clearly visible. face the system automatically plays the related soundscape,
Participants used their mobile phones to produce the con- which plays on in a loop until the user moves the focus away.
tent (both recordings and photos) and could carry out the This version of the prototype system provides also some vi-
post-processing tasks using free software available for mobile sual feedback to the user. When a new soundscape is played
devices and personal computers. the user is presented also with a pop-up window containing
the view from the exact place of the microphone taken at
2.2 Crowdsourcing the same time of the day. Our goal is to evaluate the e↵ect
Most of the projects that aim at a large scale sampling of of visual cues in respect of a pure acoustic interface. Since
the territory rely on user-generated content. When a crowd- all locations are tagged, users can perform a textual search
sourcing approach is undertaken, there are some crucial as- using acoustic features, sources and mood.
pects that have to be taken into account. The simple moti- The project is still in its early stages. The first step will
vation to participate, which in this project was assured by be the development for mobile devices, in particular tablets,
the presence of a final grade for the participation to the lab- where interaction will not be mediated by a pointing de-
oratory, does not guarantee e↵ective collaboration among vice. After the development of a prototype system for mo-
participants and a standard quality of the user-generated bile great part of the activities will regard the evaluation of
content. the user experience with di↵erent combinations of commu-
Figure 1: The interactive map where the participants added the recorded soundscapes. Each dot in the map
is a di↵erent recording, made at di↵erent times.
nication channels: from the complete information which is [3] M. Magas and P. Proutskova. A location-tracking
available now on NeatLine to an audio-only interface. interface for ethnomusicological collections. Journal of
New Music Research, 42(2):151–160, 2013.
4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [4] I. McGregor. Soundscape Mapping: Comparing
Listening Experiences. Lambert Academic Publishing,
The author thanks the students of the university course in
Saarbr ucken, DE, 2011.
Design and Management of Cultural Tourism of the Univer-
sity of Padova for participating to the crowdsourcing exper- [5] E. Pampalk, A. Rauber, and D. Merkl. Content-based
iment that created the soundscape dataset and for granting organization and visualization of music archives. In
access to all the multimedia content – sounds, images, text Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International
– they have created. Conference on Multimedia, pages 570–579, 2002.
[6] T. Pohle, P. Knees, M. Schedl, E. Pampalk, and
G. Widmer. “reinventing the wheel”: A
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