Conference_programme: 20: Soundscapes
Lecture: Developing a digital map framework for crowdsourcing environmental audio data
Author(s): Zervas Panagiotis, Myriounis Antreas
Summary:
Soundmaps are digital geographical maps, reflecting the sound information of an area. They are considered an effective auditory archive, and like sound walks, allow active participation in the soundscape experience. \nIn this paper, we present a soundmap framework that uses crowdsourcing to gather information for visualising area characteristics. It can be described as a soundmap-centric scheme designed to collect, process and visualise soundscape data from smartphone recordings. It comprises a client application, running on an Android device with an intermittent Internet connection and a server responsible for processing the collected data. The user, through the client application, records the soundscape of a location and performs geo-tagging. In a second step, it can add a metadata in the form of free text description and the choice of adding a label about soundscape category from a pre-defined set. The metadata is saved in JSON format and uploaded along with the audio file to the framework server through FTP protocol. \nOn the server side, functionalities such as, remote file transfer, database manipulation, GIS visualisation of audio data, automatic audio tagging and the choice of exploring database data by filtering and faceting across different dimensions (i.e., visualise diagrams related to the loudness level of recordings in a specific location and time) are supported. A functionality of experiencing soundscapes in 3-dimensional sound in street view environment has incorporated. All these functionalities are provided to a desktop or mobile device through a website portal and a mobile application. \nThe proposed framework can be used for use case scenarios such as, (a) explore the soundscape data of different locations, (b) collect and annotate audio data for database creation that can be used in auditory scene analysis research, (c) as a test-bed for investigating the potential of smartphone use in collecting crowdsourced data for noise mapping purposes and other. \nAn early version of the soundmap framework can be accessed at the following internet link: http://snf-662544.vm.okeanos.grnet.gr/public_html/FrontEnd/
Corresponding author
Name: Prof Panagiotis Zervas
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Country: Greece
