Our vision

We hope that the maps and visualizations provided by Soundscape will increase citizens’ awareness of their urban acoustical environment, on both a personal and city-wide level. Hopefully the content made available by Soundscape will improve peoples’ lives, however marginally, by bringing an important issue to their awareness and providing a platform to understand the problem and devise solutions to deal with it.

We see Soundscape as the base platform for sound/acoustic applications across the globe, by providing a large database with tools to access the vast amounts of information easily. Possible applications include:

• Data-mining applications: The past decades have seen a massive shift in the way data is examined. Patterns are not discovered from small data samples, rather society has become massively data-centric, with huge amounts of data being subjected to analysis yielding results and patterns not apparent on smaller scales. The nature of Soundscape’s data collection will create ample opportunities for data-mining applications, from real-estate “sound ratings” of different neighborhoods to applications that plot running routes across the city according to the types of sounds or moods requested along the route.
  
  
•  Technological advancement – by aggregating large amounts of sounds already identified and tagged according to sounds heard in each recording, Soundscape’s database can provide a platform for studying or even a basis for noise recognition algorithms.