How does your city sound?

USQ

Estimating soundscape quality in urban spaces

About

USQ builds an extended network of human annotators who use a mobile application to record urban soundscapes and provide collaborative knowledge to train a soundscape quality estimation system. Our goals are to:

(a) build a benchmark of annotated urban recordings wrt soundscape quality

(b) train an automatic method that estimates soundscape quality

Annotation tool

If you feel like contributing:
(1) download and launch the app
(2) record outdoor ambient urban sounds for at least 30 secs
(3) give the perceived soundscape quality (1: unbearable, 5: ideal)
(4) upload your annotation
(More detailed instructions)
Download App (Android)

Dataset & Baseline Code

We provide ATHUS (Athens Urban Soundscape), a dataset of around 1K recordings and respective soundscape quality annotations. The following files are available for download:
(1) short-term audio feature matrices for all recordings
(2) spectrogram images for all recordings
(3) csv file containing the metadata
Download Audio features Download Spectrograms Download Ground truth

Also, the code for a basic approach on soundscape quality recognition (and a demostration on how to use the provided data) is available at github.

QU Sound Team

Theodoros Giannakopoulos
Georgios Siantikos

Students: Margarita Orfanidi, Marina Potsi

Feel free to email us to provide some feedback or questions:
tyiannak@gmail.com