An open-science crowdsourcing approach for producing community noise maps using smartphones

An alternative method is proposed for the assessment of the noise environment, on the basis of a crowdsourcing approach. For this purpose, a smartphone application and a spatial data infrastructure have been specifically developed in order to collect physical data (noise indicators, GPS positions, etc.) and perceptual data (pleasantness), without territorial limits, of the sound environment. As the project is developed within an Open Science framework, all source codes, methodologies, tools and raw data are freely available, and if necessary, can be duplicated for any specific use. In particular, the collected data can be used by the scientific community, cities, associations, or any institution, which would like to develop new tools for the evaluation and representation of sound environments. In this paper, all the methodological and technical issues are detailed, and a first analysis of the collected data is proposed.