Crowd-Sourcing the Sounds of Places with a Web-Based Evolutionary Algorithm

The sounds we associate with particular places are tightly inter-woven with our memories and sense of belonging. We describe a platform designed to assist in gathering the sounds a group of people associate with a place. A web-based evolutionary algorithm, with human-in-the-loop fitness evaluations, ranks and recombines sounds to find collections that the group rates as familiar. An experiment covering four geographical locations shows that the process does indeed find sounds deemed familiar by participants.