Silent·Cities

Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in cities' soundscapes around the globe. From March to October 2020, a consortium of 260 contributors from 35 countries built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acoustic changes in urban areas. We present this collection here, along with metadata including observational descriptions of the local areas from the contributors, open-source environmental data, open-source confinement levels and calculation of acoustic descriptors. We performed a technical validation of the dataset using statistical models run on a subset of manually annotated soundscapes. We confirmed the large-scale usability of ecoacoustic indices and automatic sound event recognition on the Silent Cities project dataset. We expect the Silent Cities dataset to be useful for research in the multidisciplinary field of environmental sciences.