Data from: Chatty maps: constructing sound maps of urban areas from social media data

Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, whereas general urban sounds do not come to the attention as they cannot be easily captured at city scale. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we applied a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures to the cities of London and Barcelona. To begin with, we compiled the first urban sound dictionary and compared it with the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours was experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offered a wider geographical coverage. From picture tags, we then studied the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. We learned that streets with music sounds were associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, whereas those with human sounds were associated with joy or surprise. Finally, we studied the relationship between soundscapes and people's perceptions and, in so doing, we were able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm and exciting. Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.城市声响对我们感知城市空间有着深远影响。然而城市规划领域往往仅聚焦于噪声污染，究其原因在于扰民声响多以市民投诉的形式进入市政管理者的视野，而普通城市声响则因难以在城市尺度上大规模采集，未得到足够关注。为同时采集令人不悦与愉悦的城市声响，我们针对伦敦与巴塞罗那两座城市，采用了一种依托地理参考图片标注信息的全新研究方法。首先，我们编制了首份城市声响词典，并将其与基于文献梳理所得的词典进行对比：实验结果表明，本研究编制的词典不仅与官方噪声污染水平具有更高相关性（即效度更优），且覆盖的地理范围更广。随后，我们借助图片标注信息，探究了声景与情绪之间的关联。研究发现，伴有音乐声响的街道往往传递出强烈的喜悦或悲伤情绪，而以人声为主的街道则多与喜悦、惊喜情绪相关联。最后，我们分析了声景与民众感知之间的关联，并据此绘制了城市区域的声景特征图谱，可区分出嘈杂、单调、宁静与活力四类声景区域。上述研究成果有望为日益城市化的当今世界提供创建疗愈性空间体验的科学依据。