SENSORS. Install sound sensors to facilitate the handling of complaints from residents for noise pollution! This is the bet taken up by the city of New York, through a vast project launched by researchers from the New York University. The principle: record all the noises produced by the city, then use machine learning algorithms (machine learning) in order to automatically identify the source of each nuisance, and immediately alert the relevant city authorities. The project has been funded to the tune of $ 4.6 million by the US National Science Foundation and is expected to last 5 years.
Algorithms in tune with the city
Unprecedented in the world, this project is led by Juan Bello, professor of music technology at New York University. Beyond the desired improvement in the quality of life of residents, the issue is also participatory, since the town hall and the inhabitants are called upon to contribute by classifying and annotating the thousands of sounds collected. This phase will guide the learning of the algorithm so that it can ultimately identify sounds on its own, without human intervention.
DEPLOYMENT. Baptized “Sounds of New York City”, the project is currently being tested in the district of Greenwich Village. The device consists of small boxes fitted with microphones and fixed to the walls of the university, which transmit the data collected to servers via a WIFI network. This first proof of concept will be extended to the neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn, chosen for their variety of sounds. “There should be 100 by the end of 2017”, estimate Juan Bello.
The din amplified by the skyscrapers
Because “the city that never sleeps” is one of the noisiest in the world. However, “many studies show the phenomenal impact of noise on health, in the short and long term”, insists Juan Bello: heart disease, hypertension, hearing loss … obviously, everything is very expensive for the community. In Île-de-France, its social cost was, for example, estimated at 16 billion euros per year! “New York authorities are aware of the problem”, underlines Arline Bronzaft, environmental psychologist and professor at the public university of New York, who denounces for years the consequences of noise on health. For her, the noise level is already affecting the behavior of New Yorkers. “People walk faster partly to escape noise, they speak loudly because they compete with other sounds.”
REVERBERATION. Especially in Manhattan, the skyscrapers increase the noise phenomenon because they form corridors of sound reverberation, an effect well known to researchers modeling noise in cities, explained in infographic by New York Mag. The phenomenon is less in Paris, since the height of the buildings is lower there. For Juan Bello, “a lot of the sounds you hear in New York would not be as loud elsewhere, due to the particular topology of the city.”
Successes and difficulties
There will nevertheless remain a bottleneck: it is up to the city to do what is necessary to neutralize the origin of the nuisance … and the specialized services are often overwhelmed: since the establishment in 2003 by the town hall of a 24-hour call number for all non-urgent complaints, 311, “it is the noise which, invariably every year, comes first”, explains Juan Bello. And in the event of a noise nuisance complaint today, “it takes between five and six days” for one of the city’s 50 specialist inspectors to intervene, he said. A delay after which the problem often disappeared.
LABORATORY. However, the first results obtained by the team of researchers are encouraging and confirm that the complaints are justified, at least for construction-related noise: all the complaints filed were cross-checked with the observation of sound standards being exceeded. . According to Juan Bello, New York represents “a perfect laboratory” to develop solutions that can be transposed elsewhere in the United States or around the world. An ambition that promises to still encounter some technological difficulties, such as the “modeling of the horns”, by definition unpredictable in time and space … but also respect for private life, the sensors having to ultimately never record more than 10 consecutive seconds, in order to avoid confidentiality problems. Which is not the case today.
SS with AFP
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