NoiseAbility: Making sense of sound in the city

ssWe brought together three different cities from across Europe to collaborate and pilot a smart initiative in a rapid deployment and using open data standards to demonstrate replicability, interoperability and scalability.

NoiseAbility: a six month SynchroniCity Large Scale Pilot, funded under Horizon 2020, that will deliver a new predictive management tool for cities to help them manage noise for their citizens.

The NoiseAbility partnership was one of 16 successful teams awarded funding under the €3M Call, part of the SynchroniCity project. SynchroniCity focused on public authorities and businesses collaborating to deploy and scale-up innovative advanced IoT (internet of things) enabled city services in real-life conditions across Europe.

As Strategic Partners and Engagement Leads we led the consortium which included data insights specialists, UrbanTide, piloting innovations in Bilbao, Edinburgh and Eindhoven to help cities understand the context for when noise becomes problematic for citizens. Noise pollution is a recognised, serious impact on health and wellbeing and Edinburgh, Bilbao and Eindhoven have identified noise as a priority to be addressed.

We designed an engagement process to work with citizens, both face-to-face and online, to capture feedback about specific noise occurrences in each pilot area. The data gathered was fed into IoT Lead Partner, Urban Tide’s USMART platform where it was linked algorithmically to data collected via noise sensors, placed in strategic locations in each city’s pilot area. NoiseAbility gives cities the capacity to set strategic targets that incorporate noise acceptability as part of their evidence base.

We worked strategically with each city in addressing critical issues focusing on specific city-centre locations.

Jane McLaughlin, Director of The Lunar Works said,

“The speed at which cities must address today’s complex challenges requires urgent and agile delivery. Our pilot will demonstrate that we can effectively and simultaneously deploy citizen-centric, intelligent, integrative use of data for the benefit of citizens and cities across Europe.”