Last week, you could find an enthusiastic subset of our team hanging around suspiciously on the campus of the University Hospital in Antwerp, booklets in hand and an ominous device close by.

This was the kick-off of a new measurement campaign in the framework of ‘De Oorzaak’, our ongoing large-scale citizen science project on urban soundscapes. Our trip to the hospital allowed us to catch multiple birds with one stone.

First of all, we’re out in the real world capturing sounds. We need a whole lot of different sounds, from all kind of sources, to feed in the AI-models that will automatically detect sound sources in our upcoming large-scale measuring campaign. We listen, the sensor records, and we write down exactly what we hear, greatly facilitating manual labelling of the soundbites afterwards.

Second, we are interest in the soundscape on the campus of the university hospital itself. We want to know what sounds patients residing on campus experience, and how that affects their health. And, as we are ecologists at hard, we want to figure out what role a greener hospital campus can play in that regard.

Third, we made use of this trip to start recording bird sounds. We hope to use our extensive sensor network to make a unique spatiotemporal assessment of the distribution of bird sounds in the city. For that, we of course again need to listen to a lot of birds ourselves. Luckily, those were starting to wake up for spring: great tits, blue tits, robins, wrens, ducks, moorhens, even a long-tailed tit: our bird sound dataset is starting to grow!

Finally, we can provide a subjective assessment of that soundscape: how nice was it, how lively, how chaotic? Following standardized terminology, we can create a dataset that links objective sound measurements to our experience of that sound.

Glad this is on a role again, and much more to come!