Here and there across the city of Antwerp, curious boxes with funny black noses are starting to appear. While their presence for now remains subtle, it heralds the exciting beginning of a new impending roller coaster ride of discoveries!

These boxes are smart sound sensors, designed to measure the variety of sounds in the urban context. They are the predecessors of a large citizen science project on sound and its impact on our lives; a collaboration between University of Antwerp, the Universitary Hospital (UZA) and media partner De Morgen, and I am proud and happy to be in charge of the scientific roll-out of this project.

We’ve embarked on a preliminary journey ahead of the grand project scheduled for later this year. Our primary goal now is to capture the diverse urban soundscape using these sensors. We aim to collect data encompassing a wide range of sounds. Our team, including a group of dedicated students, will meticulously classify these sounds. This data will then become the basis for training machine learning models within the sensors to recognize specific sound patterns in our main project.

Our first foray into the real world yesterday already garnered media attention, including a detailed article in our media partner, De Morgen, and an engaging interview on regional radio and television.

Now it’s full speed ahead to the main project coming up soon!