Public Lab Research note


Map the quiet places near you using Hush City platform

by Hush_City_Mobile_Lab | May 06, 2019 11:13 06 May 11:13 | #19255 | #19255

With Hush City app, you are an active part of a soundscape and citizen science research project to map and evaluate everyday quiet areas.

Our cities are becoming noisier by the hour. Only in Europe, over 125 million people are affected by noise pollution from traffic every year, and apparently, quietness is becoming a luxury available only to a few of us.By using this free mobile app, you will contribute to making quietness available to all those who appreciate it.

Hush City app will help you to identify, access and evaluate "everyday quiet areas" in your neighborhoods. You can find places such as small, quiet spots where you can go to escape the city's chaos, relax, read a book, play with your kids, and have a pleasant conversation. Chill out!

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Join the Hush City community. It is simple!

  • Download Hush City app on the iTunes or Google Play store
  • Go to one of your favorite quiet spots
  • Record the sound of the quiet spot where you are
  • Take a picture of the spot where you recorded the sound
  • Answer the questionnaire about this quiet spot
  • Share this information with your community.

Or, use the app to find a quiet spot near to you. Go to it and enjoy spending some time there.

Please be aware that noise levels measured by the mobile app, may not be entirely accurate, depending on which smartphones are used, weather conditions and other factors.

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Image: Hush City's icon (c) Antonella Radicchi 2017

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Main Features of the Hush City app

Using the Hush City app, you can:

  1. crowdsource your favorite quiet spots and share them with the Hush City community;
  2. identify and access quiet areas in your city or in other cities worldwide, shared by the Hush City users;
  3. filter the quiet areas according to their sound levels, descriptors used to tag them, perceived quietness, visual quality and accessibility, as perceived by the users who crowdsourced the quiet areas;
  4. engage in gaming activities;
  5. review your personal surveys and delete them if you are no longer happy with them;
  6. provide feedback on the Hush City project.

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Hush City Map

Do you know that the quiet areas crowdsourced with the Hush City app are now open access and available on line? Explore the Hush City Map & find already more than 2000 quiet areas worldwide. Happy (quiet) surfing!

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Image: Web-based version of the Hush City map, (c) Hush City Mobile Lab 2018

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Your Privacy is important to us: Privacy Policy

We believe in open data and we share and promote the open source approach; in this regard the Hush City's code will be published under a CC license and shared with the community. Please review this Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions carefully. Clickhere to download the document.

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References

If you are interested in reading more about noise guidelines, the soundscape approach and our research, please find some important links here:


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3 Comments

Hey, first: welcome to PublicLab! Glad you could make it. I promise you won't regret it ;-)

Really cool project. One question: Do you plan to integrate an API for this? For example, it would be really cool if I could write a query to get the noise level for a specific location.

Thanks for sharing this!

PS: It makes much more fun to share projects and be a part of the community when you are using a personal profile and not a profile for this project ;-)

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This is great! i had the opportunity to share this project with several people over the weekend who were lamenting the lack of any quiet spaces in New York City. Thanks for working on this!

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Love this! I added the activites tag on this so people know it's something they can do. Have you visited the wiki page on noise yet? Want to help edit/update it?

www.publiclab.org/noise

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