Mitigating noise and traffic congestion through measuring, mapping, and reducing noise pollution

Noise is a ubiquitous and omnipresent urban pollutant with serious health issues. This so-called “forgotten pollutant” includes all types of sounds including vehicular noise, barking dogs, music, and human sounds. Mechanical noise, and especially traffic sound, is especially “annoying” as it manifests in a plethora of ways that can be constant, intermittent, or impulsive. We have approached noise mitigation efforts via notions of “you can’t fix what you can’t measure,” “seeing is believing,” machine-aided soundscape listening, and unusually cost-effective, robust, scalable sensor network designs for dense, spatiotemporal soundmaps creation. In this paper we report on updates—Citygram’s recent partnership with IBM and its “Horizon” edge compute system, plug-and-sense sensor network hardware/software, visualizations, machine learning and sensor scaling/deployment strategies—applicable towards capturing road, rail, aircraft, and other types of urban noise agents to improve understanding of urban livability a...