Turn your mobile phone into an environmental sensor and participate in the monitoring of noise pollution

Noise pollution is a serious problem in many cities. NoiseTube is a research project, started in 2008 at the Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris and currently hosted by the BrusSense Team at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, which proposes a participative approach for monitoring noise pollution by involving the general public. The NoiseTube mobile app extends the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling citizens to measure the sound exposure in their everyday environment. Furthermore each user can participate in creating a collective map of noise pollution by sharing geolocalized measurement data with the NoiseTube community.

By installing the free app on your smartphone, you will be able to measure the level of noise in dB(A), and tag the measurements obtained (e.g. subjective level of annoyance, source of sound,...). When uploaded to the website (3G, wifi or manually) you can check your sound trajectory on Google Maps.

Motivations to participate

Citizens and Communities concerned with noise
  • Measure your daily sound exposure in dB(A) with your mobile phone
  • Tag noisy sources to inform the community about them
  • Visualize your measurements on a map and contribute to the creation of collective, city-wide noise maps
  • Compare your experience with that of others
  • Privacy: all measurements are yours.You decide to make them public or not
Local governments / city planners
  • Improve decision-making by understanding local and global noise pollution in your city using maps and statistics
  • Get immediate feedback and opinions from citizens
  • Give immediate feedback to citizens
Researchers
  • Get access to and analyze (anonymized) collective noise data
  • Find out what is important in soundscape perception
Developers
  • Extend our mobile app in whichever way you see fit
  • Use our environmental sensor web API to do your own web mashups

How to participate

If you have an iOS-, Android- or Java ME-based smartphone with GPS, download the free app to participate!

Open source

NoiseTube is built in the spirit of open participation and the software that has been developed as part of the project has been placed under the GNU LGPL v2.1 open source license. The source code has been published on Google Code. We welcome anyone who wants to to contribute to the project (as a developer or otherwise) to contact us.