21 June 2018

How does noise pollution affect us?

More than 30 boys and girls were as young researchers during the 12th Festival of Science in the workshop organized by the La Salle Media Technologies Research Group (GTM). Under the title "How noise pollution affects us", Dr. Leticia Duboc and Dr. Rosa Alsina proposed an activity that worked to raise social awareness of the damage caused by noise in urban environments, and that allowed children to experience and appreciate the sensations caused by different types of sounds: car engines, sirens, people talking, etc.

Engineering

Fairs and Congresses

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With great dedication, the children worked just as our researchers do every day: tagging noise with individual laptops, with the help of headphones and Audacity software.

Judging by the interesting observations and questions they asked, we are sure that among all the participants there were brilliant future scientists!

To close in a very practical and fun way, they did a shouting competition measured with sound meters, some teams reached 128dB; not far from the noise of an airplane!

The workshop was part of the SmartSense project (Scalable & sustainable Smart City Services), and also explained the SmartSound technology, a set of algorithms that use artificial intelligence to automatically identify noise. SmartSound technology has many applications. These include distinguishing traffic noise for the construction of strategic noise maps to cities, identifying noise of interest at home (e.g. falls in homes where older people live), and identifying bird species at risk of extinction in national parks.