Sound Alliance: Less noise, more action, healthier cities

Economic activities, urban sprawl, and motorized transportation have contributed to an increase of noise in cities around the world. Air is the main medium for sound waves to reach our ears; thus, noise is considered as an air pollutant, and it is a proven cause of health effects and non-communicable diseases (NCD), such as hearing loss, mental alterations, and cardiovascular diseases. 

A digital platform to foster multi-sectorial participation in the co-creation of innovative and sustainable interventions based on technology –crowdsensing, big data and blockchain-can help design and procure quieter and healthier urban areas. 

Participatory management allows for appropriation of noise reduction and integration of sound as an enriching element, it can create novel soundscapes that improve environment and human health. This can positively change the lives of 4.2 billions of urban dwellers, which represent almost 55% of the world’s population, and expected to be 68% by 2050.

Scientific evidence relates exposure to environmental noise with hearing loss, difficulty to comprehend and concentrate, sleep disturbances, sleep alterations, cardiovascular diseases (ischemic heart disease and myocardial infarction), cognitive impairment in children, and poor mental health derived from stress and anxiety.  

Transportation, buildings, construction sites, public places, alarms, etc. contribute to environmental noise in urban areas. Cairo, Paris, Beijing, Delhi, Mexico City, San Francisco, New York City, Moscow, Buenos Aires, and Rome are among the loudest cities in the world. 

In the United States, Clean Air Act subchapter IV addresses noise pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency recommends an average 24-hr exposure of 55 A-weighted decibels (dBA) to protect public health. However, 104 million individuals have a continuous average exposure of >70 dBA over 24 hr). In the European Union, 108 million people are exposed to average noise levels from road traffic above 55 dB, whereas the European guidelines recommend below 53 dB to avoid adverse health effects.

Acoustic environments with high noise levels generate habit; thus, inadvertence of excessive noise indicates severe levels. Urban dwellers have accustomed to noise levels that prevent them from appreciating pleasant and useful sounds (nature, music, sound signals and emergency services).

The urban resident has to cope with stress, rush, road traffic, industrial and construction noise, loud publicity and music in retail stores, street vendors, nightclubs and restaurants and even loud private parties. All these activities can be associated with entertainment, progress and economic gains; however, they are also associated with discomfort and illness. Perception varies among citizens and their urban context; some of them do not realize urban noise as a problem and the rest of them find fewer and fewer spaces where to retreat.

Sound Alliance can provide an exceptional platform for organized citizens to collaborate with other local actors, use technology to explore their environment, measure noise levels, generate data and learn how others perceive it. Moreover, it gives them the opportunity to actively participate in the design and retrofit of their urban environment and engage in the implementation of interventions that can improve local soundscapes. 

These interventions constitute sustainable measures to reduce noise emissions, control its propagation and avoid people’s exposure; they can reduce the incidence of noise health impacts and associated diseases. They can also promote acoustic ecology and potentiate the use of sound to understand the interrelation among human beings, the built environment and nature.

Sound Alliance is an open innovation platform for urban communities to take action towards the improvement of their acoustic environment, as well as their physical and mental health. It aims to connect and empower communities to jointly develop an open-source tool-kit of resources to co-create better soundscapes.

The platform allows for: 

A) Generation of local information: soundscapes diagnosis, noise levels, health impacts, regulatory framework, etc; 

B) Citizen engagement and capacity building: collaborative vision of local soundscapes, noise maps and monitoring network;

C) Co-creation of an open source tool-kit of innovative interventions and resources for an action plan: noise reduction and enhancing sound proposals;

D) Contribution to international objectives: theory of change aligning the impact of this project with:

a) New Urban Agenda commitments 

• Generation and use of transport infrastructure and services, reducing the environmental and public health costs of noise. 
• Promoting the creation and maintenance of networks of open, multipurpose, safe, inclusive, accessible, green and quality public spaces to reduce noise.

b) Sustainable Development Goals

• #3 – Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
• #11 – Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. 

The process involves implementing virtual and presential urban living labs through 8 stages:

• Planning. Contact stakeholders and define the basis for collaboration, a geographical area to implement, and a space to work.
• Initiation. Take the first steps: kick-off meeting, MOUs, and build a theory of change. 
• Science and awareness. Measure noise levels and understand the local urban soundscape.  
• Co-creative design. Hold virtual and presential collaborative sessions to develop and select tools for active interventions.  
• Implementation. Put the selected interventions in place, procuring their survival and permanence. 
• Monitoring and evaluation. Revise the accomplishment of outputs and outcomes, and conduct mid and final evaluations according to the indicators on the theory of change.  
• Optimization. Adjust and adapt any element that might compromise the survival or permanence of the implemented solutions. 
• Dissemination and replication. Document to share and identify lessons learnt to determine the conditions for replication.  

Technology unlocks the potential for:

A) Enabling civic awareness and empowerment by measuring the problem through mobile noise crowdsensing.

B) Producing evidence to support improvement proposals and solutions through big data and AI pattern recognition.

C) Providing participation, confidence and transparency, while guaranteeing the traceability and privacy of data through blockchain-based self-sovereign ID. 

With this integrated approach a Sound Alliance becomes a relevant social vehicle for meaningful change in a forgotten environment.

This solution addresses an environmental problem that has been largely overlooked and barely addressed. Previous attempts to work on urban noise problems have been marginal and have not proven successful in producing sustainable solutions. Our solution proposes a combination of modern technologies with participatory methodologies that have proven powerful in other contexts and even on other urban environmental issues. 

Countless sound sensing devices can be easily found in the market or online, they are available with various options and features; they can be automated, remote, continuous, real-time, short-term, long-term, etc. However, few countries or cities have an official permanent ambient noise-monitoring network. 

There are a few initiatives that have involved citizens in measuring noise levels; they have invited people to measure sound, tag noisy places, and compare experiences with others. However, they have used people as moving sensors and have failed to generate community consciousness and to ultimately include citizens in the design and implementation of multi-sectorial actions or interventions to address urban noise.  

Urban noise takes away people’s life, physical and mental health; therefore, it demands and deserves the immediate implementation of every effort, technology and methodology available.  Our solution can change the way in which urban residents interact with the environment, it can revolutionize the way we think about urban noise, design our cities, and produce and perceive noise. Not only it addresses an important problem, but it also offers an open digital platform to co-create innovative urban soundscapes.

The context, and the purpose, in which we use technology makes the difference. What makes this solution unique is the use of existing technology as a learning material for constructing environmental understanding. Local sensing through portable devices such as smartphones is not new; however, the orchestrated involvement of the user can determine a real breakthrough that can change habits and mindsets. Using local sensing as augmented physical capabilities provides a key element that allows urban residents to actively explore their environment and unlock powerful ideas. 

Local noise sensing through the use of smartphones with a personal previous plan or idea can enhance the process of exploring a specific urban environment and unravel its complexity. With the aid of AI, it can help identify the sources of the problem, it can show its magnitude, it can reveal how it evolves within the urban fabric, and it can support or reject a hypothesis (regarding ambient noise standards, or regarding noise propagation paths). Basically, it can leverage any idea that the participante might have in order to explore and understand local urban ambient noise.

The sum of all data produced by participants constitutes a valuable repository of information that is secure, traceable, and privacy-protected through a Blockchain-based Self-Sovereign ID. Virtual and presencial Living Labs can contextualize that data to engage and empower communities to co-create courses of action to develop and monitor concrete proposals to reduce noise emission, moderate or deviate noise propagation, and integrate useful sounds to the urban environment.

The ultimate impact of this solution is to improve physical and mental health in urban areas. This is achievable by engaging communities to reduce the negative effects of high ambient noise levels in urban areas, actively building better soundscapes.

Outcome 1. Increase social well-being of cities through empowering community action.

Outcome 2. Reduce the incidence of acute effects, including decreased sleep quality and quantity, increased annoyance, stress and distraction. 

Outcome 3. Reduce the prevalence of chronic effects, such as hypertension, reduced learning and productivity, and endocrine disruption.  

Outcome 4. Reduce the long-term risk of heart disease, hearing loss and tinnitus.  

To reduce the negative health impacts of urban ambient noise it is necessary to reduce people’s exposure to harmful noise levels. In order to make urban areas more livable, three kind of outputs are needed to: a) reduce noise levels, b) alter noise propagation paths and c) introduce useful and valuable sounds to enrich the urban soundscape.    

To produce these outputs, it is necessary to take actions; however, actions and interventions are not effective when they come from single actors attemptintg to impose them. On the contrary, sustainable solutions emerge from open participation and consensus. Therefore, we propose Sound Alliance as an open platform to promote collaboration and co-creation of tools to improve urban soundscapes.  

We expect to service them in three ways: Living Labs to enable communities to develop tailored-made open-source tools and know-how to improve specific soundscapes. The Sound Alliance shall promote an open culture of better soundscapes by facilitating replicas at other local sound-defending communities to accept and adopt our collective tool-kit and knowledge base to similar conditions. The combination of a global alliance with local workshops to open up two-way channels for diffusion of innovation: outward dissemination of lessons learned, and inward community testing of products and services that industry, local government and academia, might request to test.

Although urban ambient noise extends through large areas, its social impact is better understood within the boundaries of one soundscape perceived by one community living in one neighborhood.

Our size KPIs therefore are: SCN, soundscape per community at neighborhood; SIPN, social impact per population at neighborhood; GIN, geographical area impact per neighborhood, SPD, soundscape perception density per population at geographical areas. Each KPI shall be related to urban health indicators to measure improvement of health over time.

We expect to start next year with two early adopters Living Labs, each with 10,000 SIPN. Our strategic goals for the Sound Alliance are to double each year the number of Living Labs, and promote replicas by a rate of four, increasing to twelve.

First year 2 Living Labs with 20,000 SIPN. Fifth year 32 Living Labs with 320,000 SIPN, and 112 replicas with 1’120,000 SIPN. A total 1,440,000 SIPN.

Our goals are to raise awareness on how urban soundscapes impact our health, and to empower citizens to change their environment through decentralized, open, inclusive and efficient courses of action.

The importance of the first year is determinant; it will place the urban noise issue as an urgent environmental problem. From there, we will identify lessons learned as well as areas of opportunity to continue with the replica to more cities. Replicating and escalating are part of the original design of the project, and are expected to happen due to the relevance that our Sound Alliance might reach to call for action, to engage relevant stakeholders, and to apply to soundscapes the success urban living labs methodology has had in other environmental issues. 

During the first projects, capacity is going to be built in each locality and community, in order for the different local actors to be able to continue with the project and even conduct their own versions as replicas, or in bigger urban areas as scale implementation. This will allow reaching a considerable number of urban areas served through knowledge frameworks and specific open-source tools.

If we manage to keep our Sound Alliance strategic goal of rates of expansion, by year 10 we could have a 1,024 Living Labs in operation, and 6,144 replicas to use frameworks and tools, benefiting together a total of 71’680,000 people.

Perception of the problem is low, vague, and stakeholders feel powerless. Potential participants are certain that urban noise demands attention, but they are not clear on how to gather data, less organize courses of action. Past research is almost forgotten, and relevant legislation confronts enforcement hurdles. When introduced to our project, initial contacts manifest their interest and agree on its necessity, but demand additional endorsement of more organizations to strengthen its urgency. They are in need of allies to make them stronger.

Since we are planning on involving all key actors, it is a fact that local and/or federal government has to be involved in order for the urban living lab to be successful. For the government to place political value on a project such as this one, a determinant factor is the capability of the promoters, which we are certain we have, and the support of greater organizations and groups that can add confidence and credibility. 

Community participation, on the other hand, grows worldwide. However, it demands and expects to rely on digital social networks frameworks and tools for strategic planning, reaching social consensus on collective visions, apply concrete resources for project formulation, and follow thru their instrumentation, monitoring and evaluation.

The project needs an initial support to raise awareness, as well to promote confidence and credibility for the implementation of its two pilot projects. Afterwards the impacts shall become visible and prove valuable.

We already began bringing together the kernel of Sound Alliance through gathering data (survey) and building a prototype (pre-app format) to engage organizations and communities. This way, we can better understand people´s needs and support their participation in order to build a powerful platform.The support of MIT, and MIT-Solve, is vital to increase credibility and respect, that we will use in a promotional campaign to include contacts beyond our personal reach.

Expert advice from MIT on technical and business model issues shall help us increase our own existing capabilities, to strengthen our development of frameworks and tools, and further capacity building and institutional development of local communities. We hope the support of MIT-Solve shall bring contacts with students, professors and research programs whose content is relevant for our project, and give them the opportunity to become interested to participate in our Sound Alliance.

Kickstarting the Sound Alliance relies on selling the first two Living Lab pilot projects. We envision this as a cooperative work between national and international multi-sectorial key stakeholders. Bootstrapping then is a joint effort to get international support for local city soundscape pilot projects, as counterpart to local actors inputs.  

From our experience with community participation exercises, resulting best practices and lessons learned from first two pilots would definitely generate value, products and services that might be of interest to industry, local authorities and academia. These concrete results shall play a vital role in the financial sustainability of Sound Alliance, as explained on the funding section.

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We are an initial team of two: Georgina Echaniz-Pellicer and Alfonso Govela, joining our expertise in Environmental Studies, Noise Control, Participatory Urban Planning and ICT. 

Healthy city soundscapes are still an environmental issue in need of social understanding for collective action. There are laws and regulations, but we still lack means to educate and engage the population into relevant programs of action. We believe we are in a unique position to solve this problem.  

At MIT Georgina Echaniz-Pellicer focused on the use of technological tools as learning material for constructing environmental understanding. The environmental issues addressed included noise pollution. Her professional work, within the Mexican government and as a consultant at CeDEAmb, involves environmental law, education, and public policy to reduce pollution. Her experience in these areas strengthen the potential of promoting Living Labs as fruitful environments for collective co-creation of concrete actions. 

At MIT Alfonso Govela looked into participatory design, and relevant uses of ICT for architecture and city-making. He applied them at the First Urban Development Plan for Mexico City’s Federal District (1980-1984), and in further consultancies on Digital Civics, a Civic Literacy Initiative for UN-Habitat, where City Changer Labs engaged +3,500 youngsters to solve urban issues with mobile technology, City Builders Lab (“Taller Construye tu Ciudad”) taught +19,000 children to build public space playing with Minecraft (Guinness World Record at Aldea Digital 2016), and City Maker Lab contributed to democratize access to digital fabrication. As Consultant for Urban Innovation and Blockchain for Metropolis, the world association of largest cities, he has conducted several City Blockchain Labs, and wrote, “Blockchain, a tool for metropolitan governance?”

First contacts with:

• WHO, United Nations World Health Organization, to promote systematic crowd-sensing of soundscapes for evidence-based decision-making.
• UN-Habitat, to promote the notion of healthy soundscapes into urban planning and environmental legislation.
• Hyperledger, of the Linux Foundation, to integrate our Living Labs with their global Meetup Network and new Hyperledger Labs, a global network of 170 local groups that promotes innovation through open source projects.
• Metropolis and UCLG, as global networks of city governments to provide our Living Lab as a resource for actions that improve their particular soundscapes.
• CAMe, the Metropolitan Environmental Commission of Mexico City and the Megalopolitan area (State of Mexico, Hidalgo, Morelos, Puebla, and Oaxaca; to put the topic in the spotlight of the biggest megalopolis in Mexico.
• SEMARNAT, The Mexican Ministry of Environment, to socialize the idea and to put the topic in the spotlight of the Federal Government. 
• INECC, The national Institute of Ecology and Climate Change; as the main research branch of the Mexican Ministry of Environment.
• Mexico City Government, through the Secretary of Environment; as the agency in charge of addressing urban noise issues in the City, and the General Coordination for International Affairs.

Urban living labs to improve soundscapes create value in terms of multi-sectorial capacity building to address urban problems and co-create a tool-kit of interventions and resources. Through workshops and co-creative sessions, the involved actors will be able to jointly identify, measure, analyze and abate urban ambient noise.  

This results in revenue for key stakeholders and partners. The platform will be designed to track and record interactions among participants, generating data to be used for targeting specific actors who could be users and/or providers of basic elements to implement the interventions. This can be a means of monetizing the solution in the short-term. 

Under the premise that the co-created interventions generate quieter and healthier cities, each dollar invested in this solution will produce social benefits like enhancement of public health and improved living standards for urban dwellers. In economic terms, noise pollution has negative impacts on productivity, which generates economic losses that eventually affect quality of life; therefore, taking actions to reduce it produces positive effects in the economy. Contributions will come from partners and key stakeholders; in the form of money and in kind; for example, a place to run workshops, development of research studies, technical advice, etc. Financial contributions will be invested in key resources such as campaigns to reach actors, kickoff meeting, data collection devices and platform/app, staff and supplies for workshops and co-creative sessions, and to implement interventions. Any other surplus from the use of platform, apps, databases, etc., will be invested in procuring the interventions’ implementation.

Following a cooperative model, stakeholders and partners who participate constitute the main support for each urban living lab. Therefore, it is imperative that the solution creates sufficient trust and credibility in order to generate and maintain interest and participation. 

All the key actors engaged in our Sound Alliance and Urban Living Labs provide funds and resources to implement it. Whether it is in the form of money or in kind-infrastructure, expertise or time-, each one of the participants has something to offer; all of them have a stake in the successful implementation of the process, and also gain value and revenue, as explained in the business model. 

The more urban living labs to improve soundscapes are implemented, the more successful stories there will be to share. These milestones will build confidence in the solution and will increment participation as well as resources allocation to the project. Therefore, with time, the solution can be replicated and escalated, and it also can increment the flow of participation in order to provide financial sustainability for each urban living lab.

• Detonate a Global Alliance that recovers sound as a vital environmental issue.
  • For cities and local governments.
  • Within MIT Schools and Research Labs. 
  • Can we dream together about a new MIT Sound Lab?
• Increase international awareness and reputation:
  • Bring international awareness to healthy city soundscapes through MIT-Solve recognition. 
  • Strengthen international reputation through the addition of one to two board members from MIT. 
• Benefit from MIT expertise:
  • Collaborate with MIT experts to advise on innovative technical opportunities, learning methods, co-creative tools and business model. 
  • Arouse interest of MIT students, professors, and researchers into the plural actions to create, and maintain, healthy city soundscapes. 
• Get support from MIT networks:
  • Connect with local champions and global partners through MIT Alumni Clubs, MIT Enterprise Forum, and other MIT networks for citizen participation.
  • Connect with investors to develop local crowd-sensing devices and form digital communities of engaged citizens.
  • Coordinate a global grant campaign to support work on characterization mapping of soundscapes.
• Build a body of knowledge for experience-based decision-making:
  • Conduct measure impact studies to validate healthier sound environments.
  • Apply AI for pattern detection of soundscapes, education and identification of action areas.
• Build a strong and inclusive civic platform of engaged and connected citizens to understand the critical health impact of soundscapes, and to actively participate in their creation and maintenance. Implement a Blockchain-based Self-Sovereign ID platform to protect privacy rights and ownership of crowdsensed sound data.

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• MIT Solve, for previously stated reasons.
• Expand our global city networking: current relationships with UCLG, Metropolis and the Guangzhou Urban Innovation Award, to extended partnerships with other networks like C40, 100 Resilient Cities, WeGO (World Smart Sustainable Cities Organization), UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities, CA (Cities Alliance).
  • Networks of cities are learning environments for urban innovation, capacity building and institutional development. Connecting with them provide distribution channels for our methodology, and opportunities to conduct Sound Living Labs in diverse communities and neighborhoods worldwide.
• Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs,
  • To help us advance technical aspects of mobile crowdsensing, application of AI and Blockchain Self-Sovereign ID.
• Bloomberg Philanthropies
  • To help us orchestrate a global grant campaign for education about soundscapes and actions for healthier sound environments.
• European Environment Agency To integrate mobile crowdsensing into their environmental noise indicators and corresponding laws and regulations.

Social recognition of soundscapes and collective actions for quieter and healthier cities need Big Data from crowd-sensing and leverage AI to recognize patterns of types and levels of sounds across different cultural perceptions, aggregated in diverse areas, at all times of day and night, through many neighborhoods and communities. 

There is a necessity to apply AI at several moments of our Living Labs. Always protecting the privacy of data with a Blockchain-based Self-Sovereign ID and anonymous register of interactions.

Mobile sound crowd-sensing could benefit from machine learning cultural variations from irritating noises to pleasant sounds; automatic recording when certain levels are detected; aggregation of sounds to recognize spatial patterns that identify problematic urban zones; automatic requests for additional sound/spatial data when needed; detection of density patterns of records; automatic detection, and correction, of flocks and sparse registries, among others.

Participants at our science and awareness workshops on urban soundscapes could benefit from observing AI-derived pattern recognition and data visualizations. Comparing them with their own interpretation, can potentially aid to improve machine learning algorithms.

AI text analytics of regulatory frameworks could help participants understand the extend, and limitations, of available legal support and inform their political engagement for action.

Co-creation workshops could structure their proposals for AI analysis of recurring trends and missing potential areas. At implementation level, automatic social sentiment analysis could reinforce monitoring and evaluation, as well as optimization, and dissemination of best practices and lessons learned.

AI is necessary for our solution. MIT expertise can make it happen.

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