BCNDataset: Description and Analysis of an Annotated Night Urban Leisure Sound Dataset

Abstract

Acoustic pollution has been associated with adverse effects on the health and life expectancy of people, especially when noise exposure happens during the nighttime. With over half of the world population living in urban areas, acoustic pollution is an important concern for city administrators, especially those focused on transportation and leisure noise. Advances in sensor and network technologies made the deployment of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASN) possible in cities, which, combined with artificial intelligence (AI), can enable smart services for their citizens. However, the creation of such services often requires structured environmental audio databases to train AI algorithms. This paper reports on an environmental audio dataset of 363 min and 53 s created in a lively area of the Barcelona city center, which targeted traffic and leisure events. This dataset, which is free and publicly available, can provide researchers with real-world acoustic data to help the development and testing of sound monitoring solutions for urban environments.