NoixApp

Among the many forms of pollution in urban areas, acoustic pollution is one of the less considered, albeit very important for the public health and welfare. Being less popular it is also less known and accounted for, so that few initiatives exist in this field. These are generally based on systematic surveying practices based on fixed stations only which cannot reconstruct a full picture of the acoustic spaces of the cities. A new perspective is necessary. Noixapp is a crowdsourcing/citizen-science solution developed by the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics - OGS, to measure acoustic pollution in urban areas that uses inexpensive mobile phone microphones to acquire data on urban background noise and send it to an integration platform that allows to reconstruct a full picture of the acoustic space of an area. The solution is based on a mobile application software where it is possible to record, compute and average Sound Pressure Level values. Georeferenced data are transmitted to OGS facilities where they are anonymized, integrated, validated and mapped on an open-data web based portal. SPL can be calibrated by using external reference instruments.