The Sounds of the City Maps

The creators of SmellyMaps are back with a new project called Chatty Maps. Chatty Maps provides a number of city maps which reveal the dominant soundscapes of city streets.

SmellyMaps is an interactive map of London which reveals the prevailing smells on London's roads by analyzing all the negative smell-related words tagged on Flickr photos and in Twitter messages. Chatty Maps, on the other hand, analyzes the tags used in photos posted to Flickr to map the sound profiles of streets in a number of major cities around the world.

Chatty Maps includes interactive Leaflet based maps of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Miami, Seattle, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan and Rome. In each map the city's roads are colored to show the dominant sounds on the street, based on tags used in social media.

If you select a street on the map you can also view a data visualization which explores the relationship between the street's soundscape and emotions. For example streets with music sounds are often associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, while those with human sounds are more usually associated with joy or surprise.