Sounds of New York City

Sounds of New York City (SONYC) is an urban noise monitoring research project led by researchers at New York University to study and mitigate noise pollution in New York City. The project combines a distributed acoustic sensor network, machine listening methods, data analytics, visualization tools and citizen science annotation of urban sound recordings. Its published work uses the term machine listening for machine-learning and audio-signal-processing systems that identify or classify sources in urban sound scenes.

SONYC was developed by researchers at NYU, including the Center for Urban Science and Progress, the Music and Audio Research Laboratory, NYU Tandon School of Engineering and NYU Steinhardt, with collaborators at Ohio State University. The project received a US$4.6 million National Science Foundation grant as a multi-year cyber-physical system initiative.