11 de April de 2024

SoundCollect lands in schools around Catalonia

Citizen science is an essential tool to address social, environmental and health challenges that affect the entire population. Noise pollution is a problem facing our society today, which must be tackled collectively, including the active participation of young people in the project SoundCollect.

The SoundCollect app has already arrived in classrooms. The educational community has joined the SoundCollect initiative, the sound of the community, involving its students in the new citizen science project that we lead from Science For Change. One of the objectives of SoundCollect is to highlight the value of quiet areas, which are essential urban refuges for building healthy cities. To do this, SoundCollct needs the active listening of the entire community in order to enjoy and preserve them.

During March we have been holding sessions with SoundCollect in various schools in the province of Barcelona. Thanks to the collaboration of Revolta Escolar, on March 15 we were at Escola Diputació, taking a soundwalking with the families of the school. We were able to use the SoundCollect app to acoustically characterize the school environment and participate in the construction of a collaborative sound map.

We also held three sessions at Escola de Batxillerats CIC, on March 18, 19 and 21. During the first session, we discussed various acoustic and citizen science concepts, sharing how noise pollution affects our daily lives. In the second session, we took a soundwalking with the students of the center, in which they learned how to use the SoundCollect app and how to monitor sound data. In the last session, we carried out a co-design dynamic with which the students proposed and shared innovative solutions with the rest of the class to address the problem of noise pollution.

The role that the educational community has in this project is essential, since it requires active listening from the entire population, including the youngest. Thanks to their participation in the project, they will provide crucial data to implement joint solutions that allow the management, protection and conservation of quiet areas, these spaces of high acoustic and socio-environmental value.

We are now improving the SoundCollect app, which will soon have a new version that will be available on Google Play Store and App Store. Join our social networks @sound_collect so you don’t miss the launch of the SoundCollect app.