Turning SONYC data into temporal charts.

Description

From late 2016 to early 2020, Sounds of New York City (SONYC) used smart noise sensors to collect 30-second sound clips from across the Big Apple.

A team of researchers used these clips to assess noise levels in New York City's outdoor environments. With most of the sensors in downtown Manhattan and some in Brooklyn, Queens, and uptown, the data reflect outdoor sounds New Yorkers are likely to hear on their daily commutes.

New York City is noisy. In 2026 alone, the city has received over 145000 311 complaints about noise on the sidewalk or street. The SONYC project, and hopefully these charts, can help understand when certain sounds can be encountered.

Read more about the motivation and creation of this dataset see the DCASE 2020 Urban Sound Tagging with Spatiotemporal Context Task website.

Sounds

Researchers and volunteers tagged the presence of 23 sounds, chosen in consultation with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). These 23 fine-grained sound categories were then grouped into eight coarse-grained classes.

Over the course of four years, the sensors mostly picked up the sounds of car engines, alerts, and human voices. Car horns comprised over half of all alert signals, and vehicles with large engines made half of all engine noises. In addition, non-machinery impacts—loud bursts, kocks or slaps that are hard to place under a single category—were identified in nearly 20% of sound clips.

Time of day

Below is an interactive chart showing occurences of different categories of sounds distributed over time.

Click on a legend item or its corresponding area chart to reveal the total number of occurences, then hover over the entire area to see how many times that sound was picked up at a particular hour.

Click again to see the entire chart.