CityTones Urban Soundfield Repository

Soundfield recording is the process of capturing an environmental auditory scenes. Not long ago, the NYU immersive audio group picked up what used to be called “IHearNY3D”, a collection of 3D Ambisonics recordings of various interesting locations of New York City. We soon realized how many applications in the media and research field can make good use of spatial audio recordings. 360 sound design, VR gaming, urban data analysis, classification training… just to name a few. 

From there, CityTones started. We decided to begin a field collection repository of soundfield data, complete with 360 video, objective location data and subjective soundfield quality assessments. By recording the same location at different times of the day, we can now inspect how the soundfield environment changes with the dynamic routine of the urban crowd (see also SONYC). 

B-Format soundfield representation for 1st order Ambisonics pressure gradients.

Since then, we developed the project into an open source repository to be used for non-commercial purposes by engineer, scientists and students alike. This database wants to collect worldwide spatial recordings in B-format Ambisonics of interesting locations at different times of the day.

We encourage all recording engineers with an interest in soundfields to help us make this repository grow. You can find the submission portal on the button above and the submission specs on the publications page. The recordings will soon be open and available to download for the general public as multi-channel B-format files with panoramic spherical video.