[Week 1- What Does The City Say?]

We all got exposed to different sounds every day.Take a walk down your street and what do you hear?Maybe the sound of car horns, siren, and music etc. Did you ever think of that we can use these sounds to understand where we are? Sounds are an important modality for perceiving the environment. People use sound to understand their surroundings. For most of the people, it is not too difficult to estimate where they are in a superficial manner, by using just what they hear.If you just close your eyes and listen, you can hear very specific sounds to help you understand where you are. I mean, if you hear car horns you are very likely close to traffic or if you hear waves you are very likely close to sea or ocean.

Understanding the surroundings using sounds feature can also be earned by machines and it can be used for the many areas such as in criminology to estimate criminals location from phone conversations using the background sounds or in robotics, robots can use audio information a complementary means of scene recognition that can effectively augment visual information.

In our project, we want to estimate the location of the subject in a very superficial manner by using sounds of the environment. We will use publicly available audio datasets according to our needs.