Resumen de "Sons al Balcó", a Social Technology Transfer Project Designfor Citizen Science and Awareness

Xavier Baño, Rosa María Alsina Pagès

• "Sons al Balcó" project aims to study the effect that the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused on the perception of noise in Catalonia. The research activities cohabit withthe dynamic collaboration with citizens and other stakeholders to create social and environmental impact, to widen awareness and design tools to improve citizenship development and empowerment. In the context of the lockdown due to COVID-19 and framing the proposal in a research group in acoustics and detection of acoustic events, the proposal was conditioned especially by the need to record the relevant changes that were happening in the soundscape everywhere of Catalonia, from urban environments (and therefore, with a large change in the soundscape) to rural environments, where the sounds heard by the neighbours had hardly changed. Faced with this fact, and thescientific proposal to evaluate these changes understanding Catalonia as a large laboratory of changing soundscape, the research and technology and knowledge transfer team set to work to design an interdisciplinary project that include research in epidemiology (noise and health), the interventionand support of the administration, the encouragement of schools and a deep link in social networks, especially during the weeks of the most severe confinement. In this paper we present the methodology followed to take into account all the stakeholders of the process and the several areas of knowledge to build the complex process of designing a citizen science project that is still opened today, with a clear focus to quiet areas and citizens wellbeing in cities.