Hearing Green is a pilot communication project developed to support the City of Vancouver’s Green Rainwater Infrastructure (GRI) and Electrification programs. These initiatives are reshaping how Vancouver’s neighbourhoods sound by introducing quieter engines, new vegetation, water features, and returning songbirds, but that acoustic dimension isn’t often communicated to staff or residents. Sound is a known factor in community health and wellbeing, and impacts wildlife as much as it does us, yet it’s rarely part of how planning decisions are discussed or evaluated. Hearing Green addresses this gap by translating field recordings from Vancouver’s green (or not-so-green) spaces into a colour-coded visual mapping system. Each two-minute recording becomes a 24 by 15 grid, showing which sounds are present, whether mechanical, natural, electric, or social, and how clearly each can be distinguished from the rest. The method is intentionally qualitative: rather than relying on automated acoustic indices, which may misclassify sounds like human speech as biophony, the system is built on human perceptual judgment.

Inspired by SFU’s World Soundscape Project, to understand the impact of a sound environment on human life, this project takes a listener-focused approach, where the source of a sound and its context matter as much as its volume. Six sites were mapped across Vancouver, capturing everything from quiet wetlands to high-traffic corridors. The project turns sound recordings into easily readable visuals, helping us compare the difference between a balanced, healthy soundscape and an unbalanced one and giving GRI and Electrification a reusable way to communicate their acoustic impact to decision-makers and the public alike. Recommendations: develop the mapping system into an interactive digital tool to scale beyond these pilot sites, expand resident engagement through soundwalks and creative events, and pursue further comparative studies, with careful attention to methodological consistency as the system scales.

Interactive PDF

Next Steps

When my internship term ends, Hearing Green can move into a handoff sprint. This would potentially include: finishing a prototype of a proposed web mapping tool, a specification document outlining use cases, a completed mapping guide, and organized production assets. This covers everything someone needs to pick up the work. I’m also leaving a “future directions” document outlining possible next phases: resident-led soundwalks and creative events, a scalable digital mapping tool, and further comparative studies. The mapping system, its research foundation, and a clear rationale for its methodology will be fully documented and ready for whoever picks it up next, whether that’s city staff, a future CityStudio intern, or my own continued interest in the work.