Public-Space Sonification for Pedestrian Trajectory Nudging

Increasing the effectiveness and pervasiveness of crowd management measures is an urgent societal need given the continuous urbanization and the persistent growth of large crowd events. Rendering our environments smart and capable of dynamically nudging the crowd flow would provide an effective solution. This holds especially when a massive deployment of field stewards is impossible or not preferred. Yet, this is an outstanding scientific and technological challenge. Here, we present a proof-of-concept towards the usage of acoustic feedback as a way to smarten our environments and automate pedestrian guidance. We established a living lab experiment in a building at TU/Eindhoven (NL). For about 12 weeks, we tracked pedestrians in real-time and reproduced sounds (piano chords, in a wave field synthesis system) coherent with the pedestrian trajectories. We aimed at having pedestrians detouring to a path different from the “typical” for the area. We compare the effect of the acoustic feedback with the control condition (no sound, in random alternation with the feedback). After a transient “learning” phase, pedestrians appear to unexpectedly act contrarily to the feedback design, and rather detoured in opposite direction. This work substantially extends the analysis previously presented by the same authors in [1]