Public-space sonifcation for pedestrian trajectory nudging

Increasing the efectiveness 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 fow would provide an efective solution. This holds especially when a massive deployment of feld stewards is impossible or not preferred. Yet, this is an outstanding scientifc 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 feld synthesis system) coherent with the pedestrian trajectories. We aimed at having pedestrians detouring to a path diferent from the “typical” for the area. We compare the efect 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].