Analysis and Automatic Classification of the Soundscape of a Natural Park Close to the Airport of Barcelona during the 2021 Lockdown Period †

The noise caused by airports and its impact on human health, together with train, road traffic, leisure, and wind nose has been widely analyzed, even in the reports published in 2019 by the WHO. Noise effect has also been studied in the literature on other species, such as birds and amphibians. In this work, we focus on a natural environment of special singularity due to its location: the natural space of the Delta del Llobregat, next to the city of Barcelona. The Delta del Llobregat is placed in an area close to the Port of Barcelona, and directly on the route of the planes taking off from Barcelona airport. In this paper, we present a first analysis of the typology of the sounds found in the natural environment of the Delta del Llobregat after conducting a simultaneous recording campaign at three separate spots of biological interest, determined by the park’s curators. We identify the interfering sounds, as well as the amount of wildlife sounds in relation to the noises caused by the airport activity. The recordings and posterior analysis were made on 5 March 2021, when airport activity was still greatly diminished by the mobility restrictions. In addition, we apply machine learning techniques to classify the acoustic events produced by both airport activity and wildlife, aiming to build an automatic system that would allow us to gather labelled data in future works.