Challéat S. auteur aut IRD Farrugia N. auteur aut IRD Froidevaux J. S. P. auteur aut IRD Gasc Amandine auteur aut IRD Pajusco N. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf reformatted digital access Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in city soundscapes around the globe. From March to October 2020, a consortium of 261 contributors from 35 countries brought together by the Silent Cities project built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acoustic changes in urban areas. We present this collection here, along with metadata including observational descriptions of the local areas from the contributors, open-source environmental data, open-source confinement levels and calculation of acoustic descriptors. We performed a technical validation of the dataset using statistical models run on a subset of manually annotated soundscapes. Results confirmed the large-scale usability of ecoacoustic indices and automatic sound event recognition in the Silent Cities soundscape collection. We expect this dataset to be useful for research in the multidisciplinary field of environmental sciences. specialized 021 102 020 11 1 928 [16 p.] 2024 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010091968 10.1038/s41597-024-03611-7 [F B010091968] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010091968 https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/2024-11/010091968.pdf IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2024-11-13 2025-11-06 fdi:010091968 fre