Project charter — TUNES

Name and purpose

TUNES (Transit User Noise Experience Survey) is an open, privacy-preserving programme for passenger-generated measurement of acoustic conditions on ordinary railway journeys, plus optional structured perception reports.

It produces:

1. A passenger-facing quieter-journey / noise map tool
2. An open measurement platform, methodology, and versioned public dataset

The second may ultimately matter more than the first. TUNES does not replace operator or professional acoustic surveys; it adds repeated, real-world passenger evidence across times, loads, devices, and carriage positions.

Public value

Help passengers (including parents and sensory-sensitive travellers) compare routes; help researchers and civic actors study exposure and perception; help operators and authorities see recurring passenger problems — without claiming regulatory-grade substitution for Class 1 surveys.

Core principles

Open source · privacy-preserving · auditable · methodologically transparent · honest about uncertainty · accessible to non-specialists · useful to professionals · designed for ordinary commutes · offline-first during collection · resistant to false precision · versioned for reproducibility · expandable without premature global design.

Geographic and technical posture

• London-first pilot (Underground priority; other London rail as scope decisions allow)
• Portable schema: generic railway concepts in the core model; London data as instances
• iPhone-first collector; Android / wearables / external mics as later validated expansions

Repository ownership (decided)

Three repositories — see repos.md and ADR-003:

• tunes — charter, research, methodology, schemas, open releases
• tunes-ios — recorder
• tunes-web — landing, map, pipeline

Affiliation

TUNES is independent. It is not operated, approved, or endorsed by Transport for London. Professional practice notes (e.g. TfL R3291 via FOI) may inform methodology as references, not as affiliation or redistributable data.

What we will not claim at foundation stage

Scientific validity of the public map, health risk scores, or engineering-grade equivalence to ISO 3381 Class 1 surveys — until tiers, calibration experiments, and honesty UX are in place.

Recommendation

Treat this charter as the binding north star for all three repos; route scientific disputes to ADRs in tunes.

Confidence: High for mission and repo split; Medium for exact launch breadth, which ADR-001 defers until pilot evidence.

Depends on experiment/legal/user-test? Stakeholder discussion for partnerships; legal for controller roles.

Links: scope-statement.md; repos.md; ../00-index-full.md; humans ../../H00-start-here.md and H19 — Why TUNES exists.