Listening in the real world covers many situations and locations. This diversity limits the effectivity of small experiments. The Sensor City project in Assen provides the infrastructure to do research on many locations and over a long time which allows cover the diversity. In the project, nodes can be connected to a private, high speed network. This network covers the whole city and two rings around it. The nodes have processing power onboard for sound event recognition and calculation of psychoacoustic features. In the case of experiments the nodes can send the audio data over the network, for privacy reasons this is not normal operation. The sound event recognition is based on CASA techniques and aims to provide outcomes that match the outcome of psychological research that is being done in parallel. The goal is to have the output depend on the location, the activities of the public, the planned functionality of the location, etc. To facilitate this architectural and city planning information are included in a the research.