The EAR-IT project is an EU FP7 funded project working over a 2 years period (oct 2012-Oct 2014) on the exiting challenges of using acoustic sensing in smart cities and smart building. With innovation and research in this area, the project will experiment in the city of Santander (Spain) and for intelligent building in Geneva, applications improving security, energy saving, traffic management and more. The project idea will conduct a large-scale ‘real-life’ experimentation of intelligent acoustics for supporting high social value applications fostering innovation and sustainability in two existing test beds ( also known as FIRE ) with the FP7 projects SmartSantander (www.smartsantander.eu) and Hobnet (www.hobnet-project.eu).