Wired reports on a project to record ambient sounds from all over the world.
Bryan Pijanowski wants to capture the sounds of the world on a single day, and he needs your help. On Earth Day, April 22, Pijanowski hopes to enlist thousands of people in recording a few minutes of their everyday surroundings with his Soundscape Recorder smartphone app. All those sonic snippets could create an unprecedented soundtrack to life on Earth and as they accumulate, year after year, scientists could use them to measure patterns and changes in our sonic environments.
"I've been on a campaign to record as many ecosystems as possible," said Pijanowski, a soundscape ecologist at Purdue University. "But there's only so many places in the world I can be. I thought about how I could get more recordings into a database, and it occurred to me: We have a couple billion people on this planet with smartphones!"
(Score: 2) by GlennC on Monday April 21 2014, @05:39PM
After reading the article, I'm still not sure why I should do this.
I'd be concerned about any other data that the application would send.
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 1) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday April 21 2014, @06:22PM
I can supply the sound of moving air, rushing through my MacBook, while running HandBrake on a BluRay rip...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday April 21 2014, @06:24PM
I'll have to filter out background sound. It's the opening two bars of "Jumping Jack Flash" on a loop. I'm told the world record for tolerating this is 4 days, but that guy is in a facility now...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 21 2014, @05:48PM
"a soundscape ecologist"
I think the failure of this idea is thinking sounds are geographically distributed.
The whine of a switching power supply is the same, no matter where its located. Thinking historically, a floppy disk seek sounds the same all over the planet. Or a jackhammer. I heard someone across the street at the construction site fire up a circular saw for a few minutes, doesn't matter where.
Aside from language, I imagine an office in central USA sounds a lot like an office in .uk or .cn. Or a street. Or a house.
Of course a null result might be the point of the research and wouldn't necessarily indicate failure.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday April 21 2014, @06:09PM
I suspect its one person's pet project, and all 157 goodie-two-shoes who down load the app will forget it as soon as earth day is past. These are the same people that get up at dawn to await the sunrise on the solstice, and other "highly" meaningful "contributions" to society.
The results, (if any) will be to publicly decry noise pollution by cherry picking the results. Of course the results will already be cherry picked at submission, just as the participants are self selected, and nobody is going to submit "silent" clips.
You can't hear the absence of noise. So if you played the clips from random places on earth simultaneously, you would hear only the noise, and the silence would be drowned out. So you see its the perfect project for busybody hand wringers and social reformers. A self fulfilling prophesy, and one that can't reject the "researchers" and one in which they can only be proven right with their carefully selected data sets.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Woods on Monday April 21 2014, @06:42PM
Indeed, I was thinking about submitting my sound clip, but regardless of when/where I was at the time, it would pretty much just be silence. I suppose you might hear a very faint whir of a CPU fan in the background, but most likely not. I think that would definitely defeat the purpose.
Maybe this is addressed in TFA, but who takes the time to read that?
What determines where/when we grab a clip? Should we be outside, inside, around something noisy or in a quiet room with talking? Maybe I can just submit one of the ones from this list. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Monday April 21 2014, @06:17PM
Possibly true. My intuition leans the other way, that the background noise in different cities might vary a lot depending on local architecture, building codes, traffic and population densities, etc.
The only way to find out which of these guesses is right to to collect the data.
I none the less question the scientific value of collecting such data with apparently weak experimental controls. That is to say, I am mildly interested in what factors most influence "soundscape ecology" but I am skeptical this is a good way to find out.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Appalbarry on Monday April 21 2014, @06:06PM
This sort of sound collection - the documenting of the soundscape at particular time and place - arguably began back in the 1970s with the World Soundscape Project. [www.sfu.ca]
Led by composer R. Murray Schafer, [musiccentre.ca] this group pretty much invented the idea of "acoustic ecology", and the ensuing conversation about how the sounds around us influence our behaviours, well-being, and society.
The work is continued by members of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. [proscenia.net]
(Score: 1) by Oligonicella on Monday April 21 2014, @07:13PM
Unless he pays me, he can go record the sounds himself. Not because I'm a dick, but because I find this project of dubious value.
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Monday April 21 2014, @07:36PM
It's OK. If you were a dick, that would also be a sufficient reason. ;-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday April 21 2014, @07:51PM
You would get a better response if you said that Batman plans to use this to find the Joker.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @09:52PM
given they listen to every single powered microphone on the planet all the time...
HI SPOOK HOW IS YOUR DAY? WANNA LEAK SOME STATE SECRETS?
(Score: 2) by zim on Tuesday April 22 2014, @04:25AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @04:40PM
He is compiling the data for the World-Wide Whoopee Cushion.