RECORDING AN EXCEPTIONAL STATE OF URBAN SOUNDSCAPES

Loading up field recordings to “Silent Cities: A participatory monitoring program of an exceptional modification of urban soundscapes”. This is a scientific project that examines the impact of human activity on our environment. The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing many countries to put in place drastic containment measures. A notable effect of these measures is the reduction of economic activities, from factories and offices shutting down to global and individual travel. The project organisers hope the lockdown restrictions will be a unique opportunity to capture and to study the eco-acoustic diversity of ordinary, urban spaces that are usually masked by man-made noise. Participants are asked to make time-stamped recordings over the next few months, to be uploaded and stored at the Open Science Foundation (OSF) as a public dataset. The collected data will be converted to spectrogram images, to be analysed and presented in the future as a co-authored paper.

This draws from the work of Bernie Krause, who compares and contrasts archived field recordings as a way of demonstrating the impact of Anthrophony – the sounds and noise that we humans make – on the general health of the Biophony – the sounds made by organisms in their habitat (Krause et al., 2011). Organised by Samuel Challéat, Nicolas Farrugia, Amandine Gasc and Jeremy Froidevaux at the University of Toulouse, the Silent Cities team state: “While we recognise the severity and serious consequences of the pandemic, we want to continue to do what we do the best: searching, testing, experimenting. In other words, we want to continue to question the world in which we live.”

Krause, B. Pijanowski, B.Farina, A.Gage, S. Dumyahn, S. (2011). ‘What is Soundscape Ecology? An Introduction and Overview of an Emerging New Science’. In Landscape Ecology 26 (9).